08-15

Doctors know about Vitamin D.

Don't be so sure about that. When I first heard about the connection of D3 with the immune system, I asked a friend, who happens to be a cardiologist, about it. He said vitamin D prevents rickets, that's all. And an overdose produces arrhythmia, so be careful with the supplements. Indeed, that's the conventional wisdom found in text books.

According to the internet, a healthy immune system needs much higher levels of vitamin D than those necessary for a functioning calcium metabolism, and a D3 overdose is only bad if you have insufficient levels of vitamin K2. I don't know what to think about all of that. After all, my representative study with a sample size of one and no controls yielded no significant results.

Nope, because according to me, if you're fat, it's because because you like sugar more than being slim, and if you're not vaccinated, it's because you can't do simple math.

Looking forward to statistics supporting your assertion.

You may be confused. At least here in Germany, we (mostly) implement 2G: "Geimpft oder genesen." -- vaccinated or recovered. (Depending on context, "getestet", meaning tested negatively, is also fine.)

So no, "natural immunity" is not treated any differently from "artificial immunity", and it absolutely is about getting out of a pandemic without too many people dying. By the way, there is no difference. Immunity is immunity.

Indeed. That's why helmets are mandatory for motorcyclists. Helmets are to motorcycles as vaccines are to COVID. Neither guarantees that you don't die or need intensive care, but both reduce the likelihood.

Stigmatising obese people, people who drink alcohol, people who do extreme sports, people who have children late in life. Where does it end?

You sound as if you live in a weird parallel universe where we don't stigmatise those people.

It's not difficult to find people who think along all or some of these lines: Obese people are ugly gluttons, drinkers are a danger to others and themselves and have no self control, extreme sports athletes are crazy, people who have children in their forties are inconsiderate and will get retard babies.

The reason we don't get worked up about those as much as about covidiots, is that the groups you mention don't endanger anyone else. The one exception is extreme sports (think drag racing, not wingsuit flying), and that's why we require those athletes to buy insurance.

You are obviously an NF temperament, most probably the ENFP personality type.

Extraversion/Introversion is the first distinction of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. I find it remarkable that exactly the people who get incensed at the MBTI "because everything is shades of gray and you can't sort people into neat 16 bins", are those who are at the very very end of at least two of the four scales.

don't let over people tell you how to think and behave!

Ironic, isn't it?

Not at the behest of The People? What a weird court.

But more importantly, "to seize" means to "take possession", doesn't it? And you need a license to possess a teletherapy machine, for the very good reason that the damn thing is dangerous. IGR had a license. The bureaucrats didn't. Neither did the new site owner, landlord, whatever you want to call them. They still took possession, by force.

Property rights are a set of rules. Nuclear safety regulations are a set of rules. These are not the same kind of rules, though. Not understanding the difference kills people. The court didn't understand the difference.

From https://web.archive.org/web/20140503013539/http://noticias.j... by way of Google translation:

"Meanwhile, the ownership of the clinic's assets was being discussed in court, and the cobalt 60 teletherapy unit was moved to the new facilities and the cesium 137 teletherapy unit was abandoned in its original place due to being seized."

Sounds like the root cause was stupid bureaucrats, but that must of course not be admitted in public.

Meanwhile, Rachel posted an update. Apparently, the whole section about how "the system got reworked" doesn't describe the proper solution, but her own (Rookie Rachel's) attempt to fix it.

And in that context, everything makes sense.

In this blog post, senior engineer Rachel talks nonsense about normalization and promotes a bafflingly complicated solution as superior to a simple one, without identifying the actual fix, which appears to have happened accidentally.

In other words, with enough empathy and patience, a clueless rookie can grow into a clueless senior engineer!

Rachel usually makes more sense than that. That's why people are nitpicking implementation details.

I must be missing something, but the "solution" with the 3NF and five separate tables with their own indices seems artificial and like pointless overengineering. Isn't this solved by a single index?

Or maybe a relational DB is already overengineering. Using a hash table (some libdbm lookalike) to map (ip,helo,from,to) to (time) solves the problem, too, and doesn't have a low performance failure mode.

This doesn't change the major point about everyone having been a newbie at point, though.

Or maybe not. It was Navy training that destroyed TMI-2.

Instead of worrying about the loss off coolant, the operators worried about the reactor "going solid", which is slang for "no steam bubble is left in the primary coolant circuit". This made sense on the small Navy reactors they were trained on, but on the large land based ones. Arguably, it never made sense to take a submarine engine and turn it into a power plant.

In April of 1986, the operators of a nuclear power plant turned of the coolant flow to their reactor under full power, just to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. The reactor just sat there peacefully doing nothing, because it was a fast neutron reactor, the EBR-2.

they're more dangerous and still experimental

They were neither in 1986. But sure, let's build more "grid storage", which isn't even experimental.

If Betamax is so much better than VHS, why is VHS a market success and Betamax a failure?

This might surprise you, but Haskell can do IO. It even has a name. It's called "IO". Shocking, I know. (IO happens to be a monad, which I'm sure someone will point out soon, but that's not important right now.)

"For CD [control diet], the source of carbohydrate included corn starch, sucrose and maltodextrin. In contrast, the HFCS-MFD contained HFCS as the primary source of carbohydrate at a level of 26% of the diet by weight. The HFCS-MFD also was comprised of 38.6% kcal from fat while the CD sourced 10.3% kcal from fat. The sole source of fat in the CD was soybean oil while the HFCS-MFD contained multiple sources of fat including palm oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, lard, beef tallow, and anhydrous milk fat in addition to soybean oil. Moreover, HFCS-MFD contained reduced levels of fiber and increased levels of sodium and cholesterol."

This is not a study about (only) the effects of HFCS. Everything observed could equally be blamed palm oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, lard, beef tallow, milk fat, fat in general, sodium, cholesterol, or lack of fiber. The only thing nothing can be blamed on is carbohydrates, including sucrose, because the control group received more of them. Oh, all all that in mice.

Frankly, I don't think anything can be learned from a study that varies so many variables at once.

Very important document. Thank you and your friend "from the West" for making and preserving it!

It might be because managers talk all the time while saying nothing. So nobody really listens anymore. It was certainly true in most meetings I experienced.

Fossil fuels have one of the highest energy densities

What? The energy density of primordial fuels is six orders of magnitude higher!

And all that greed, corruption, corner-cutting resulted in two major accidents, which killed fewer than 60 people in total. What a condemning track record!

One of these accidents happened in the Soviet Union, in a reactor type that could never be licensed in the US. The principal cause was operators ignoring safety regulations under political pressure. Do you really think, whether the US builds or doesn't build PWRs and BWRs would have impressed the SU one way or another?

The other accident happened in Japan. The principal cause was a rather extreme tsunami. What turned it from a minor mishap into a major accident was that modern politics invalidated the original safety concept. (The BWR's containment has to be vented before core damage occurs, but that was no longer politically acceptable in 2011.)

The lesson to learn from both accidents is that politicians have too much power and engineers have too little.

People will either pay more or save money by changing their lifestyle to match the weather and seasons.

Absolutely. People will soon adapt to Renewables by heating their homes only in summer, when electricity is cheap, and not in winter, when it is expensive. They will also use electric lights more during the day, when electricity is plentiful, and not at night, when it is scarce. This isn't really new; after all, for millenia, people responded to droughts by simply eating less in the years with bad harvests, and they were happy, weren't they?

In a world powered by Renewables, electricity in worthless during summer days and priceless during winter nights. What a glorious future indeed!

Wait, what? Coal plants operate with an upper temperature of under 600C, and they approach 40% efficiency. Why do you say it's only 20%?

Either way, it sounds as if a coal plant without the furnace wouldn't be able to compete with "conventional electricity". What is "conventional electricity" then? Open cycle gas turbines? Are they that much cheaper, even including fuel cost?

How come? Conventional electricity plants also convert heat to electricity. That doesn't sound fundamentally different from your business.

Was your input temperature too low? That would explain it. At low temperature differential, you have lower efficiency and need much bigger machinery for the same output.

That said, fusion has a chance to be competitive, because the temperature will be higher. (Obviously, the thermodynamic limit is in the billions of Kelvin, but a practical power conversion system will operate in the range of 500-1000 Celsius.) But for the foreseeable future, it won't be competitive.

Your first question has a simple answer: by law. New nuclear plants haven't been licensed in Germany in, like, forever. Currently, the law explicitly states that no new nuclear power plants will be licensed.

How they got the operators to agree to the early shutdown is less clear. By offering a good deal, I guess. It's only taxpayer money, after all.

Why nobody set plans in motion to replace it? I don't know. My best guess is, because politicians are unbelievably stupid. They really don't know anything about electricity. They really don't get that excess electricity in Juli doesn't help you in cold, dark January. Annalena Baerbock stated publically: "The grid is all the battery we need." At that level of incompetence, who knows why anything happened.

I do believe we should have built more nuclear plants 20 or 30 years ago

Would you like to know why we didn't?

Because climate activists told us 20 years ago that

- [a nuclear power plant] takes 30 years or more to build one

- [a nuclear power plant] usually costs twice as planned

- [nuclear power is] way more expensive than renewables

- renewables can be deployed now

Then we (Germany) wasted 20 years building renewables, and now we are nowhere close to fulfilling our Kyoto commitment, and got the most expensive electricity anywhere in the world. Well done, climate activists!

I didn't completely get it, but it sure sounds scary. Probably because I don't know what happened at Harrisburg. Did people die there?

it takes millions of years for plants to do it

Silicate minerals can do it in thousands of years, and much faster with some human assistance.

Unfortunately, every device that has Signal installed, also has a root kit installed: the play store.

If I use PGP-encrypted mail, I have to trust that the receiver is not stupid. If I use Signal, I have to trust that Google is not evil. Hmm...

I don't get it, what bomb program? The Haigerloch machine is obviously a power reactor, similar to the more modern CANDU line.

So you're not actually parsing CSV and your comment was off-topic. Thank you for the clarification.