Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: What about that Welfare…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
It’s like unemployment is seen as a de facto felony.
A lot of companies in America (the ones who are hiring) are not accepting applications from the unemployed, on the grounds that they must be inherently incompetent if they're out of work, and that it wastes their time having to look at CVs from the desperate. It's pretty ugly.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to James George,
I am sick to my guts about this – nothing demonstrates exactly how far NZ has regressed from the ideals of the 19th century Pakeha settlers than this awful incident.
Wow, James, your racist, regressive jibes are so subtle.
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Not for certain, but they had a rough idea. And again, without putting too fine a point on it, felled on the spot – as both of the survivors initially were – as opposed to huddled in one or more groups near fresh air bases, would tell the story.
Mostly. I imagine there are always going to be more specific questions - like "how long?" and "did they suffer?" which the families will want to know, and which may never be answerable.
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I'd also like to ask the question about the complications involved in testing methane levels on a continual basis. How is it done? Can it even be done? Are there tricks or tools that can be used to detect it even with just a moderate level of certainty? Doesn't it have a distinctive smell?
Matthew's better equipped to answer that than me; I do testing on bugs growing in test tubes or get data from geochemists testing seawater, neither of which are applicable to continuous testing and yes/no tests. I can tell you about determining exact levels, but that's something else. (In fact, I could really, really use a trace methane detector in the lab right now - it'd save me booting up the gas chromatograph every time I want to check the methanogens are growing!)
Regarding cause-of-death, *if* they died of asphyxiation and *if* the bodies weren't then damaged in the second explosion, it should be possible to tell - if I recall correctly, carbon monoxide kills by preferentially binding to red blood cells and starving the body of oxygen, so it'd be in the blood. Methane would be in the lungs, if they'd been breathing it in, and as it's toxic there'd be breakdown products. But time isn't going to make things any easier, here - most decomposition is anaerobic and the mine is still being heated by smouldering coal, and it's definitely not dry. The methane levels aren't going to affect the internal anaerobes that take over decomposition, not for a while. Once they've worked away for a while, it'll be hard to determine much of anything.
It can be possible to estimate time-of-death from the stage of microbial decomposition, but with the unusual conditions down there, it won't be easy. Plus it's relatively crude, as these things go. I honestly wouldn't hold out much hope of determining specific causes of death unless they're bleedingly obvious (i.e.: burning from explosion, trauma from falling rocks, etc), unless the bodies are recovered relatively quickly (within a week or two). With conditions the way they are - who knows if they ever *will* be recovered?
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Hard News: What about that Welfare…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
How would it be enforced without raising the spectre of human furnaces?
I don't think it could be - taking away or cutting benefits if people get pregnant is simply not going to fly as policy. But it's a nice illustration of the group's real priorities.
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I find that wording rather chilling.
At least they're honest about thinking that reproduction is a privilege conferred by wealth. Creepy and disturbing, yes, but honest.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to chris,
Well said Sacha: "Today is for the departed". People sometimes respond to grief with ill considered words and actions. Engaging in spats and flaming and matters of "told you so" and "he's to blame" is simply a means to delay the inevitable acceptance and mourning of the loss together, responsibly and peacefully.
At the same time, that's really - well, human. We all want things to have happened for reasons, even if they're bad ones; want to be able to say "if only we'd known this, done this, it wouldn't have happened". We want to be able to blame because anger feels better than despair. Of course people are "ill-considered" after losing family and friends. They're fucking grieving.
But there are a lot of people playing the blame game who aren't personally affected and don't have that excuse. They're the ones who need to learn about respect. And dignity. And shutting up, right now.
(Also, as others have said - thanks for the poem, Craig. That was - right.)
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Matthew Poole,
If the gas was still hot at the end of a 150m journey through rock, that bodes very ill for the conditions inside the mine itself :|
They're now saying it's possible they may never even be able to send a rescue team in. It's certainly looking pretty bad - not that it was ever good. Methane + carbon monoxide + coal dust was always very, very bad news for anyone down there.
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But then you'll be a graduate science student, by definition a minion for your supervisor.
Of course. Undergraduate minions are practice for when you can have your own, graduate student minions. But you've got to start somewhere.
(I described my undergraduate as a minion to a potential new lab undergraduate the other day. She laughed. Nervously.)
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Hard News: I'm not a "f***ing cyclist".…, in reply to Sacha,
That’s like me going head-to-head with a supertanker in a small sailboat in a crowded shipping lane expecting a ship the size of a small country to get out of my way.
Nice to see they've lost all sense of perspective there.