sethoflagos

It's a bit of a grisly picture, but when I look at myself in a mirror, I think I'm essentially seeing the 2D surface of my face from behind with all the wet bits removed. This is what comes of four decades of fiddling around with contact lenses.

Unclear. The lower Rhine is not deep. My comment was more applicable to the latter part of your quote concerning @studiot 's friend's borehole source. Apologies if this caused confusion.

In northern Europe, once you get below about 10 metres soil depth, the annual variation in temperature is barely significant. Moreover, the thermal inertia is so high relative to vertical heat flux, that most groundwater analyses I've worked with over the years show around a six-month lag between surface and sub-surface temperatures. ie the higher borehole temperature peak (such as it is) tends to occur in the winter months. Which is somewhat counterintuitive. But useful perhaps.

Btw: I couldn't resist sampling the fermented cucumber this afternoon. Delicious! And quite different to the pickled version.

It's an issue in diaspora populations, particularly northern Europe where a dark skin reduces solar vitamin D synthesis between three- and five-fold compared to the white population.

No! Cast inedible Mac at a camel, Biden. It's a con.

And yet a substantial percentage of the world's population gain much of their carbohydrate and most of their protein intake from them without undue GI distress. I wonder if FODMAP sensitivity arises in part due to the typically impoverished diet of Western industrialised nations. Where of course, most of the limited research in the area will have been done, with all the consequent selection bias that implies.

Very much not my field, but I'm guessing that the gut biota produce short chain fatty acids from it that we use? My understanding is that it gives the gut downstream of the small intestine a bit of work to do that highly processed foods generally don't.

Two things I seem (touchwood) to have said farewell to recently are a beerbelly and chronic IBS. I'm loathe to claim any particular factors as being critically significant to either of these, but my working hypothesis is that they correlate with ditching a pub grub diet in favour of a) increasing fruit and veg intake b) switching carbohydrate intake from chips, rice and pasta to wholewheat flatbreads and pulses. Perhaps @CharonY can shed light on whether the more resistant starches of the latter are the good dietary move my subjective experience and unlearned research seems to suggest Sometimes I do but not on this occasion. As it's my first go at fermented cucumbers I'd like to see the full natural sequence first without too much tampering with the process. This ferment is quite vigorous anyway so I don't think there's much of an issue.

Apparently the kefir organisms are quite sensitive to both ambient temperature and humidity. As I'm currently living in Abuja (central Nigeria) and looking at six solid months of mid-thirties Celsius and 25% RH, perhaps we're going to be a little too hot and dry here. But you've whetted my appetite, so I think I'll have a bash at making dahi, an Indian version that should be a better match for our climate. And I am very partial to mint raita. Though I think I'll steer clear of the bhang lassi. Well, based entirely (😉) on your recommendation I've given it a go. The cucumbers available were a fair bit larger than what I'd have preferred, but I scooped out the seeds (sandwich filler) and cut them into spears. Also a bayleaf and a few scent leaves should hopefully supply enough tannin to help prevent them from disintegrating. Being from the vine, these will certainly attract Kahm yeast, so I employed @StringJunky 's 'floating roof' barrier in a 32 fl oz Kilner. A bit got in through the gap, so I added enough vegetable oil to make a decent seal, and everything appears to be progressing fine. A few more days of hubble-bubble and after chilling in the fridge, we'll see what we get. Looking forward to it.

Absolutely. I was also intrigued by the efficiency with which it removed uranium from seawater. Up to present, the sequential order of serpentinisation reactions has been largely inferred from terrestrial ophiolites which have been strongly overprinted with later processes. It will be interesting to see how much of the old guesswork holds up now the geologists have an extensive fresh section to study. I wonder how much of that chapter will need to be rewritten. 🙂 I'd also be interested to get a little hint on how Abuja acquired our local landmark, Zuma Rock. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Abuja_monuments_36.jpg

A Long Section of Depleted Mantle Peridotite A pretty huge advance. This one will run for years to come, I think.

The 'brown note' is something below 9Hz at ~150 dB. It might make you vomit. The rest is urban mythology.

I have three young Nigerian nephews living in my Lagos apartment, and take an interest in their schoolwork. They go to quite a good school by Nigerian standards, but both their tuition and teaching materials fall short of those I received in an obscure Yorkshire farming village 60 years ago. And way short of those of my children. The Flynn Effect suggests that this 60-year+ lag will penalise them by oto 18 IQ points. So that figure of 70 is rather vital to your argument. When I challenge it, you disown it and run away. Your dishonesty is clear for all to see. It's a reasonable approximation when the gradient flattens out at the tail of the curve. To balance this, I deliberately omitted the detail that over 60% of the Nigerian population, dim and gifted alike, are below the age of 25 and therefore ineligible for the visa lottery. Your available 'pool of talent' is really only 0.06% of the population: ie less than the Nigerian American population. I certainly wouldn't. But you're the one who claimed that these high IQ types were the ones with the drive and ambition to be successful in their endeavours. You can't have it both ways: and whichever you pick now will obliterate your own arguments elsewhere. Go argue your case with the US Census Bureau. The critical population under discussion is 2nd generation Nigerian Americans. Their parents must have emigrated from Nigeria roughly ten years either side of 2,000 when the total population was ~122 million. You're clutching at straws here. Learn to read. I credited your immigration process with filtering out up to 90% of applicants. Don't forget, I know quite a few people who emigrated under this scheme. Some quite closely. Such as my best ever junior process engineer. We still keep in touch. As I said, irony wouldn't even give you a hair parting.

Okay. Let's have a look at your numbers. I'm guessing you just pulled that estimate from where the sun doesn't shine, but let's run with 70, a full 2 SD below the (US?) average. So simply meeting par, the Nigerian American community must have been drawn from on or around the 97.5% mark on the IQ bell curve. But since the 2nd generation exceed all others by some margin, they must either be ~15 points higher IQ than their parents (a possibility you have already rejected), or their parents were drawn from on or around the 99.85% mark on the Nigerian bell curve. Now 0.15% of the Nigerian population 25 years ago would be about 170,000 individuals or about double the Nigerian American population. So effectively, you're saying that the US immigration managed to lure half of the top 0.15% of the population to emigrate? From a country where top 1% of the country enjoy a standard of living in Nigeria far higher than anything they could afford in the US? And how did they achieve this remarkable feat? A selection process that correlates only weakly with IQ and would pass at least 10% of the population for lottery participation. Your numbers fail at the first glance of real scrutiny. As numbers made up in a dishonest attempt to justify deep prejudice always do. LOL