i heard a story about varnish factory that failed quality checks after one old guy got fired, he was a smoker and used to spit in the main reactor. some enzyme from saliva made it shinier

it will vary, just after distillation (or RO/ion exchange) it should be closer to 7 then it goes down as carbon dioxide gets absorbed. that’s why it’s buffered everywhere where it matters

in my case the size of the system was so small they didn’t have that excuse, yet they were only ever able to get correct results after experimental data was handed over to them, zero predictive power, useless

seeing that jargon file has an extensive page on retrocomputing feels like figuring out that there were archeologists in ancient egypt

some people would tell you that we can simulate small bits of chemistry but it’s flat out wrong (i might be biased as i’ve wrangled for a year with computational chemists about results that don’t conform to reality) and even then errors are so large that’s it’s useless

and then some bozo says that biology is just complicated chemistry and chemistry is just complicated physics and we can simulate physics

curious thing is that i never hear biologists or chemists saying that, only some physicists and techbros. just trying to simulate your way out of small organic chemistry problems will make you even more hopelessly lost than you were before

maybe it introduces some critical contaminant (many such cases)

that’s a weird metric to look at because drug approval happens only like, 5-15 years after end of preclinical research, sometimes longer

clinical trials also take fuckton of money but this might be also post-2008 cuts that we only see effects of now

they did a whoopsie, lead 210 comes from uranium 238. every 220 years radioactivity drops 1000x which means that 200-300 year old lead is mostly fine. copper notably doesn’t have this problem, is dense and is refined to high degree, at scale. it’s good enough to shield most of relatively low energy radiation from that isotope (less than 50kev gammas). couple mm of copper should be plenty for many applications

different tool for a different purpose. water has a large heat of evaporation which is something that allows for more compact turbines

big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime

it also happened with tramadol before (different plant)

Adding to that, logistics are such that direct impact will be felt strongest in places like India that rely heavily on Qatari LNG to make fertilizer, but many places have other sources of both gas and fertilizer. Americas, EU, Russia and China will get by because they have their own supply and will be only affected by price increase

without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer there’s only enough reactive nitrogen going around for something like 1-1.5B people. yea mate very sustainable to retvrn to traditional farming and starve 80% of the planet in the process

real. every prediction i got from computational chemists was wrong

that’s at least four days before kidnapping of maduro

op what else did you knew

dune (1965) was written 26 years before desert storm (1991) and before iran-iraq war (1980) or iranian revolution (1979) or six day war (1967) or black september (1970) or yom kippur war (1973) but just after baathists took power in both syria and iraq (1963) and some time after coup in iran (1953), suez crisis (1956) and nasser taking power in egypt (1952)

some context for the bottom row https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/16/exiled-russian-accused-of-spying-on-opposition-including-navalny-movement https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/11/04/russian-pro-democracy-activist-detained-in-poland-admits-to-working-for-fsb-en-news

tldr openrussia didn’t learn that there’s no such thing as former fsb agent, and now there are consequences

no no no no it’s on by default so it’s opt-out, and switch for that isn’t even implemented yet