sethoflagos

Looks very much like a flint nodule: a form of chert associated with chalk and limestones. You're right, it's chiefly cryptocrystalline quartz (the crystals are too small to make out even with a hand lens), and your's looks to have a coating rich in haematite which produces the reddish browns. The dark green speckles may well be chlorite with the rest of the coating various other clay minerals and probably a bit of calcite. Pure chert shows white, so the central mass in pic B appears particularly quartzy to me. Why do you think it isn't?

A close schoolfriend graduated to become a junior doctor at St Georges, Tooting at the same time as the resident epidemiologist Professor David Strachan was popularising this idea, and I must admit that I was much influenced by her enthusiasm for his work. However, in my current abode, there are health threats (typhoid, the haemorrhagics etc.) that are not seen too often in Tooting. You really can't play fast and loose with them.. In the long term, you won't win that one. This intrigues me (even if I don't quite follow some of the wording) as the strategy I've settled into is a diet based on 'dodgy' veg from the local markets, that almost without exception is either pickling or fermenting in a Kilner jar by the following morning. Probably the most processed food I eat these days is my daily dose of sauerkraut, and I honestly haven't felt so well in years. If, as I think you're suggesting, this is due to selectively allowing certain organisms to chronically 'infect' me, then I see no reasonable grounds, based on personal experience, to dispute this newer interpretation. Though I still might take my annual dose of worming pills just to be on the safe side. Some of them are definitely a bit nasty.

Not to mention having an immune system admirably equipped to defend against infestations of intestinal worms that gets 'bored' when there are no worms to deal with.

My guess is that if there is another universe external to ours, and it harbours intelligent life of a similar level, then some of them at least will be sat scratching their heads over the Riemann hypothesis. Or whatever pass for heads out there.

Who are you calling an idiot? Like others on this thread, I'm simply pointing out that the OP is framed in an inethical, right-wing-dog-whistly manner. This pretty well sums up the situation for me (quoted from https://keepournhspublic.com/privatisation/how-is-the-nhs-being-privatised/): Meaning that the NHS is: Obliged to fulfil all health needs Available to all Free at the point of use Not an insurance-based system Paid for by tax-payers. Methods of privatisationWhile attacks on the basic tenets of the NHS have been made since its inception, attempts to privatise the NHS have occurred in recent years in the following ways: Removing duties of government to provide NHS services through the Health and Social Care Act 2012 The tendering of contracts for services, and making them available to private companies Private financing, such as PFIs, with no guarantee hospitals paid for in this way will be in public ownership when they are paid off with tax payer money. Inclusion of health and patient data in trade deals Sending patients to private hospitals Migrant charging. Is privatisation of the NHS expanding?Attempts have been made to introduce charging in the NHS since it was founded, and attempts to further privatise services have been ongoing since the 80s and 90s. This era saw hospital car parks, cleaning, portering and catering. PFI was introduced in the 90s, but it was the 2012 Health and Social Care Act that has opened up the NHS to privatisation like never before. It was this Parliamentary Act that demanded all NHS contracts were put on the ‘open market’ for the first time. The changes since then have been dramatic, and often unseen. While most hospital clinical care is still in public NHS hands many are unaware of the inroads privatisation has made in winning smaller community contracts since the 2012 Act came into force. In 2018/19 and 2017/18 7.3% of CCG commissioned clinical contracts were in private hands (down from 7.7% 2016/17). In the five years to 2015 the private sector was awarded the following: 86% pharmacy contracts 83% patient transport contracts 76% diagnostics contracts 69% GP out of hours 45% community health contracts including children and AWLD 25% mental health contracts

= minions busying themselves with misrepresentation.

No. It is being systematically undermined by a wealthy global cabal and their political minions whom you seem to be assisting with your jingoistic misrepresentation.

St. dev. of same OoM as the estimated value. ie. Not 100% sure whether it's gone up or down National data for population, births, and deaths in sub-saharan Africa, specifically Nigeria. It's just an example I have some working knowledge of.

It depends a lot on how that data is used. Eg two censuses ten years apart may provide an accurate enough population value to give reasonable estimates of say incidence of haemorrhagic fevers per 100,000 per annum. But subtraction retains the same absolute numerical error in a far smaller quantity, so the uncertainty in population growth per annum is enormous. Hence if population is determined not by recent census but by an old one extrapolated by some historic growth rate, it's likely to be so far out as to render derived statistics no better than OoM.

+/- 20 million?

You could cut the 'millions' down to a mere 10,000 described species by just restricting your project initially to Ammonoidea. They have a continuous distribution spanning around 250 million years and because of their status as important index fossils for dating of sedimentary strata, they are well documented and dated. Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fish and descendants) is another interesting clade which spans even longer ~416 million years to present. You might want to limit that one to marine forms only as the numbers start growing exponentially from the Carboniferous on when some of them ventured onto land.

How reliable do you think those statistics are? I can't speak for Chad, but this is the online birth registration portal for Nigeria. Because reasons, I can't comment too much, but feel free to ask yourselves whether it is voluntary, free of charge, free of bureaucratic hurdles etc., likely to be taken up by the entire population? Similarly:

In the last two years. I used hard contact lenses from 1977 to maybe 2007 when my optician said I had some eye anoxia issues and should switch to gas permeable soft lenses. Since I stocked up during infrequent visits to the UK, there was a distinct tendency wear lenses somewhat beyond their serviceable lives, and eventually I began to get quite severe inflammatory reactions.

Hopefully someone who's lived for over 25 years in sub-saharan Africa, and has the odd bout of malaria now and then will chime in.

Multimodal probability distributions. The mean value may not be a particularly likely one.

That's sort of how statiscal averages work. What's your point?

There's significant well-documented evidence that Plato lived to at least 75. Aristotle deceased at 62. Pythagoras ~75. Socrates ~71. Aristophanes ~60. Thales of Miletus >=77. Archimedes ~75. Plutarch ~80. Epicurus ~71. Diogenes >=79. Zeno of Citium ~72. Zeno of Elea ~60. Zeno of Sidon ~75. Crates of Thebes ~80. All three score years and ten give or take. There are exceptions: Eudoxus of Cnidus appears to have died at the tender age of 50; Pyrrho of Elis and Hippocrates of Kos appear to have both reached 90 years. And 'all the classical Greek thinkers that spring to mind early on a Wednsday morning' is not exactly a random dataset. However, it does seem to indicate that during the first millenium BCE, if someone survived into their thirties and had a reasonably comfortable lifestyle, they had a reasonable chance of reaching 70.

Not at all. The thread has so far omitted famine and malnutrition which I would have thought outstripped any disease, even malaria, as historic causes of premature death. Btw Psalms 90:10 rather famously states the natural lifespan of mankind as 'three score years and ten', so the idea of individuals in their thirties or forties as being 'old' doesn't really tie in with the record.

So taste is the more basal sense? Hard to imagine how 'smell' operates in a marine environment where I presume both originated. Incidentally, I would have thought consciousness was an example par excellence of an emergent phenomenon, and therefore would not really have a 'centre' as such; it being a more distributed, non-localised product of the sum of its many parts. Though the crucial importance of the thalamus within the network seems to be... for want of a better word... emerging.

Might we expect those historically most significant threats to survival to leave some evidence in the genome? If so then conditions such as lactose tolerance and sickle cell anaemia point the finger of suspicion towards famine and malaria as persistent offenders.

A particular bugbear of mine is hydroquinone, particularly in the context of 'skin whitening' cosmetic products. I believe there are some controls on its use in Europe and the US. But not so in Nigeria, to the extent that when I buy soap for myself, I really have to scan the contents listing. I find its purpose saddening and definitely do not require its intended effects myself. I can certainly identify with this experience. After over 40 years of contact lens wear, I began to develop significant allergic reactions to the solutions (or possibly something else like protein residues) and had to give up and go back to wearing specs.

I'm surprised that olfaction and taste are routed so differently. A little research tells me that taste sensations are routed through the thalamus on their way to the gustatory complex. And yet taste and smell seem so closely coupled in our overall perception of eg bacon that they almost act as one. Very curious.

It doesn't generate a survival advantage to those populations who have to endure boreal winters.

Easy. Do a Magwitch. Decide what compensation would help ease your conscience and have a third party (eg a solicitor) deliver it to the wronged person anonymously.

I thought the vet's speciality was Pu... Cat.