The effects clear just as fast.

Not from the research I did in the 1990s.

If you had a knock-down then neurological sequelae are a high (50% +) probability. You had a full suite of neurology tests for damage to peripheral nerves and brain damage afterwards. Didn't you? If not, get onto the medics for your employer's insurance company as soon as possible.

I'd expect you'd have to report such an injury to the local medical and health-&-safety authorities. They should have been insisting on full neurological follow up too.

H2S is really do-not-fuck-with-me stuff. Absolutely, totally, fuck-not-with material.

If there was ever sufficient there to knock you out, even for a second or so, then you came so close to being dead that you should have a coffin made up. It has a horribly well-earned reputation for pooling near ground level, then knocking people down into a pool of more concentrated gas where they then die over the next several breaths. It's not an asphyxiant like most "poisonous" gasses, but it actively gets it's way into every cell of your body and blocks vital parts of the metabolism (oxygen processing in mitochondria). In fact, it is so poisonous that that is one of the few things that helps protect people when they take a hit - it can drown your lungs and shut down your heart before it really gets a chance to destroy your brain. Which isn't much consolation.

I suppose on the good side, from the research work that I did for the trade union some years ago (on chronic exposures to personnel working on oil installations that change from "sweet" to "sour"), there is no substantive evidence of heritable or genetic damage from H2S hits. OTOH, it is unsurprising that the presence of enduring sub-ppm H2S poisoning is probably an abortifacient.

john wayne syndrome with a touch of stupidity (seriously, showed up to a complaint about a woman threatening to kill hersel with a kitchen knife and they shot her dead with 7 shots- because she had a kitchen knife)

And you let these knuckle-draggers walk around with guns? No wonder America is such a fucked-up society.

freely and easily obtainable mental health resources(*) he probably would still be alive today.
* Assuming that such things are actually available.

He was an American living in America. He'd only have had access to such resources through his (or someone else's) wallet.

Knowing only that he was an American, there's only about a 0.6 probability that he had access to health services.

Which is disgusting.

The bacteria theory is more likely, because I remember reading something about bacteria living in trash dumps, and supposedly breaking down plastic.

There was a particular bacterium - I forget the name - which was found in the waste water treatment plant of a nylon-manufacturing plant in the mid-1970s ; due to it's unusual living circumastances it had developed the ability to metabolise the 6-carbon molecules which are the components of nylon, but specifically NOT to metabolise the nylon itself.

Which is a quite remarkable bit of biology - IIRC it came about as the result of an off-by-one reading of the bases in a particular bit of DNA (checking the wikipedia article, there's alternative interpretations of this, but it's years since I read the original papers ; the details of how the mutation came about don't bother me). But it's not going to clean the oceans of our wastes.

I'm not aware of any other reports of "plastic eating bacteria," in particular any bacteria that can actually digest nylon-type plastics (as opposed to the monomers from which they're formed) , or indeed any other classes of plastic, such as the poly-alkene family.

Plastics formulations have changed considerably in the last few decades. The common use of materials such as plant-based celluloses as fillers in many plastic products is changing both the economics of production of "plastic", and is also changing the way those products break down in the environment. Where in the past you'd have centimetre-scale blocks of solid polymer, now you'll find that the grains of bacteria-edible cellulose will get eaten by environmental bacteria within a few years of going out into the environment (basically, getting wet), leading to the disintegration of the bulk body into much smaller particles. They still weigh the same (less, of course, the biodegradable filler), but they're decidedly less noticeable. Which is a cosmetic improvement. But it is a cosmetic improvement, only.

Environmentalism is about saving humans not the earth

Are you sure that the two are separable? While I'd like to think that it's possible for humans to live off the Earth, I'm not absolutely sure that it is possible. (Corrollary : if it is not possible for humans to live, long term, off this planet, then as a species, we're dead.)

Oh, hang on, it's an AC. You're non-existant already.

Mainland Scandanavia ; you're correct. However the Svalbard archipelago (disputed claims by both Russia and norway) is a major breeding centre for polar bears.

There's also some evidence (skull morphology from cave deposits) that the polar bear evolved due to isolation of a population of brown bears on the European Atlantic seaboard during the most recent ice age.

Clearly you've spent enough time in Norway in winter and in Siberia in winter to be able to compare the two and find them indistinguishable.

That's peculiar - because in the winters that I've worked in Norway, it has been very different to the winters when I was courting in Siberia. I sure as hell can tell the difference, even if you can't.

I'd *love* to have a prehensile tail. How many times have you wished for an extra hand?

Have the sensual / sexual implications and possibilities not begun to dawn on you?

And besides I already have two hands, a third grasping appendage with a different set of strengths and weaknesses would add more options.

OK, maybe they have.

Do I feel the need to flag the next thousand adverts I'm sent as being repetitive, sexually explicit and misleading, in alternating sequence? And then look to see if anyone I know has done anything interesting that I didn't know about. Then log out again for another couple of months.

Web 2.0? Yeah. Right.

WTF are you, AC spewing out of your hole?

The Nazis didn't outsource the creation of Enigma to the Americans. They brought it from the Poles (who had already broken it and given the keys to the British). Or something like that.

Speaking as someone who has spent years doing gas analyses in the oil industry (i.e. I have spent a lot of time thinking "that's a lot of flammable material ; if we handle this wrong, I may die."), and who recently had to shave his beard off (5 years of lovely growth) due to poison gas concerns on a well I was drilling offshore (nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide) ...

I'm not particularly happy about "Joe Sixpack, Car Mechanic" working with hydrogen, because it is a bastard for leaks. A thorough-going bastard.

And I'm not terribly ecstatic about a fairly nasty gas like ammonia sitting around by the ton in tanks maintained by Joe Sixpack's brother. (I once broke a carbouy of 880 ammonia solution in water - and had spend hours cleaning the laboratory out ; that is nasty stuff. But it's nowhere near the lethality of my beard-sacrificing gas, H2S.).

And I'm fully aware of the hazards of hydrocarbon fuels too - I get paid to find the damned things.

On balance, if the conversion efficiency were adequate, I suspect an ammonia storage with local (i.e. within the engine block, where Joe Sixpack uses his best tools and concentrates, with the manual in hand) formation of hydrogen for use, either in an IC engine or in a fuel cell, could well be the lowest risk outcome. It certainly bears looking at.

It took me 30 seconds searching to find a couple of dozen papers in this general field of research, by someone called "McElrath". I know that it may seem heretical to you near-7 digiters, but some people use their real names (or in my case, profession) here, and have done for approaching two decades now.

If photons with a frequency in the visible spectrum don't react with "dark matter" than why would photons with a frequency in the x-ray spectrum?

For the same reason that if photons in the red end of the visible spectrum don't interact with this red-transmitting filter, then why would photons at the X-ray end of the visible part of the spectrum?

Wavelength matters to absorption spectra. That's rather what makes them spectra.

109 kg per cubic metre? One tenth the density of water?

I think Bugs Bunny must have been round your post. Eating all the carets.

Snow? Water ice snow?

Ah user ter DREAM of walking through water ice snow. For us it were wading through methane slush, all day every day.