Where Boeing sold surplus parts and equipment including entire landing gear assemblies

Why on earth are they making surplus landing gear assemblies?

Or does that mean ... that you can belly-flop a plane and have the fuselage in good enough condition to be worthwhile fitting new landing gear to. I find that idea rather scary.

I don't know about your country, but in this one a person who has epilepsy which is prone to be triggered in day-to-day life normally loses their driving license.

I think that it may actually be a recordable illness - i.e. if a doctor diagnoses the appropriate disease, then they're obliged to inform the DVLA (Driver & Vehicle Licensing Authority) of the diagnosis. (Obviously the patient isn't required to inform the doctor of whether or not they have a driving license - that's not relevant to medical treatment.)

In the agreement between you and the state about getting your license to drive (it is NOT a human right), you agree to inform the DVLA of any relevant medical conditions. So even if you cover up the disease from the DVLA, then you're still driving in violation of the terms of your license, and therefore have no license. And so your insurance is also invalid. So that makes two criminal counts against you already. and another two counts every time you drive. Not a good idea.

There are ways of getting your license back - a friend in that condition (trauma-induced fits after a motorcycle crash) got his license back after IIRC two years without a fit, and the consultant's opinion that chances of recurrence were negligible. Other people don't bother - Mum never asked for her license back after her illness. But as she was pushing 50 when she learned to drive, it was hardly an issue.

Where's the undo button?

It's between your ears, above the access to the "Send" button.

There is this process called "reading", whereby you optically process the information on the screen (or even slices of dead tree) in front of you, perform OCR upon it (moving your lips while doing OCR has been optional for bit over a millennium), check the information in the message, and then only pick up your mouse and position the cursor over the "Send" button.

Surprisingly, many lawyers have at least a basic familiarity with this process. But it's not exactly a trade secret.

Slashdot offer a similar error-checking option near their "Submit button. So I'd better use it.

Are you suggesting that people selling books would stoop to planting white hair from a polar bear and claiming they saw a Yeti nearby?

I wouldn't put it past some of the "participants" (to be excessively polite) in cryptozoology to do just that.

The neat trick would be finding polar bear hair that matches the DNA from a polar bear mandible of some 100,000 years age, found in permafrost in Svalbard. Which is what the actual DNA match was.

(Caveats : the polar bear mandible was estimated at greater than 45kyr on basis of radiometric dating ; the 100,000 years is a coarser estimate from local landforms. There are probably some honest people in cryptozoology, but identifying them through the charlatans is tricky.)

Hmmm, interesting.

If I hadn't come across ("fnarr, fnarr") pole vaulting as a comparison, then I might have lit upon shooting ("fnarr, fnarr"), if only because a friend's daughter was a serious competitor for a place on the national biathlon team on that winter sports thingy recently (the thing with the logo of rings ; sorry, not a very sporty person myself). (That's cross-country skiing and target shooting, for those that don't know or have forgotten already.)

But yeah - good example with no obvious reasons for gender segregation, but the segregation persists.

Another random piece of data that floats in my mental files is that many of the biggest salmon hooked in Scottish rivers have been caught by women. And that is really confusing, particularly for the patriarchs.

I chose to use pole vaulting as an example, and yes the innuendo potential did not escape me.

Oh no - they (the IeSF) want to change the status quo. In favour of their (or their corporate overlords') wallets, of course.

But it's more akin to playing an instrument than participating a sport.

If I had a spare pair of ear defenders (or two), I'd head up the road to the local highland games (I think it's Braemar this weekend, but I'm not sure) and ask the competitors in the bagpipes competition if they're more or less sportsmen than the caber-tossers.

Can I use your name when I ask?

Pron is a sport? Sorry, "spurt."

How long have the sherpas been up there carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers?

The Sherpas have been carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers since the early 1930s - say 3 generations. For the preceding 30-odd generations (and maybe considerably more) they've been living in the same regions carrying loads of fabrics and foodstuffs over the Himalayan ranges from the plains of India into Tibet during the early summer (after the winter snows melted), and then returning to the plains of India with loads of salt from the interior high-altitude deserts of Tibet to sell in India.

Oh, sorry, did I relieve your ignorance of the economies of interior Asia for the last (several) thousand years? My apologies - I'll let you continue in the dark in future.

It's not difficult to find these things out.

The target of my research (literature search only) was, as you say, chronic exposures. Specifically, a considerable number of oil production installations which were designed 20 years previously for "sweet" hydrocarbons (no H2S) have since had their fluids turn sour (probably by downhole bacterial decomposition of sulphate in injected seawater), resulting in embrittlement of high-pressure pipelines and plant (one set of problems) and also consistently detectable (though still sub-ppm, probably ; this is a problem since most industrial calibration samples are at 1, 5 or 10 ppm) H2S in the accommodation atmosphere. As you say, this is an under-researched area, due to H2S's well earned reputation as an acute killer.

You say "the human body has enzymes that break it down harmlessly (it is present in small amounts in the body normally). As long as those enzymes aren't overwhelmed" ; yes, the human body has enzymes that can process H2S, "as long as they're not overwhelmed." Problem is, that overwhelming happens many times that the enzyme molecule encounters a hydrosulphide ion, leaving the cytochrome enzyme literally plugged and resulting in a back-up of un-processed hydroxide free radicals. If that sounds like good news to you, then we've got different understandings of "good news". That said, though there has been some work done looking for post-exposure (to H2S) cancers and other sequels to the oxidative damage, with no strong effect noticed. (Caveat : vintage mid-1990s, and this is an under-researched area.)

This happened 30 years ago. If there was going to be a problem, it would have shown by now.

There are programmes following up people after such periods, though mostly (AFAICT) in the paper pulp industry. The exposure of some hundred thousand of people in Edmonton to several ppm for several days after a blowout ... sorry, I've forgotten the location ; about 1981, some hundred kilometres upwind from Edmonton ... Lodgepole blowout ... has produced a considerable cohort for a longitudinal study. Getting funding to actually perform such studies seems to have been difficult - probably because it would be politically inconvenient, and partly because - well, everyone knows that H2S is do-not-fuck-with stuff, so to stop fucking with it seems a pretty good start to management.

used in trauma to induce a deep hibernation like state

Yeah, I saw those reports. And I thought that sounded like pogo-sticking across really thin ice above a pool of hungry sharks. With lasers on their heads. I do understand the mechanisms they're proposing for preventing apoptosis (well, IANA metabolism researcher ; but I've forgotten more biochemistry and chemistry than most people), but that really doesn't encourage me to be on the receiving end of such treatments. I'd rather plan to avoid such injuries instead.

On a complete aside, I just discovered New Zealand's favourite part of Central Europe : Bad Aussee.

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.