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Comment Re:A simpler cure (Score 4, Insightful) 240

Yes please, I will have it with milk before I lay my head down for unclouded dreams of delight.

95% of all food/environment-related health research misses the elephant in the room; the hard to quantify effects of personal stress. This study shows that stress, by variation to routine, kills people. My remarks were there to illustrate that sleep cycles driven by routine are unnatural because we make them so.

It's always galling when the media focus on rich, busy people, on how stressful their lives are, It's the poor bastards at the bottom who are most stressed and have the worst health outcomes. Any research that draws attention to this is to be welcomed.

Comment Re:A simpler cure (Score 1) 240

I pretty much can fall asleep when I like, within boundaries. Normally it's off to bed at 2300, awake at 0700. But I can go to bed tonight at 2100, knowing I'll fall asleep in no more than 30 minutes and my body will wake me up at 0530.

But then except for a trains and planes, I haven't used an alarm clock in over 5 years.

Comment Re:Without her permission? (Score 1) 367

Is there some new [to the law] concept of private here?

When we 'put something on the Internet', why don't you have an expectation of privacy? I'm not talking about usenet/blogs, etc, but in email. That's on the internet. Of course, you say, but that's different. Can putting a comment on Facebook not be thought of as just a wider email- it's addressed to a fixed number of individuals. No-one outside of my circle can access it with my permission, just like if I sent it. If I wrote a letter to a friend saying I didn't think that person x was doing a good job and my friend took that letter and photocopied it and passed it around, I don't think I'd be liable for any slanderous proceedings (IANAL though).

Facebook posts are not the action of publishing. There is, or should be, a very cogent difference in intent.

Comment Re:BBC's standard (Score 1) 171

Eh? Patrick Moore may have held views that were certainly more UKIP than Labour, however describing him as a "far-right Nazi" (Head of the SS-type far-right Nazi?) is just nuts. I wouldn't have agreed with much of his politics, but just as Labour voters aren't communists, UKIP voters aren't fascists (and personally, I'd like to see Labour be a lot more socialist).

I always thought of Moore as being a complex human-being. His views on 'foreigners' were forged in WWII and he, and any of his generation, should be forgiven. War deeply changes people. I certainly take Voltaire's view on his opinions.

I wonder what you'd say about my neighbour, George, who my son interviewed for a project on D-Day? George was on Gold Beach on June 6th 1944 and his first words were "I've tortured so many people". He then described the living hell of the Falaise Pocket in a way that there's now one ten year-old who'd never join the army. He's lived his life quietly, but he's never forgot the smell, miles down-wind of Belsen. You won't find him driving a VW.

Moore's alleged misogyny was odd, it came not from the women who worked with him (I read many defences and not a single "J'accuse" from his female colleagues), but from his own views that the (his?) world should be a Boys-Own club. Also, and rarely, 'Never Married' apparently meant just that, not that he actually cruised the public toilets of the world.

RIP.

Comment Re:Privacy as a sport (Score 1) 379

But this isn't tapping phones as we know it. Did the govt used to open all letters, read and copy them? Did it have thousands of wax cylinders running to record all phones, or have operators employed by the hundreds of thousands to make notes on all conversations?

These mass surveillance campaigns have actually been technically possible for a hundred years, but yet, they haven't "always" been doing it.

Comment Re:For me... (Score 1) 330

Never understood why people don't celebrate more as they're getting older. It's a race we all retire from at some stage, better to be increasingly glad.

Unless being born on 4th July is like having your birthday on Christmas or New Year's Eve?

Comment Re:Independence (Score 1) 330

This act was as amazing chutzpah as when the Chinese jet and the American SIGINTS spy plane collided 12 or so years ago. Can you imagine what the US would do/feel/sulk if the Chinese were flying the same missions over 'international waters', but this time from Cuba and up the eastern seaboard ?

It will come now.

Comment Re:Seems fishy (Score 4, Insightful) 262

And people swallow that 'unlawful combatant' nonsense? Didn't they have the right paperwork? Forgot to get their forms signed by the right people? Or just weren't ready to stand out in the open and be simply blown away by a military that is 100% better equipped than all the other militaries in the world, combined?

Phrases like 'unlawful combatant' are the true banality of evil.

Comment Re:Video of the actual explosion (Score 2) 1105

Moderate-sized explosions in an area packed with people. Very early to speculate, but 'Homemade IEDs' are what the police are saying.

I'm totally speculating here, but this looks like 'domestic' (i.e., US and amateur) terrorists. Foreign governments like their explosives to be high and their targets to be internationally recognised. However, for the people who lost, lives, limbs or loved-ones, this won't be of any consolation. Our thoughts are with them all.

Comment Re:Magic Gulf stream (Score 3, Informative) 422

Here in NW Europe, we're being told we're kept warm in the winter by the "warm waters of the Gulf Stream". Unfortunately, we don't literally bathe in those waters. Heat is transported by SW winds that blow across them, picking up moisture which is then rained out over us and releasing latent heat.

This unseasonably weather is nothing to do with the Gulf stream weakening, it's simply the winds are blowing in the opposite direction (from the cold, dry land). Why they are prolonged is to do with the jet stream position's much further to the south. The mid-latitude jet's a product of the atmosphere's thermal gradient (and some orographically introduced wobbles) and its odd, prolonged position could quite conceivably be to do with Arctic sea ice loss.

Comment Re:It might be true but (Score 1) 325

In what could have been an awful piece of television, 6 European and 6 Japanese bankers in the City of London were sat down in a bar and given beer. After only 2 glasses, 4 of the 6 Japanese were bright red and visibly uncomfortable. One of the two exceptions was a noticeably small woman who polished-off half a dozen without problems. None of the Europeans were similarly affected.

The premise (which is widely accepted in Europe) is that beer and wine gave clean drinking water. If you reacted badly to it, good ol' Evolution found its path through unsanitised water. In the East, the drink was tea, so the tolerance of alcohol is not an innate part of the population.

Hell, beer WAS food for many generations. It is only very recently that food became cheap in the modern world. Before decent nutrition, beer was a way for manual labourers to get cheap calories quickly. We're talking up to the 1960s here, not just the 1690s.

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