I'd actually argue with recent advances in low observability in fighter jets that the risk of bumping into each other close range is higher than ever. The only reason it's not really happened recently is because the US has had a near monopoly on stealth aircraft.

As soon as China and Russia's 5th gen fighters start entering the market I suspect close in combat is going to become a big deal again.

I read a book not so long ago about British Sea Harrier pilots in Yugoslavia, they genuinely feared the MiG 29s that the Serbs had because it could significantly out play them in terms of missile range so they were potentially sitting ducks if they ran into one, but they were aware of a vulnerability in the MiG 29's radar system such that it would only continue to detecting targets that were moving on a horizontal plane and would filter out non-moving targets. They developed a strategy and practiced it against ex-East German MiG 29s before arrival whereby the Harriers would fly in incredibly tight formation pairs so they'd appear as a single radar blip, when they detected a MiG 29, one would literally just drop vertically whilst the other would break off, the MiG wouldn't detect the one dropping vertically because it wouldn't appear as though it was moving and so would chase the one that broke away, this meant the MiG would chase into range of the one dropping off that wasn't visible on radar who could pull up hard and take it out from below in much closer combat where it's radar wouldn't see it coming.

I think this scenario proves that it's really not as straightforward as the layman often thinks; the idea that you can just see something on radar and press fire - it's not like that. See also the way Wild Weasel units work, their entire basis is getting SAMs to fire at them so they can evade the missiles and take them out; if missiles were that great the whole Wild Weasel concept would just never work. Part the reason Wild Weasels historically had no choice but to work this way was because SAMs outranged their anti-radiation missiles like the Shrike, so they literally had to fly into SAM range to be able to pop off a missile at the SAM and that usually meant the SAM getting a good few shots off before they even got to fire back; often Wild Weasel units, certainly Vietnam, ended up raking NVA SAMs with machine gun fire just to make sure the job was done.

The effectiveness of missiles is much more nuanced therefore; sure we hear about Syrian MiGs being shot down by Turkish F-16s like it was nothing, but that's primarily because Syria is utterly hopeless at defending it's forces against hostile aircraft - you only have to look at the ease at which Israel regularly bombs shit in Syria to see that. In this respect it's much the same way that when insurgents like the Taliban attacks US compounds by the hundreds they usually die in the hundreds with minimal to no US casualties, but this isn't a statement on the uselessness of hand to hand combat for US troops, on the contrary, when US troops have been pulled into battle on the terms of insurgents hand to hand combat has been incredibly important - Fallujah in 2004 was a prime example of this. The point is therefore, that whilst missiles work great in ideal conditions; when you're up against an opponent that isn't competent enough or isn't capable of evading them or doesn't have any training or technology for evasion, then they're basically easy mode; up against a more serious opponent? dogfighting will still always be relevant.

For what it's worth, when I was still a fairly new diver I stupidly ignored the advice about never diving when you have a cold and did my deep diving training certification with one.

I got to about 5 metres and felt a bit of a pain in my soft palate at the top of my mouth, so I tried to ascend to free it and it wouldn't clear so I tried descending again, I descended a bit further and although that made it hurt, it then went away and I continued the dive down to 40 metres (I got narc'd that dive but that's a different, though partially related story).

On the way back up I hit something like 10 metres and had the exact same problem, I tried to descend to clear it and it wouldn't, I tried to do the same as before, to ascend and see if it persisted. Anyway, I simply ascended and it went away but not without becoming more painful first.

A few days later I noticed I'd lost my sense of taste completely, even chocolate just felt like having liquid mud in my mouth to the point I stopped eating it, it was just a flavourless mess. This continued for about 3 months, I went to the doctor and he just didn't seem to care, so I lived with it and after about 2 more months it went away altogether by itself and my sense of taste went back to normal. It wasn't really until about 12 months after it all started I put two and two together and realised it was a diving related injury - I'd previously assumed the loss of taste was the result of a cold but I'm now certain it was a diving injury. In hindsight, I had trapped air somewhere at the top of my mouth/in my nasal passage caused by snot buildup, the change in pressure expanded air bubbles in it pushing pressure on them. When I ascended at the end if went away because it burst but not before having put enough pressure on whatever it put pressure on to injure me and cause this loss of taste.

But given it took around 5 months to come back and we're barely even 5 months into this, I'm inclined to agree with the GP, it's far too early to determine if this is a permanent side effect of the illness, or if it's just a long running temporary side effect. As I say in my case it took around 5 months to return to normal, if I were in your position I'd hope to see it back by 6 months, but in all honesty I'd give it 12 before assuming it's permanent. That is of course just based on my experience of having suffered loss of taste. Hopefully it can at least give you some solace in that you'll hopefully get your sense of taste back, I suspect based on my experience that whatever part of us it is that fails and makes us lose our sense of taste is capable of self repair - it just takes time. If you're getting it back intermittently I'd wager you're already well on your way to recovering it.

It's not so much that, most divers I've dived with are happy to do a night dive, they just generally choose not to bother. If you're on a week or two week long liveaboard where there's 4 dives a day, 3 in the day, 1 at night, then it's not uncommon to find everyone do all 4 dives on the first day or so, but then do all 3 day dives, and only 1 or two of the 7 - 14 night dives available over the rest of the trip.

I think it's mostly just that people can't be arsed to do the 4th dive of the day if anything, but as I say I just find that surprising, because it's nearly always the most spectacular. Personally I actually often feel much more comfortable night diving, I find I'm more relaxed than ever, my air consumption is always at it's best and my dives always longest at night, I just find my heart rate slows significantly more for whatever reason on night dives, and it sets me up nicely for a good night's sleep afterwards.

Don't get me wrong, I hear what you're saying; even during day dives if you're doing a deco stop in open water, especially if there are large waves on the surface or awkward currents, it can certainly be a bit disorientating, especially if a shark comes to see what you're all about, or if a large barracuda starts staring at you like it's sat there waiting for you to fuck up so it can take a chunk out of you. Similarly there have been plenty of other circumstances where I've felt uncomfortable and a bit unnerved - strong downcurrents for example pushing you deeper and making it hard to ascend, and I've had the odd wreck dive where I've felt just a little bit too claustrophobic (despite never suffering from claustrophobia normally). Ultimately though I just feel that paying a lot of money and spending many hours travelling to get somewhere like Raja Ampat to not bother with all the night dives feels a bit like buying a Ferrari and then using it for nothing other than the 30mph max local school run - you just end up missing the best bit about it.

I don't think I've been diving anywhere in the world where, if you turn off your lights on a night dive, you can't see algae glow if you kick your fins or move your hand through the water to at least some degree.

We've done a few lights off night dives where we just followed the glow in the water each time the diver in front kicked their fins and disturbed them. Jellyfish and pelagic tunicates are also a common sight in this respect, as are squid, cuttlefish, and ostracods that can also display bioluminescence.

Nonetheless, it is pretty spectacular when you get sufficient concentrations of algae crashing on the shore so as to see the waves themselves glow blue. A lot of divers don't seem to enjoy night dives, I'm not sure why; diving in the day especially on reefs is spectacular, but night dives are just otherworldly and a completely different ball game; the things that float in the water column alone are just so alien:

https://www.google.com/search?...

The zooxanthella on which corals depend to survive, and which also help give corals their colour leave when coral becomes sick (such as from being too hot). That makes them go white and unable to feed, sometimes the zooxanthella returns, but more often it doesn't and they just die. All you're left with are white coral skeletons that eventually get overwhelmed by algae growth which typically prevents new coral from establishing.

This isn't necessarily permanently fatal to a reef, if you have healthy parrotfish populations then they'll munch up algae like no tomorrow and they're even bite the coral skeletons and shit them out as sand (that's how white sand is created). The problem is that parrotfish and algae eaters are also typically overfished too.

So it's not always fatal for a reef, and doesn't have to be permanently fatal - reefs can recover, the problem right now is that we're not allowing them to, and there'll reach a point where enough reef and algae eating fish have been eliminated that it does become permanent.

I think the reefs can actually survive global warming in all honesty - I think they're sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse that they can adapt - what I don't think they can survive is global warming + overfishing + dumping and excessive pollution from shipping + increased acidification of the ocean etc. We need to reduce at least _some_ of the pressures, if not all of them.

Blue Planet II "The Deep" wasn't filmed at Challenger Deep, it was filmed only about 1000 metres down in Antarctica. Challenger Deep is around 10x deeper than that at just short of 11,000 metres.

I appreciate what you're saying, it's misleading to suggest this is open to anyone other than the 1%, that's absolutely true, but personally as a diver, I think even Blue Planet II is no substitute for doing it and being in the ocean. Whilst I loved Blue Planet II the biggest disappointment for me was it largely told the same tired old stories that the BBC tells every time it ventures into the ocean. There was for example a lot of time spent in the Galapagos, which was already well covered by their numerous Galapagos documentaries and for whatever reason, the BBC also have a fascination with the Great Barrier Reef when they do underwater shows, and yet ask any diver if they've dived there and you'll get either a "Yeah it was a bit shit", or "Why would I want to go there?". The fact is because the Great Barrier Reef is largely dead, it's a little bit shit, it's just not been very good for a long time; it can't hold a candle to, for example, Egypt's Red Sea or Raja Ampat in Indonesia. Nowadays Australia's best diving tends to include Weedy Sea Dragons, Port Jackson Sharks, and Cuttlefish congregations in the South.

The under water world in general is far more exciting than Blue Planet II was ever able to pretend it is, and I'd encourage everyone with the opportunity to do so to give it a go, especially before we kill anymore of it off anymore than we already have. If you think you're getting even remotely the same experience watching a Bluray or DVD then you're massively mistaken. Those Dolphins on Episode 1 were great right? You know you can dive with them an interact with them in Hurghada, Egypt? I have, and I remember it far more vividly than I do Episode 1 of Blue Planet II. The same is true of the Orcas and Humpbacks just North of Narvik in Norway, they're amazing, but you know what's also amazing? The astounding variety of colourful sea slugs that inhabit Norways fjords, it's selection of nudibranchs that Blue Planet II didn't mention. In fact, it barely touched on them at all, but they in themselves are one of the ocean's most fascinating types of creatures. Did you think the cloudy sulphite pool in "The Deep" episode was awesome? Get yourself qualified as a deep diver (40m max depth) and you can swim into and under them in Mexico's Yucatan, I have and it was one of the best dives I've ever done- no wildlife but coming up through a sulphite cloud.

And that's really the point, from Green Morays in the Caribbean and Giant Morays in the Middle East and Asia that make it look like dinosaurs still exist, to massive Whale Sharks that could literally steam roll you whilst feeding but politely stop and move around you despite being upto 10 metres long, through to tiny nudibranchs that have colours you wouldn't think were possible in nature because they look like artificially manufactured neon crayon colours (look up Nembrotha kurbayana or Goniobranchus kuniei on Google images for example), and through to fish like trumpet fish and jacks that swim alongside you using you as cover to hunt, or the cleaner fish that start pecking at your goggles to clean you if you just slow down and stop on a reef, there's a lot to see in the oceans that Blue Planet II doesn't touch.

Sure few people can afford this particular trip, but most can afford a snorkel and mask and get to the ocean, others can afford to learn to dive, and they should. Some of the best places to dive in the world are cheap as hell - Mexico and Egypt are within most people's price ranges and that grants you access to everything from underwater caves and sulphite clouds, giant whale sharks, bull sharks, dolphins, and some of the most colourful and healthiest reefs in the world. You're right that for most people Blue Planet II is the closest they'll get to the deep ocean for sure, and I agree everyone should watch Blue Planet II because it's still awesome, but again, I'd really just caution that it's absolutely no substitute for actually getting in the ocean.

One other thing I disagree with you on though is the suggestion that anyone doing this trip won't get to see what the film crew have already captured, I disagree, that's really the wonder of the ocean, every time you go beneath the waves you always see something new, wherever you are. It's just the price tag that fucks most people.

Nope, it's the same story in the UK, BT has flat out said that they're not even seeing half of the bandwidth usage across the UK that they've seen during past events which they were also able to handle fine.

The backbones across Europe aren't the limiting factor in internet access, the last mile is. Britain's ageing last mile copper infrastructure that's still all too present in the vast majority of homes is what prevents internet speeds in the UK improving, not BT's 21cn backbone.

This is how I know, because the owner of the UK's backbone has said so:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tec...

BT has said that even with all this extra homeworking they're still not even at half of the peak load they've had to handle in the past, and they handled that absolutely fine.

There's no reason to think it'd be the same across the rest of Europe - that the proportion of bandwidth usage through increased homeworking isn't exceptional or unprecedented against past events.

As such I'd tend to agree with the GP, this is more about Netflix, and YouTube trying to save money in the face of a global downturn that's hit their stocks hard than it is doing any of us a favour. We, as paying customers, are being shafted so they can continue to pretend to their shareholders that it's business as usual for them.

Not sure about PC, but to be fair, the Xbox at least isn't bad in that area (in some ways ahead), though the Switch and PS4 aren't quite there. For example, you can play digitally bought Xbox games on more than one console. I don't play Xbox anymore really and pretty much purely play PC now, but games bought digitally like Diablo 3 always worked just as well on mine and my wife's console together.

Similarly Xbox has the concept of clubs that can be linked to games with calendars and such for club gaming sessions, it creates a nice on-console integration of communities around games, media sharing is trivial and streamlined (I'd argue more so than Steam) and similarly can be used for guide sharing, though they also provide links to things like TrueAchievements guides on console too using the console's built in browser. The Xbox hasn't really done VR (though the Playstation did), and certainly it's weak on mods, but mods aren't non-existent - games like Skyrim and FarCry support a fairly vibrant mod community on the Xbox. Streaming is fully integrated into the Xbox experience too across console and PC using Twitch and Mixer. Some areas where the Xbox does stand out for example is the consistent way to get people in game with you - it's hit and miss on Steam, and for whatever reason PC games are always way more shit at NAT punchthrough, I always felt that's just because developers are lazy on the PC and figure people just know how to open up ports and such. Steam's all or nothing privacy options are a bit shit too; if you make it so people can't see your historic gaming activity, then it also prevents people seeing the servers you've setup in some games so no one can find it to join where Steam's invite doesn't work. That area really needs work, I'd go as far as saying Steam's privacy settings are just outright broken they're so poorly designed - if I want to show offline but allow people in the same game as me I'm talking to to see a server I've setup they should be able to, it should be upto me if I'm worried about others seeing the server when I'm pretending not to be there not an all or nothing "show yourself, or you don't get to play multiplayer".

So I don't think Steam is unique in all those areas in all honesty, nor is it necessarily the best - it does some things better than the Xbox, but some things worse. But for what it's worth the reason I mostly play PC is because consoles games are just plain boring nowadays - everything is a Gears of War clone or some equivalent shit and the stories aren't even interesting anymore. It's just an exercise in tedium, and whilst with the 360 we had a nice breadth of games, that just isn't true with the Xbox or PS4 - there's like 2 or 3 flight sims for example whereas last gen there must've been 20+. There's not really any RTS games, whilst last gen there was. That's why I've really just ended up back on PC - just so much more breadth of game choice, and Steam certainly makes that discoverable. I'll be honest, I have Uplay, Blizzard.net, GOG Galaxy, Steam, and Xbox app installed (I still have like 3 years of Xbox game pass so I get a bunch of really good free games on PC there as well as Xbox) but I do use Steam the most despite all the things I don't like about it, and despite the fact I get free shit elsewhere that I end up not touching because of Steam making it easy to forget about the others.

Years ago I'll admit I got knee deep in fanboyism around console wars. Nowadays I just don't care, I just want to play games. If something is a bit shit I'm happy to call it out on whatever platform, and I'd certainly never let some distaste of one platform of another stop me playing a game I want to play like I used to - life is too short for pointless tribalism. Maybe it's because I don't have to worry about the cost of these things anymore, maybe I'm getting old, who knows. I even own a *gasp* MacBook nowadays as well as my PC :)

You know you get those things in every digital store right? Even console digital stores offer you that nowadays.

So is the implication of all that that you probably wouldn't expect a vessel like this to cross the pacific anyway and it's more likely to stick to the coasts of the Americas regardless?

It looks upside down.

In fact, if it capsized and rolled right over it'd a) be a normal boat shape and b) you'd have a cool underwater window. This is definitely a boat I'd want to capsize if I owned it.

This bit is interesting:

"It can travel 3,750 miles before it needs to refuel."

That means it can't cross the Pacific without reverting to diesel engines for a not insignificant portion of the trip. Given as it states itself, the scarcity of refueling stations, it's likely that any trip to the Pacific would see it using diesel for many thousands of miles before reaching a refueling station. I suppose it's better than diesel all the way, but not great; certainly far worse than using sails as someone above hinted at.

"My understanding is that they took the measurements of his mouth/vocal tract and used what would be the "average" tongue for those sizes to create the sound. So while it is likely still off from his actual voice, it should be relatively close."

I'm not sure that's the case, certainly it contradicts what the researcher was saying yesterday. I also can't see anything relating to that in the study itself, though they do say the soft palate at least was estimated (because that was partially preserved):

https://www.nature.com/article...

The subject of creating a fake tongue was touched upon, but there was no suggestion they'd be able to do that or have done that, though they didn't explain why. I'm assuming this could be due to the fact that according to the researchers the mummy's vocal tract was significantly smaller than the modern average male. As such, it's not clear how they could determine what an average tongue size would've been back then without any preserved tongues to base that on; you could make a guess based on the difference in vocal tract size or similar, but that would really be just that, a guess, and that's certainly not scientific, and certainly no guarantee that you're anywhere near replicating this mummy's voice.

Really all they seem to have done is 3D printed an estimated vocal tract and generated sound from it without any of the other aspects that go into generating actual speech.

They did touch on the point about religious chants that this exact person had made being known including the exact sound of the chants, but the interviewer pushed on this too and said how is that possible, to which the guy couldn't give an answer other than something along the lines of "Some historians just tell me so I believe them". All in all it was fairly clear that what they achieved doesn't remotely match up to the sensationalist headlines of having recreated the mummy's voice, which is a shame in a way, because I tend to feel even managing to get the vocal tract sound approximate is valid science in itself; it's just not remotely what they're actually claiming, nor is it in itself particularly newsworthy.

If they stuck to what they'd actually achieved it wouldn't of course make headlines, but here we are again, with a relatively fringe study being blown up to pretend it achieves something more than it does, just to get the team in the headlines, which inevitably is why people don't trust science - because of lies like this.

Yeah, apparently ancient Egyptians sounded identical to Minecraft villagers, who knew?

Yeah, this was on the radio in the car on the way home yesterday, I was listening to the sounds and then the justification. The interviewer to be fair was asking legitimate questions like, how do you know he really sounded like this given none of the flesh is intact? They eventually admitted that the sound they've produced is the sound he'd make now, in his coffin, decomposed, if he could make sounds, so may share no resemblance with the sound the actual person would've made when he had an actual flesh tongue.

As such, it all felt rather fucking pointless. It's certainly not what they're trying to sell it as; a recreation of his actual voice, merely sounds that they've managed to emanate from a reconstruction of his rotten carcass. It's like blowing over the top of a bottle to make that noise you can make with a bottle and claiming you've recreated the voice of the bottle, were it to be a living entity.