1

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why has no Warp Speed Pill been invented to Stop Periods?

« on: 04/08/2022 21:24:32 »

A very few men are  so sexually insecure and socially inadequate that they feel a need or even a right to assault women. These are the people who need medical treatment, not all women.

2

Just Chat! / Re: Do British pubs typically serve restaurant quality food?

« on: 04/08/2022 17:56:01 »

There has been a massive change in my lifetime, following tighter drink-driving legislation. In my youth, pub food was a grudging addition to encourage lunchtime drinking. With decreasing consumption of alcohol, and increasing competition from supermarkets, the majority of pubs have at least increased the scale and variety of their offerings and a good many are now really restaurants with decent draught beer and a dartboard. My chef son produces Michelin-star food in pubs.

3

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why has no Warp Speed Pill been invented to Stop Periods?

« on: 04/08/2022 17:36:12 »

Anyone with a brain would be in favor of reducing the population. The means to do so safely and cheaply has been around since 1960. As BC says, how you use it is a matter of choice, unless you subscribe to some bizarre superstition that allows dirty old men to determine your sex life and reproduction.

4

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why has no Warp Speed Pill been invented to Stop Periods?

« on: 04/08/2022 13:42:36 »

You appear to be in the wrong forum. This is not the games forum.

Are you deliberately missing the point, or just... well missing it for some other reason?

5

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why has no Warp Speed Pill been invented to Stop Periods?

« on: 04/08/2022 13:39:01 »

It has.

Where?

OK, This is the bit where you make it utterly clear that you do not know what you are talking about.

The usual formulation for the contraceptive pill is 21 pills with active ingredients in - typically both a progestin and an oestrogen- and then 7 days without pills during which so called "withdrawal bleeding" occurs.
But if you keep taking the active pills that doesn't happen.

So, this "magical " pill you say should be invented at "warp speed" is "the pill" and  has been around for half a century.

Did it occur to you that you should ask a doctor, or at least a woman, about this before posting?

6

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Is the male anus higher than the female anus?

« on: 02/08/2022 22:34:12 »

When it comes to political speeches, the male anus is certainly louder and more often heard than the female, but the contents are indistinguishable.

7

Technology / Re: Can rechargeable 9volt in guitar?

« on: 28/07/2022 10:53:40 »

Not a sensible option in the first place. The current drain in a guitar is very small even when switched on, so battery life is determined by the self-discharge and corrosion characteristics of the battery - long-life alkalines are far better in both respects. I get about 2 years' worth of rehearsals and gigs from a 9V Duracell.

That said, the guitar should work OK even without a battery, though you won't get any boost effects. So if it doesn't work, it's possible that the electronics have been corroded, the pickup selector switch has failed, the battery connector has gone open-circuit (another reason for not using rechargeables - the connectors don't last too long if you keep taking them off!)  or that the output jack is broken. If the LED doesn't light up, the problem is in the battery - jack - on/off switch part of the circuit. or maybe the lad has tried to connect a NIMH battery back to front with the jack in place - that could indeed fry everything including the LED. Seen it all, in the last 70 years of playing.

8

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Star distance appearences

« on: 20/07/2022 00:26:16 »

It is a well known fact that stars that we see don't exist anymore

It is a well known expectation that most of the stars we see with our eyes do still exist.
- There are a few exceptions, such as a few stars that are thought to be nearing the end of their lives, and displaying some instability. They are very bright, so we see them from far away, and it is possible that they have already gone supernova.
- But most of the stars we can see have life expectancies far in excess of the light-travel time.

9

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Star distance appearences

« on: 13/07/2022 02:27:00 »

You have to admit - the constellations do not look much like their names, at first glance.

I heard that some researchers had extrapolated stellar proper motions backward in time to see what the constellations would have looked like thousands of years ago. They came up with some date that they thought the familiar Ancient Greek constellations looked "most like" their name. From this they deduced a date when these constellations may have been originally named.
- I've not heard of the same thing being done for Australian Aboriginal constellations, which are apparently more about galactic dust clouds, and it would be much harder to measure a proper motion (compared to an individual star)..

Of course there is another explanation that I heard, about some Ancient Greek astronomers spending the night outside, with a very large amphora of ouzo...

10

General Science / Re: What caused rope to spin while pulling stuff 6 stories up?

« on: 03/07/2022 19:14:46 »

Most ropes have a twist to them; sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not.
But when you hang a load on the rope, it untwists a bit, and that's why the scaff poles twist.
But when you let the load off, it untwists again and that happens when you lower the rope back. But you are less likely to notice that.

11

Technology / Re: What Question Could You Ask To Determine Sentience Of An AI ?

« on: 01/07/2022 17:28:28 »

Today I encountered an x-ray machine exhibiting boredom and possible suicidal ideation. Halfway through a clinical exposure, it decided it had had enough and switched off. Rebooted, it cut off even earlier each time. Clearly fed up with studying human anatomy. Next week I'll pack a dead rat in my toolbox and see if a change of subject might perk it up a bit.

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Technology / Re: What Question Could You Ask To Determine Sentience Of An AI ?

« on: 30/06/2022 17:25:14 »

So here's a good question:

"Who's a pretty boy, then?"

That should sort out the self-aware parrot from the dumb chipset.

13

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 24/06/2022 11:44:35 »

Eurasia was genetically very diverse and had suffered innumerable plagues and pestilences by the time Columbus left these shores, so what was left of the population (after a very high rate of perinatal and infant deaths) was fairly resistant and understood some methods of quarantine and treatment for the diseases they exported. But they didn't export the treatment.

14

Physiology & Medicine / Re: The crucial ingredients of CBD:

« on: 23/06/2022 22:42:06 »

You can probably hang the soft bits that everybody remembers, on a secondhand skeleton, thus eliminating most of the requirement for calcium and phosphorus. The other stuff is only required to make it all function, but to misquote a famous authority, a dead mouse is a perfect model of a live mouse, if only for a short period.

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why where the native Americans so vulnerable to disease?

« on: 22/06/2022 17:26:38 »

Relatively small gene pool, isolated for maybe 10,000 years, never acquired residual herd immunity (people often forget the word "residual" - you may have to kill 90% of the population to achieve it!), many deliberately infected in the later stages of colonisation, deprived of agricultural land and clean water, negligible provision of health services....you name it. 

16

Physiology & Medicine / Re: The crucial ingredients of CBD:

« on: 21/06/2022 17:36:21 »

I'm just waiting for the spam advertising.

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That CAN'T be true! / Re: Are home water filtration systems a waste of money?

« on: 15/06/2022 11:03:12 »

Worth remembering that when the US food & drug administration tested practically every available brand of bottled water about 30 years back, they found New York public mains water to have the lowest level of pathogens and contaminants.

Also worth noting that the BBC ran an open-label tasting competition between various bottled waters. The highest score from every taster was given to a product whose label said it was spring water from an uninhabited  Pacific island over 1000 miles from any source of industrial pollutant. All the bottles actually contained chilled London tap water.

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That CAN'T be true! / Re: can deuterium depleted water improve health?

« on: 14/06/2022 18:08:13 »

It's a good way of getting rid of the waste product after you have extracted the valuable deuterium from tap water.

Much the same as corn flakes, made from the waste after extracting syrup, glue, and a dozen other valuable products from maize. Apparently the sludge is so useless and indigestible that they have to add sugar, salt, vitamins and minerals in order to sell it as a food.

As for Marmite.....but at least it tastes good.

19

General Science / Re: What takes more energy walking or skateboarding?

« on: 06/06/2022 22:34:27 »

Hi.

I agree with @chiralSPO,  more information is required.
    However, assuming no wind or air resistance, a perfect skateboard, perfect flat and level surface etc.     Then wheels are better (more efficient) than legs.   

    In principle a person on a skateboard could make the 100m distance without doing any work at all.    If the skateboard was already moving then it just continues as per Newton's Law  ("an object maintains a state of uniform motion unless acted on by a force").     Even if the skateboard was stationary to start with, the person only needs to put in enough work to make the skateboard have some kinetic energy and that's only temporary.  They can give it just a tiny amount of energy and that will be fine, it will eventually reach the end of the 100m journey with that same amount of kinetic energy.   If the person has a dynamo they can push against the skateboard wheels then they can recover that energy if they want at the end of the journey and keep it in a more useful form.
    Meanwhile, walking is an extremely wasteful process by comparison,  heat is produced in the persons muscles as chemical reactions happen,  muscle fibres and tendons get stretched and produce more heat, sound is released each time your foot slaps the floor,  the deformation of your shoes and of the ground each time your foot hits the floor also produces more heat.   Overall the person is required to do work and release heat into the environment every moment they are walking.   There is no realistic way to capture or recover all the energy that is being released into the environment.

Best Wishes.

20

Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Re: Monkeypox: Could it be similar to cowpox, and just a mild variant of smallpox?

« on: 28/05/2022 20:50:24 »

There seems to be an assumption that covid has gone away. It is still spreading and mutating. It's unlikely to return as a variant with increased pathogenicity and/or the ability to evade current vaccines but it is a possibility. It's early days in the evolution of a fast evolving virus.