exchemist

Ha, don’t we know it! I suppose I had in mind things like pneumonia, scarlet fever, typhoid, malaria, plus complications from measles and other childhood classics.

You asked someone to send a POSCAR file. What were you thinking would be done with that when it arrived? Have you got access to VASP?

Do you know what VASP is?

Largely the same ones we have around us today, though we have eliminated a handful of them, e.g. smallpox.

It is not fair to expect your readers to do the "research" for themselves. It is up to the person (in this case you) making a claim to support it with evidence. So you need to show your readers where in these logs, the evidence for what you claim is to be found.

Seriously creepy. You seem to have gone a long way down the rabbit hole. No thanks.

Oh so he's a known charlatan then, sort of up there with Deepak Chopra? I had no idea. I'll have to look out for him.

No it was Maratea, on the sea - a last minute booking. The hotel we were in was over a tunnel carrying the coast railway line. Interesting, though winding, drive down the Amalfi coast to get there. Lots of limoncello, I remember. And my son was just over a year old and crawling/walking. The hotel staff made a great fuss of him - Italians love small children. Yeah I kind of like Amarone but it's very strong. Often a bit too much, I find. When I had my run-in with atrial fibrillation a few years ago I got very careful about alcoholic strength of the wine I drank, as I found I had to keep consumption at a sitting to 3 units max. (1 unit= 10g ethanol). So that pretty well ruled out things like Amarone, which is often 15%. I was better off with 12.5% Bx etc. I even got into German riesling a bit, which can be 8-9%, though tends to be a bit sweet - good with crab but not suitable for a lot of things. Even now that the AF is fixed, I'm still aware and a bit careful.

Yes a snob of course. Must be. Only snobs take an interest in wine, after all. 😁 My son is doing a holiday job near Gavi and I thought I would try something from the region in case it gave us a talking point later - and perhaps he can find some. I do like nebbiolo reds very much but know very little about Italian whites - tending mostly to drink Chablis or Jurançon Sec, or sometimes white Bordeaux for chicken dishes (my wife was French). So it was nice to find a good one. That restaurant actually has a long and interesting wine list. Someone there knows his stuff and has put a lot of thought into it. They used to do an excellent Valpolicella Ripasso. But yes I've had Aglianico. I first came across that when we once had a holiday in a place in Basilicata called Maratea. I like it. But I admit I'm a novice with Italian wine. I believe the Primitivo grape from Southern Italy is identical to the Californian Zinfandel.

Ken Wheeler seems to be completely off his trolley: https://kenwheeler.substack.com/p/the-universal-codex-in-full To quote a bit of this gobbldedook: All motion is the division & the disturbance of rest. The greater the division, the greater the resistance; this is Natural Order. Evil & motion divide what is Pure & Whole & generate resistance, which is evil, suffering, & dilution. To charge is meant taking motion & multiplying it by centripetal compression; this is called power or energy. To discharge is meant taking motion & dividing it by centrifugal expansion; this is called force. A base atom, or hydrogen, is a centripetal compression of light, which cannot propagate, such that its charge or frequency is so high. Frequency & charge/capacitance are one & the same thing. Higher frequency is higher capacitance. [continues] Er, yikes! It looks as if @Eric Smith is some kind of shill or alter ego for this nutter.😱

At a local Italian restaurant last night I was very pleasantly surprised in trying a 2022 bottle of a Langhe white I had never heard of: Nascetta di Novello. Quite soft but with some acidity so in no way flabby, floral and herbal, hint of that waxy “petrol” note one gets with Alsace riesling. Seemed to go well with charcuterie and seafood. I gather this used to be a traditional grape in the Langhe in the c.19th, but had become almost extinct and was only recently revived by local enthusiasts. The vine is capricious, sometimes giving a productive crop and sometimes not, leading to a lot having been ripped up and replaced with the more reliable nebbiolo, which makes the great Langhe reds including Barolo and Barbaresco. Nascetta is thought to be capable of rivalling the much better known Langhe white: Gavi, which is made from the cortese grape. Nascetta now has its own DOC classification, so it is on its way back. So if, 20 years from now, Nascetta is all the rage, remember, you read about it here first! (I found a London wine merchant who stocks it and have ordered 6 bottles for my cellar, to do my bit to help their export sales.)

You are using AI to bullshit @Radhakrishnan J , a new member, into thinking he is taking to an expert, when he is actually talking to a schoolboy. That is deceit.

You did not write that text. And who is "we"?

What the hell are you playing at? You are, by your admission a school student who is not yet 15 years old. This text you have posted is clearly not your own. You have no business pretending to be something you are not. -1.

Thanks!👍

Yes I read that, but my point is it does not seem clear what it means. My tentative interpretation of it is that this service is going to be offered by the Met Office to the BBC free of charge but it seems far from explicit. However as you say there is to be an update on the new "partnership", whatever TF that means (how I hate that word in business: it covers a multitude of sins), so maybe then all will be revealed.

The OP was about the high death rate in infancy and childhood. So your observation, apart from being wrong anyway, is irrelevant.

Well perhaps old men were not quite such a rarity as that, but certainly not at all representative.

Don't be a berk. Of course I don't reject science before the c.20th. You have made that up and it's absurd. A lot of modern science (e.g. thermodynamics, electromagnetic induction, periodic table of elements, gas laws etc.) dates from the c.19th and c.18th. Newton's laws date from the c.17th. My point to you was simply that a couple of instances tell you nothing about a whole population. It's like saying, "I've never been in a car crash so car crashes don't exist."

OK but that is not a chatbot. Nor are these clever AI applications that can diagnose medical conditions from X-ray or MRI images. They are purpose-built for a particular class of tasks. Enabling an AI agent to "reason" across a completely open-ended field of enquiry, such as a chatbot is faced with, would seem to be of a different order of difficulty. But OK, it appears from what you say they are trying to do it.

I am simply adopting the terminology @iNow is using. It seems these things are called "reasoning models". I take no view on whether this is an accurate representation of what the bloody things do. (Though in view of all the hype surrounding them, I would not be surprised if the proponents of AI are overstating their case.)

OK that's interesting. To get it clear, is a reasoning chatbot an LLM still, or is that term restricted only to those language emulators that operate by trawling a database and returning answers i.e. as stochastic parrots?

Yes a cast iron stove could be used from the late c.18th/c.19th. (There are pictures of them in the Beatrix Potter books, in Lake District cottages.) I gather there were brick ones for about a century before that. But I don't know how widespread these would have been in urban working class homes.

That two individuals lived to a great age tells us precisely zero about the life expectancy of the population.

Childhood diseases, mainly. Infant mortality actually remained high until the end of the c.19th. I suspect the hygiene issue may actually have been more important after the Industrial Revolution, when so may people moved to cities in crowded conditions without good sanitation, which promoted the transmission of disease (typhoid etc). In the Middle Ages it may have been more a mix of factors, including childhood diseases but also the harshness of the climate when housing was very basic, variations in nutrition due to reliance on subsistence farming, and so on. Infants have small body weight, so the cold of winter, shortages of food or the effects of illness would be more likely to kill them than a larger adult with more bodily reserves. In the early months breast feeding would have been essential as there was no possibility of bottle feeding. So if the mother could not breast feed (and illness or death of mothers from puerperal fever was common) the child might die unless a wet nurse could be found. Regarding your comment that "most people only lived to mid 40s", be careful. There can be confusion of average life expectancy with how long adults could be expected to live. Because so many infants died before they were 5, the effect of these early deaths on the statistics for the population is to bring down sharply the average life expectancy. If one was lucky enough to survive to one's twenties, there was a good chance of living some way past 40. (In your twenties the big risks would have been warfare for young men and death in or after childbirth for young women. If you made it to 30, you might live to 50 or 60.)