Tetraethyl Lead was used [..], and is still used in some aviation fuel. There appears to be illegal manufacture and use of the substance ongoing in the PRC.

If there is still legal manufacture and use in aviation gas, as you imply, what makes you think that there is illegal manufacture in PRC? There may be illegal or unlicensed use of PbEt4, made for the aviation market, as automobile fuel additives, but that doesn't make the manufacture itself illegal. Always assuming, of course that you're applying the appropriate laws to PRC. Whatever jurisdiction you're resident in, it's laws don't apply in the PRC (unless you're in the PRC). I don't know if the PRC has banned the manufacture of PbEt4. I do know that a very high proportion of the automobiles in China were manufactured since the 1980s, which means that they've got no need to use PbEt4. And that in itself casts serious doubt on your assertion.

The amounts involved as a fuel antiknock ingredient exceed Lead's use in mold control and paint, and should be considered the primary source for increased Lead in the environment.

That was certainly the case when I was learning to drive. But I can't remember having seen any petrol pumps supplying PbEt4-doped fuel for ... over a decade, maybe approaching two decades now. I remember there being a mild wailing and gnashing of teeth from the old-car freaks when the last refinery in the country (on this continent, perhaps?) that produced PbEt4-doped fuel stopped producing it. But they've shut the fuck up because anti-knock additives are available for engines that can't be dressed-back to use lead-free fuel ; you just have to pour in an appropriate amount of additive into your tank along with the amount of fuel. Yourself. Also, the additives may be less toxic - lead is not the only metal ion that exhibits anti-knock properties, just the cheapest, when you're doing it by the hundred-tonne batch.

I stopped using M$ stuff myself at all after the train wreck that was Vista. I don't know if that was before or after the Office 365 stuff arrived, since typical network capability for my work locations then was a 256kbps link shared between 30 people on-shift and 70 off-shift or asleep. I doubt that would have been adequate for live use of an Office-like thing.

These days I use whatever email thing the client provides, my in-house software, and PDF most documents that other people need. After that, it's my choice of tools.

Truth is that nobody has any clue as to how to contain this ebola epidermic in West Africa

You contradict yourself. The solution is well-known. Quarantine.

It is just politically unacceptable, and there's a high probability of there not being enough troops to enact the quarantine by shooting people trying to escape. Which raises another problem ; having shot them, what do you do with the potentially infectious bodies?

And, who is going to order sovereign nations (four, so far, including a nation of around 100million people) to close their borders and shoot their own population?

But quarantine does have a long and good track record.

They may have aches and pains ongoing, but it sounds like they could still function well

One of the early symptoms is that you slough off the lining of your intestines. The euphemistic "bloody diarrhoea" is the lining falling off your gut and falling out of your arse. Not to mention the blood pissing out of every orifice, including many of your sweat glands.

Good luck recovering from that in a couple of months. Yeah, straight back to work as a serum mule!

After the way that haemorrhagic virus tends to make all your blood vessels thin-walled and porous, just getting a line in for taking a blood sample is likely to be a challenge.

Real geeks do not care about grammar.

Obviously, you've never had to write a compiler.

Real geeks do not care about non-geek's grammar.

Better?

To elaborate on "i kan reed" 's not incorrect answer,

We'll leave aside the "sucked in" bit of it. Your physics course will teach you eventually that most (all?) fields are of infinite extent, though equally, they get weaker with separation between the bodies pretty rapidly. You can also neglect the mass of the object - the greater the mass, the greater the forces produced which precisely counteracts the effect of the greater mass. (If the counteracting isn't exact, there's a Noble or several for the person who proves it ; smart people have tried, and not yet succeeded.) Let's just pretend you'd asked a better defined question such as "how slow does it have to be going to be captured into an orbit by the Earth".

Well, now you have to contend with the fact that both the asteroid and the Earth are travelling in the Sun's gravitational field. And in a Sun-centred frame of reference the Earth is travelling at about (2 * pi * 150million) km /year = 107515 km/hour around the Sun (plus or minus several percent because it's orbit isn't circular). But there's nothing in the question you pose to describe if the asteroid is travelling in the same direction as the Earth, in the opposite direction. If the two are travelling in the same direction, then you can achieve low closing velocities (which is what you probably really mean by "how slow") ; but if they're in contra-directional orbits, then they're going to have at least the closing velocity of the Earth around it's solar orbit (in which case, the asteroid will have to be coming from close to the Sun, and just stalling near the Earth's orbit, just as the Earth is coming past, to pick it up out of solar-dominated motion to being in an Earth-dominated domain of orbital parameters.

Then you have to look at how close the asteroid gets to Earth ; if you allow it to aerobrake in the atmosphere, you can dump a lot of velocity and momentum there, to allow the object to be captured into Earth orbit. It can happen, but it's pretty delicate - there are several craters on Mars and Venus (IIRC) from when such manoeuvres didn't go to plan.

It's not an unreasonable question, but the topic is more complex than you seem to appreciate in your posing of the question.

You were probably doing it wrong. Did you have your arm shaved? Bad move. Did you hold your arm in the liquid nitrogen for several minutes, as opposed to pouring a bucket of LN2 over your arm? They are two very different events.

I can assure you that the Leidenfrost effect works perfectly well - when I was casting lead weights for diving, I had my sand moulds a little too damp - cue bubbling splashing lead, with substantial gobbets of molten lead splashing over my arm - around 230degC temperature difference. It hurt, that's for sure ; but it would have hurt a damned sight more if not for the Leidenfrost effect.

The scars have nearly disappeared now. Or been over-printed by other cuts, nicks and abrasions. Only took 25 years.

By the time you get to studying functions - about age 14 when I was in school, you automatically have to learn how to sketch graphs just by reading the function. In fact, sketching them, by hand, was a small but significant number of marks in maths papers, including labelling them with (as appropriate), the expressions for where they cross the axes, inversion and inflexion points. That's the expressions, not the values. The expressions that you obtain by algebraically manipulating the function. i.e., by doing the actual mathematics.

Can someone actually provide me a link to examples that require you to use these machines? Real exam questions.

I find it pretty unlikely, a priori, that it would actually be quicker to set up the problem on a "graphing calculator" and then transfer the results onto your manuscript, compared to just writing it out directly on your manuscript. Plus, of course, you get the possible marks for showing your working.

OK ; maybe I'm old school - if I need a square root and I don't have a calculator or log tables to hand, I just Newton-Raphson until I've got the necessary number of significant digits. If I can't just get the root by inspection. It's not exactly rocket science.

Oh well, I guess the Elite clone (oolite, www.oolite.org or something like that ; it's blocked here because it appears on some blacklist as a games site) that I use to waste my time between finishing work and going to sleep must be positivley fossilized then.

And ... so?

But it does nothing to change the fact that he and both of his successors left office after being "suddenly taken ill",

Did you actually pay any attention to the events as they were happening? I rather suspect not.

How can I put this? The dead dogs in the gutter in Nowhereville, Saskatchewan knew that Chernenko and Andropov were "Norwegian Blue" placements. Even, incredible as it seems, Raygun the Retard, knew.

recall redng abut it in the New Scentist at the time. There was much puzzlement, but the alerts from Sweden were notcoming from nuclear reactors etc, but out of academia, who have no reasn to keep things in-house while they figure out waht was going on.

If you look at a map, Sweden was probably the closest country to Chernobyl outside the Soviet block. There was no "Ukraine", "Belarus" or Baltic states then , they were all Oblasts or Okrugs of the USSR. (Possibly parts of Finland were closer ; I'd need a map to check.)

The wind took the cloud NW from Chernobyl to th Baltic, then W across the North Sea, leading to high deposition rates over the Hiighlands of Scotland and the English Lake District (I had to check radiation levels as part of my rsk assessment for mapping work in the Highlands 2 years later ; sale of sheep for food was still banned at that time, but since I was a veggie, that didn't fuss me). It was several days later that the main plume swept back across central Europe.

It's possible that places like nuclear reactors and research stations picked up the cloud earlier, using their more sensitive detectors, but they weren't reporting it until after the other news had broken and they could say "It's not us!"

our (catholic) religious education teacher not willing to believe that the steam exiting the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant is not actually a radioactive smoke plume

Why would you be listening to a RE teacher about a science topic. You might as well ask a self-professed celibate virgin about the pleasures of buggering little boys.

our (catholic) religious education teacher

Oh. Sorry.

Preparation H?

You can get vitamin D (and it's precursors) in edible form too.Many fresh veg, fish ... various other dietary sources. Not just sunlight.

Finding plants that concentrate this stuff would be most valuable.

If the cost of preparing the land and harvesting the crops for decades (you're not going to get everything in one cycle) turns out to be cheaper than just letting the radioactivity decay ....

Which might be true, bit it's by no means a certainty.

Actually, the radiation cloud was first detected (in the West ; Pripyat knew about it a couple of day's earlier. My wife was working out of doors a hundred or so kilometres away for the week afterwards ; we paid attention to the details when she came to the west with me) over southern Sweden, from where it spread to Northern Britain and then worked it's way south. Germany and Austria were several days later. They were hit, undoubtedly, but the winds delayed the arrival of the radiation cloud for several days.

Correct, but pointfull?