John Cuthber

Sorry, it's one of those subjects that winds me up.

Guess. Here's what might be considered a hint. Jeremy Corbyn, while repeatedly described as "unelectable" was rather successful in elections. Notably, in the 2019 general election, in the only vote where his name was actually on the ballot paper, he got 64% of the votes. He was, for a while, the leader of a mainstream, left wing party. And I also said So, can you work out if I think he's an outlier? The point I was making was that the Right try to claim "false equivalence" You have people saying, "Yes, Trump said that the virus would just disappear when Spring arrived, but look at this cartoon Leftie from 10 years ago saying something silly. That proves that the Left is obviously just as bad!". And that's just a lie; there's no way round it.

No, there isn't- not among politicians who actually get elected. Did you read the thread I linked to? I kept on asking for examples of the Left wing nutcases. Nobody was able to provide any. It's not that left wing nuts don't exist- Piers Corbyn is a fine example. But the point is that, unlike the Right wing, these people are never given a role in any mainstream party. There really is a big difference. No. It belongs in the "fake" category. That picture is "old". Someone has just written the new words (the leftie antivaxxer meme text) over a old picture. "She" does not exist. She was invented by someone to discredit the Left. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/college-liberal So, at best, you have an example of a college student who is a hypocrite. Well, the thing about students is they are still learning... Are there any instances of any credible Left wing politicians saying that the vaccines don't work or that the virus is a fake- you know- like Trump did...?

OK, this is the flu virus, not covid but... "This study focussed on the effectiveness of surgical masks against a range of airborne particles. Using separate tests to measure levels of inert particles and live aerosolised influenza virus, our findings show that surgical masks provide around a 6-fold reduction in exposure. Live viruses could be detected in the air behind all surgical masks tested. By contrast, properly fitted respirators could provide at least a 100-fold reduction". from https://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr619.pdf The maths isn't really this simple but, if the R value is 3 and your mask reduces exposure by a factor of 6 it might get the R value down to 0.5- i.e. below 1- which would be good. That's not a thermal image video.

I see two points to it. First it shows which "side" actually has a grasp of reality and secondly, it's hilarious. Who remembers this oldie-but-goodie? One of the more interesting traits is that 10 years back, a guy called Rigney perpetually saying that Biden was mad, without offering aby actual evidence of it.

Fred is the worst player on the team. To be honest, it was a mistake recruiting him. We only put him in to play when there's no choice - we really only do that when we are up against a team who we are sure we can beat. So Fred only gets to play in matches where he is actually likely to win even though he's a bit rubbish. So, he's usually on the winning side What is Fred's score based on the OP's ranking system method?

Given that the trains have not been public for about quarter of a century, I think we can largely discount your view on the matter.

If a sovereign country like China (or the US or UK) chooses to do GoF research clandestinely then there's nothing that another country can do about it. So, if we were magically able to prove that China had been doing it (And it seems unlikely that they would be stupid enough to do it essentially on an open lab bench) there's nothing we could do about it. So there's not much point wasting time on trying to find out.

Are you saying that, if it turns out to have escaped from a lab we do not need to worry abort wet markets? Are you saying it it escaped from the wet market we do not need to worry about labs? Or are you, as I am, saying that we actually need to look carefully at both of those because, whichever one was the source this time, that doesn't mean the other won't be the cause of the next outbreak? If both look like plausible sources we need to reassess both.

Which?

I may have missed some of the details, but is this essentially a three page discussion between those ho think nothing moves and those who think "The nothing" moves?

What's the difference? In one option the people cutting up animals use a scalpel and in the other they use a cleaver. So?

Tax law...?

If there's an embassy (or such like) anywhere in the world which is not swept regularly for "unexpected" RF emissions then they deserve all they get. You can get a "bug detector" on eBay that will detect power levels a million times less than those needed to affect people.

Are you talking about work funded by the USA? It was essentially decided by people who think money is more important than health and by those who close down funding for research institutions in the USA. So it's Republican policy.

As far as I can tell, Amazon is "trying it on". If I buy something from them They choose and pay the carrier. So they have a contract with the carrier. I don't; I don't necessarily even know who the carrier is. So, I have no claim against the carrier if the item does not arrive. But I do have a contract with Amazon- they included delivery in their price. They are liable if it doesn't turn up. I invite you to consider what would happen if Amazon really was allowed to write that clause into their contract and have it stand up in court. I would offer to be Amazon's sole carrier for all their goods- not a company; just me. Amazon would pay me a lot of money and pass responsibility to me for delivering the goods, and I wouldn't even take a van round to their warehouse. Amazon would be legally "exempt" because of their contract. I'd have enough money to point out in court that the buyers didn't have a claim against me (see above). After a while Amazon would realise that they didn't need to stock goods. There aren't many ways to make amazon more profitable, but this would be one of them However... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_Contract_Terms_Act_1977

At the moment what I can smell in the air is smoke- someone nearby must be having a bonfire. There are a lot of chemicals in smoke- most of the research focussed on tobacco, but apart from nicotine, most of the chemicals will be similar whatever you burn. And so I can tell you that much of what I can smell are compounds like phenol and guaiacol together with acrolein, naphthalene and others. It's also possible to connect a gas chromatograph to a glass funnel and put your nose in that funnel. That way you can smell the compounds as they are separated out. (so you knew which ones are responsible for what odours). Here's an analysis of the volatiles from heating paper. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00021369.1981.10864521 So, if you wanted to know what "smokey" air had in it, you could start with those. People have done work to identify the major components of smells. Things like "burning stuff" https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-burnt-smell-standard-compounds-measured-with-GC-MS_tbl1_223971634 or things like "woody" which would include things like pinene and eucalyptol Or "herbal" where you find compounds like thymol or citral (You might notice, the chemists are not generally very original with names. The dominant odour of lemons is due to two main components, citral and limonene). So quite a lot of the work has already been done. It would be expensive to repeat it.

The smell of petrichor is largely this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosmin The first big problem is that there are something like a billion known chemicals, and we can't look for all of them in one sample. If we did then the analysis report would be rather unmanageable; a billion lines most of which said "not detected". I think that's something like a thousand big thick books (and it wouldn't be cheap) The other big problem is that, for some materials, you can smell them at concentrations which are below the limit of detection by GC/MS (or most other techniques). Cloning would be a perfectly acceptable term if I was, for example, seeking to copy a trademarked perfume. It's also a term commonly used for copying a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clone_(computing) And the word is used for credit card fraud involving a copied card.

Is it just me or... https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-08-03

This is close. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/worlds-tallest-timber-framed-building-finally-opens-doors

It's their home too, and they were there millions of years earlier.

Can you provide an example? A negative number of moles would be very weird.

I wrote code that could do that in about 1982. It played noughts and crosses (badly). It learned how to play by seeking to avoid repeating "losing" moves. The algorithm was from a Sci Am article. I'm not sure how I define "Life", but... that doesn't see to cut it.

It may not matter much how you store them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot