sethoflagos

This was never in dispute. I presume you read the bit about London being powered from South Wales during the blitz? Necessary at the time no doubt, but it is generally most economic to keep short distances between generation and demand centres.

So we can replace current natural gas powered generation and go carbon free by sometime between 2030 and 2050. Plus the power for bulk transfer to electric vehicles will have to come from somewhere. Your premise is false. It can be accommodated - on average the grid is only running at 50% maximum capacity - but hot standy capacity has to be available for when demand rises to 80% capacity which it sometimes does. The economic and operational considerations for which generating units are on base load, peak-lopping and hot standby can vary by the hour, and are not simple. The National Grid was, and I understand still is, extremely good at managing this.

I refer you to this quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)

Every region between generator and consumer has to carry that additional GVA loading over and above their own local demand. Are you seriously claiming that there's no cost to this?

I was also drawn into looking at the action of the enzyme myrosinase that in the presence of water convert glucosinates to the spicy isothiocyantes as mentioned in @toucana's last post. The enzyme's action is apparently reduced by higher temperatures and reduced pH. Although in Indian cuisine, mustard seeds seem invariably to be dry roasted or fried in ghee for half a minute or so, I'm wondering if this detracts from the heat strength of the flavour. Also, presumably it takes sometime for the enzymatic reaction to proceed, so my taste test immediately after adding water was probably premature. Should have let it stand for a few minutes. @Peterkin, when you made your own mustard, did you heat the seeds first? As mentioned earlier, I've tried grinding them without pre-roasting and made very little progress with my basic kit.

The bit where anti-nett zero is presented as a respectable policy with no mention of its negative global impact; the bit where the BBC yet again utterly ignore the viewpoints of the Liberal Democrats and Greens; the bit that's just a list of right-wing dog whistles (ie all of it)... Moray East and West between them have an installed capacity of just shy of 2 GW. At current tariffs that yields a full load potential income of around £500,000 per hour. If perchance, the Grid needs some rapid start generation capacity to sit on hot stand-by in case one of its larger units trips out unexpectedly, what better than than one or two of these wind farms? They wouldn't want to use coal or nuclear plant because they're both saddled with a maximum ramp rate of 5% of full load per hour. Too slow. CCGT plant is faster but more expensive, and Dinorwig is pre-booked for peak lopping duty. If the grid manages to buy 2 GW of hot standby capacity for 15% of potential lost revenue, that sounds like a very good deal, doesn't it? And of course, there'd have to be a fair breeze blowing at the time otherwise the capacity wouldn't be there, would it? Pointless otherwise. And as for making up a generation shortfall 500 odd miles away to the South - has anyone mentioned the distribution losses over such a distances? No, not the BBC. Better to make up some guff about the wires being too thin and keep the dishonourable Toad of Clacton happy with his grovelling pet toadies. Sorry for the rant. It's 30 years since I did a Christmas weekend night shift at a control desk in Drax. But I've still some memories of how the system should operate

Interesting that the BBC article has a paragraph uncritically praising the anti-nett zero stance of Reform Party's Richard Tice. A little research shows that the author, Justin Rowlett has a significant oil company share holding in his portfolio. It is not a balanced piece of journalism.

Well, in the interest of science, an experiment. About 3 tsps of black mustard seeds. After 15 minutes mortar and pestle action beneath the blazing sun... NB when I tried this with unroasted seeds, I got nowhere fast. Split the ground seeds into three portions and formed paste with plain water (top left), 5% white vinegar (top right), and mustard oil (bottom). Tsp of turmeric in the middle for contrast. Water gave no discernable taste. White vinegar, a faint, sweet taste reminiscent of German mustard. But mustard oil released a strong mustard kick (that isn't in the oil alone) that hard more than a hint of horseradish to it. So I mixed all three with the turmeric adding a bit more vinegar and oil to get the right consistency, and tested it out on barbecued liver and kidney. Definitely had worse. But I need to treat myself to an electric spice grinder.

That makes a lot of sense. If you start with the Olduwan, Acheulean, and Mousterian for Africa it will give you a good early foundation for understanding the progression in other regions. You might consider taking a craft course in flint knapping, if there is one sufficiently close to you.

In my youth, much of which was spent in Scarborough, fish and chip restaurants were plentiful and the tables always had three shakers: two small ones for salt and pepper and a larger one for sugar. The latter was to sweeten your tea - the only beverage provided in such establishments. I do recall mistakenly putting sugar on my chips. A mistake you only make once. Me too, though European mustards are hard to obtain/ridiculously expensive in my neck of the woods. However, our large Indian community ensures the ready availability of black mustard powder and mustard oil, which services my home production of pickled onions and lime pickle. I'm trying to summon the courage to try these options on devilled kidneys and devilled eggs, both of which I've previously only made with Coleman's English. I know the yellow is just turmeric, but will roasted and ground black mustard seeds made into a paste with mustard oil be a good substitute? Guess there's only one way to find out.

There is no 'before' the palaeolithic. It is an archaeological term for a stage in human development characterised by the occurrence of the earliest recognised human artefacts - stone tools. It occurs at different times in different places, first appearing in Africa about 3.3 million years ago and later elsewhere as our ancestors migrated. In Australia, the palaeolithic began perhaps 60 thousand years ago and is generally not regarded as ending before the late eighteenth century. There is no particular tie-in with the geological timeline other than on a very local basis. It's a measure of cultural development, not absolute time.

Our family tradition was to use whole black peppercorns in stews. This went back to at least my maternal great-grandmother's kitchen when the stew was cooked in a set pot overnight in front of an open hearth ready for the menfolk's breakfast before they headed off for a shift down Saint John's in the West Riding coalfield. I'm not sure exactly when she was born, but I was left her father's birth mug dated 10th October, 1840 as we shared a birthday 118 years apart. Anyway, she passed her tradition down to my grandmother and mother, and although we'd left the pit villages and scrag end and shin behind, our stews still were seasoned with whole black pepper, with ground white pepper reserved for tomatoes, strawberries and peas pudding mainly. Btw how can anyone mention nutmeg and not mention rice pudding? Match made in heaven!

Sorry, senior moment. Deposition came from south and west so that's Dartmoor as you say. Well spotted!

Interesting. I had some work involvement with the Wytch Farm development back in the nineties. The hydrocarbon source is the same early Triassic Sherwood Group sandstones that underlie your Littleham nodule beds. So upwards migration via local faulting of reducing fluids from that source is quite reasonable. As @studiot's reference suggests, the primary source for the uranium and other exotic metals is almost certainly from weathering of the Exmoor granite a little to the north.

During my apprenticeship in the paper industry I lost several colleagues to hydrogen sulphide poisoning. It's detectable by smell in the non-lethal ppb level, but not so at the lethal ppm levels they were exposed to. I guess that Darwinism survival only works when the chance of survival is non-zero.

But won't a significant number of bronze alloys yield a false positive for this test? I'm thinking in particular of most aluminium bronzes and gunmetals. And perhaps a word of caution against employing aggressive bucket chemistry on materials that can have significant lead and arsenic content?

No. There are too many (ie hundreds) of different alloy compositions under these umbrella headings, and no simple single test will uniquely separate them. Aluminium bronzes typically contain no intentionally introduced tin. (But some grades do) Admiralty brasses can contain both zinc and tin in varying amounts. So there is a certain amount of overlap and the choice of whether to class an alloy as a brass or a bronze can be a matter of convention rather than actual composition. Any experienced eye can usually recognise the more common (and more familiar) brass alloys by colour (both metal and patina) and context (brasses and bronzes typically have distinct applications). It takes a certain amount of courage to make a positive identification of many of the bronzes without recourse to eg. X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy.

Emily Lime prefers her limes detartrated.

Execrable. No. My street food takeaway tonight is four sticks of barbecued kidney; salad of raw cabbage, onion, tomatoes, and cucumber seasoned with suya pepper. Delicious, healthy, and enough to see me through tomorrow. Cost me all of $2.

Checked my own favourite brand. Interesting FAQ that has a ring of honesty about it. Taylors ImpactProgress on our plant-based tea bagsWe're working towards removing all oil-based plastic from our tea bags, moving towards plant based alternatives.Obviously a bit of a dilemma as to the biodegradability of PLA. I have to admit to a leaning towards pyrolysis as the most credible disposal route (short of a simple ban on manufacture/ import) for all persistent polymers. https://www.taylorsimpact.com/environmental-footprint/products-packaging/products-and-plastics/plastic-in-tea-bags

Dark times maybe. But I enjoyed that!

No. Not really. Think about it. If DPG keeps cosmetic products moist under drying ambient conditions, this implies that at some concentration within the formulation, it is able to extract moisture from air at perhaps <50% RH. This makes it a humectant wrt to the facepack or whatever it is a component of, but wrt the ambient surroundings it is a dessicant, and this is how it is classified on eg. PubChem. This does not sound compatible with a 50:50 aqueous solution buffering an equilibrium 70% RH atmosphere which is what you want in a humidor and what MPG provides.

... where it is a part of the formulation and helps retain moisture within that product. So yes, it acts as a humectant in that context. But we are not talking about that context are we? The DPG is not going inside the... cigars(?) As I said, I wish you well.

I wish you well. But I would caution that just as ethylene glycol (MEG), diethylene glycol (DEG), and triethylene glycol (TEG) have very different enduse applications due at least in part to their very different hygroscopic strengths (TEG being by far the strongest dehumidifier), then you may find out why propylene glycol is a recognised humectant and DPG is not.

Take Copernicus' heliocentric model as an example. Due to his lifelong conviction that planetary orbits should be perfectly circular, the existing epicycle models had better predictive success than he could ever achieve. Any contemporary who valued empirical data more highly than mathematical purity would naturally reject Copernican theory until Digges' modification began to shift the balance. Do we not see some of that difference still at the forefront of science today? Those who follow the empirical data, however ugly, wherever it leads, and those who go seeking pretty mathematical models whether or not the data is pointing in that direction. May be it's not so much a dichotomy as a spectrum, but even so... Sorry, I'm quoting @TheVat there, not @CharonY