It's not impossible that the two are related (I got stuck in the Heathrow Fiasco for several days. Pain in the arse.), but I'm not aware of any strong evidence to link the two events.

Look up the DDT concentration pyramid

DDT is fat soluble not water soluble, and very slow to break down. Caesium (Cs-137) and Iodine (I-127, IIRC), the main radio-nucleotides released by Chernobyl, are moderately to very water soluble, and have small, (decades) half lives. Which makes bio-accumulation much less of an issue. Not "no issue", but not much of an issue.

The radiation cloud came over ; the rain fell, bringing the fallout with it ; the radio-nucleotides were washed out of the sky and into the soil, and are slowly working through the soil to rivers and streams (delayed by absorption on to plant debris, soil minerals and humic acids). Give it another couple of centuries and there won't be a problem. In Germany.

No planes fell out of the sky, it's true. However a lot of things did happen. Planes were cancelled. Helicopters for access to offshore oil installations were grounded (I was stuck for 9 days like this ; on the last day we got permission to change personnel by boat, and the next day the flying ban was lifted). The small number of appropriate atmospheric monitoring stations did detect appreciable amounts of gas.

The problem was that engine manufacturers hadn't specified levels of airborne ash below which it was considered safe to run their engines, because they hadn't done the appropriate tests, because no one had asked them to document this aspect of their behaviour. So, nobody knew (to the degree that they were willing to risk killing several hundred of their passengers in an experiment) whether or not it was safe to fly. And caution ruled.

Look at what is happening to Malaysian Airlines after two crashes in a few months. One we just don't know what happened ; the other is in no way MA's fault (given normal airline practice at the time). But that's not stopping them from going bust, their staff being laid off, andeveryone suffering.

Do you have the balls (or cunt, if you're anatomically female) to take the risk of destroying your company? Oh, sorry, dumb question ; you're an AC ; of course you don't have the balls (or cunt) to back up your carping.

issue trade embargos on words longer than 10 characters

"Putin" is less than 10 letters long.

From Microsoft's chair, they have no choice but to fight this - how many non-US countries and corporations are going to subscribe to Office365 and other MS-cloud services if it's publicly known that MS will give your information to a foreign government?

I agree with your logic. But NO SANE organisation is going to use a system that requires them to store confidential data in any location other than on their own servers.

Which doesn't preclude there being many insane, or foolish, or bamboozled, organisations out there.

I recall that Google did a line of "Google-in-a-box" servers a while ago that would plug into your (intra-)network and would go off to index it (configurable), but keep the index physically in your data centre. I wouldn't be surprised if Micro$loth had done something similar with Orifice365 - a local server which your (intra-)net users log into, but might get patches etc from a MS server on a configurable schedule.

Cough syrup on the other hand did diddly squat.

IT worked perfectly, you mean?

cough syrup is meant to do diddly squat. It's a placebo. It comes in bottles, can taste nasty or horrible, and is a bright colour . All perfect placebo packaging. Possibly a very slight dose of topical painkiller for the throat, but otherwise, diddly squat.

Or get bitten by.

Or get tissue (including blood) into a wound on the human, when skinning / gutting / butchering a carcass killed for meat.

OTOH, it could be that the mortality rate is within the expected bounds (1 in 2 to 3 in 4 ) and that a lot of people are getting infected and dieing away from the areas that the forces of the state can get to, to count the living and the dead.

When the human testing starts, should it be old people first? afftected-continent people first? family-receives-high-payment people first?

Trolls first.

I think they should be volunteers at the very least.

Your application as a volunteer has been accepted. Your Ebola infection should shortly be delivered and the drugs (or placebo ; not your choice which you get) will be delivered in 10 days time, by when you should have started to develop symptoms. Please take it to a nearby clinic and pay someone to inject you. Your anonymity will, of course, be protected by us, though we cannot speak for every other person you meet, including the taxi driver who takes you to the clinic.

Go back and re-read my post. I only mention a dark sky as a sideline.

You can have a sky utterly devoid of light pollution and iit still be utterly useless for astronomy by dint of driving rain or scudding cloud, even withut the precipitation. With around 2/3 of nights unusable, that is the main reason that I shipped my telescope off to my sister's country guest house. On those rare occasions that it does get used, it`s much better there than in my home town. But that`s still only a few nights a year that it gets used.

Going back to the original question - what is the most effective use for getting kids interested in astronomy (or whatever the Q was - I can't remember now) - then choosing your time and place is going to be important. Making a big build up and then being washed out by the rain (or snow, or in high summer, fog) is going to be more effective dampener than taking an opportunity of good conditions and using it there and then.

"Civlisation - I buy it with my taxes!" Or some failry similar quote. There used to bwe a regular on here who used it in his signature. I can't remember if it was a Robert Heinlein or Thomas Paine quote, but it was someone who you wouldn't normally expect such thoughts from.

A giant pot of natural resources at 11LY is very exciting for colonials!

If only Nature hadn't put it at the bottom of a 5.4 Earth-mass gravity hole. that's almost as malicious as your average god.

There's a good chance that your fingers (or more likely, your carpal tunnels in your wrists) will wear out before the first spare model-M keyboard.

OTOH, finding a computer you can use the model-M on in another decade may be harder.

Use lots of smaller poles and make it really roll like a cylinder.

You'd get into a law of diminishing returns in rolling resistance compared to the complexity of the modification. You could probably turn the octagonal section of the modified (cuboid) block into a dodecagonal section by using rods of two or three different diameters and lashed into (their term) "mats" before being lashed onto the block. But whether it would be as stable, is one very open question ; whether it would be as strong under cornering (which would preferentially load the thinnest rods in the "mat") as the octagonal-section / dodecahedral-enveloped system that is proposed here.

Hmmm, I'm trying to remember my crystallographic space groups. Dodecahedra are in the same space group (class) as cubes (it's the secondary axes of 3-fold rotational symmetry that matter), so by choosing the arrangement of rods in the mat you should be able to make the envelope into a true (Platonic) dodecahedron envelope. Contrary to the paper's illustration, you'd need to attach three trios of "rods" to the three pairs of faces so that the ends of the rods protrude over the faces of the (cubic) core. And you'd need two different lengths of rods, to round off the corners. And I'm falling into exactly the same "diminishing returns" trap that I'm pointing out under your feet.

There's some interesting geometry there. And since I'm sharing an office with a lifting-slinging-hoisting-crane operations instructor, I think I'll shove that paper under his nose because he likes fiddling with scraps of rope (a "marlinspike seaman" as they were called in my youth), and I think he'll be interested.

It's an interesting idea. But it does clearly contradict the evidence of the contemporary records, which is a BIG strike against it being true.

Substituting EVD (Ebola Virus Disease) for HIV/ SIV, and bats for primates ... and you've got a good description of the probable source mechanism of the current Ebola outbreaks in West and Central Africa.

Incidentally, "improper animal handling procedures resulting in blood-to-blood contact" may include chopping up an infected animal for dinner (as most people envisage it), or digging bits of splattered bat out of the radiator of your car or from your clothing after the bat has become road kill. Which is certainly what worries us and our medical advisers as we travel near to infected areas.