exchemist

It doesn't sound right to me. Treatment seems to be improving all the time. But I don't have statistics on it at my fingertips.

No. Obviously his background was Jewish, but he was at most a sort of Deist. He seemed to take a similar view to Spinoza (also a Jew, incidentally) that the order in the cosmos (the "laws of nature", if you like) IS what we are referring to when we speak of "God". At any rate, he did not believe in the personal God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that interacts with humanity. I don't follow your third sentence. Why would consideration of what other ways the world could be made have implications for religious belief?

You are too kind. The pier in Saarfend? That's a long walk. I bought my first house in Standford-le-Hope, just up the river towards Tilbury, when I worked at Shell Haven refinery. That was 1981. I recall in the 1987 storm I was unable to use the railway line for 3 days because a whelk stall had been blown across the track at Southend. It seems to fit the vibe of the area. SE Essex is generally a bit of a dump, but one thing they had in Stanford-le-Hope was a good, traditional baker: very good bloomers and really excellent jam doughnuts with proper raspberry jam.

Half the middle class professionals in London are millionaires these days, myself included, thanks to the appreciation of house prices. And I'm not an..............oh, wait.....

You have to be a pretty special sort of dad to get rejected that dramatically. Being a narcissist probably gets you 3/4 of the way there though. But the guy is now a serious menace. He could end up getting X shut down in a number of countries at this rate. The UK is already looking again at its on-line protection legislation and calls to prosecute Musk for peddling false and malicious information are starting to appear. Not a great business move. But maybe he’s not in it for the business any more, but for his power to influence politics. Walz, one feels, is on the money talking about these people: weird and creepy is about right.

I doubt that, actually. The trans issue is being pumped like hell by its advocates - very aggressively and unpleasantly in some cases - but remains distinctly fringe and I think it will remain so. But I would certainly agree that breaking down sexual stereotypes must be healthy and liberating to people.

I agree. Bloody funny that, having shacked up with a woman with a weirdo name and given even more weirdo names to his kids, rather hinting at a weirdo lifestyle in other ways too, he then gets outweirded by his own son - and can't handle it! What a jerk.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that older people tend to be more racist. It is they who perceive the change in their communities from what they remember from when they were young, and are disturbed by it. And having had less exposure to people of different ethnicity, they tend to fear them more. Young people don’t have the same stake in the past.

Yes That’s the one I was thinking of - I knew there was a 12 in it. I can’t think what possesses parents to give their children such names. What do they think will happen at school? I recall being shocked to be introduced to a girl in The Hague office called Hariom. As in Hari Om. Her parents had been hippies, apparently, back in the 60s. I used to refer to her as the Hippy Chick - she was extraordinarily beautiful, actually, and very clever. But what a name to grow up with.

Didn't he name one of his children 12%*!X🤪 or something? No wonder they hate him.

Well it evidently pissed off his son - or now transdaughter. But one of my son’s Christian names is Xavier, actually. We wanted names that worked in both French and English, as my wife was French, and we thought having an X as one of his initials would be cool. So far he has shown no sign of sexual fluidity or resentment. But then I’m not a nutter like Musk.

Yes, it's all too easy to forget your C. Some of these CEOs think because they are good at their chosen business they have wisdom to share with the world on host of subjects about which they are both ignorant and incompetent. But normally, CEOs of major corporations don't try to pick fights in public with national leaders, for the simple reason that it is almost invariably bad for their business. Musk is positively encouraging the UK government to impose new obligations on social media corporations to police the content they disseminate. And whining about the "First Amendment" won't cut any ice outside the USA. Actually I may just have found the answer to my question, in an article in the Independent this morning: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-x-far-right-b2592740.html In summary, Musk's son Xavier announced, on his 18th birthday, that he was transitioning to a woman, changing his name including surname, and disowning his father. According to Musk's ex-partner (Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes) this traumatised Musk. Searching for something to blame he lighted on "wokeness" as a "mind virus" and vowed to try to destroy it. Xavier's birthday was in April 2022. In October of that year, Musk bought Twitter, rebranded it to X, sacked all the stuff exercising editorial control over content, re-admitted far-right posters who had been banned from Twitter - and reset the platform's algorithm to give prominence to his own posts. Since then, the speculation is that Musk has become radicalised by his own platform, being fed by his own algorithms a diet of far right stuff that further entrenches and amplifies his hatreds. It all starts to make sense. The implication would be we have a billionaire, in charge of a global social media network, who is off his trolley for personal reasons and conducting a far right vendetta. Shit-stirring over immigration riots in the UK would make sense in that context.

Let's hope Masoud Pezeshkian can improve conditions in Iran. He seems to be a sensible man.

Why is phytate a problem? I see it binds to various minerals and impedes their absorption, but only in the meal containing it, surely?

We would think you were talking out of your arse. So I wouldn't tell us that, if I were you. 😉

Yes, it certainly looks as if "the Musk has slipped", as it were, and he has come out as the far-right cheerleader some of us were beginning to suspect. He is actually trolling the prime minister of a major western democracy, calling him "Two-Tier Starmer", a reference to a baseless claim circulating on the far-right, that British police show favouritism ("two-tier policing") towards ethnic minority protests. And, since Musk's own posts on X are given special prominence, he is spreading far-right tropes across the entire global ecosystem of X. Why would an American businessman - with zero knowledge of UK politics, but aware he is stirring up more trouble - do that sort of thing?

Newton was not "working with photonics". What you are writing is techy-sounding word salad. I think you may need medical treatment.

OK thanks. So I need to check every so often to make sure I know the one in operation. What about the other question: the reason my various devices seem to have individual public IP addresses, even though they are all fed by the same WiFi router? I had perhaps naïvely imagined the router would have a single address and that it would take care of sending the right data to the right device if several are connected. Is that not how it works?

This is all over the place. If you want anyone to take the trouble to read it, for God’s sake break it down by topic and post one topic at a time. Your comments about climate didn’t seem to make much sense and so the rest I have not bothered with, as it seems to be rambling. Not surprising, perhaps, if you are 88, but it won’t help to get you a hearing. By the way, if you are 88, you were born in 1936 so must have been 32 when you graduated in 1968. That’s pretty old for a 1st degree. Why did you take it so late?

Interesting. Do you know what causes it to change?

I was trying to find out my IP address, as a question to put to scammers calling me to tell me there is something wrong with my computer (heh heh, that should fox them). However I am now confused. I read there is a public, or external IP address, which seems to identify the WiFi router for the house and then individual, internal IP addresses for the various devices (laptop, tablet, phone) that communicate with the router. So far so good. I've found the internal address on my laptop, but when I look up the external one using whatismyipaddress.com , I get different answers for the laptop (Mac) and the tablet (iPad). Furthermore, the answer I got today for the iPad doesn't seem to be the same as when I tried this a couple of days ago, though it could just be my poor memory. At all events, from what I have read I would have expected the public, external IP address to be the same for everything using the same router. Is this not the case? And should this external address be permanent, or does it change when you reconnect each time or something?

Most decent pasta (i.e. made from durum wheat) needs 8-10mins in boiling water (up to 12min for some types, depending on the shape and thickness). Normally you use plenty of water, and a rolling boil, to avoid the pasta sticking to itself. Some people add a spoon of olive oil to the water but I never bother -just give it a stir once or twice in case any of it is starting to stick together. But I suppose if you heat from cold it starts to cook earlier, so you need less time once it starts to boil. I imagine the issue with that method, though, will be that the rate of heating until it boils, and therefore the cooking time, will vary, depending on how much pasta you cook, how much water you put in, the size of the pan, the heat of the hob etc. So you may find it hard to get the same results reliably unless you are always keeping all those variables fixed: same amount of pasta, same pan, same amount of water, same gas ring. Whereas if you wait until you have boiling water first, and then add the pasta, you can time it reliably as the cooking rate will be constant - water at 100C. I'd also have thought you might have an issue with it sticking if you heat from cold, as there will be no agitation until it boils. In summary, it may work for you but I'm not tempted to try. Being in the UK, I have an electric kettle to boil the water first, so I do that, tip it in, add the pasta and salt - and check my watch.

Commendable sentiments, Sheriff, but personally I don't think we should reward spammers, however congenial their politics.🙂

Intriguing, how does that work? What is this expansion from the smaller vessel? Water doesn't expand, surely? Is it not something to do with evaporation?

The Orange One is not a member here. Is there some point you want to discuss?