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christmas boots posted:Name one thing linguists have accomplished since then. Go ahead, take your time. I'll just wait around by these definitely stationary goalposts Linguists have gotten a lot more cunning since then.
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May 15, 2019 01:19
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jobson groeth posted:Linguists have gotten a lot more cunning since then. Fair enough. Point conceded.
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May 15, 2019 01:27
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christmas boots posted:Name one thing linguists have accomplished since then. Go ahead, take your time. I'll just wait around by these definitely stationary goalposts Deciphered Linear B
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May 15, 2019 02:05
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They created the Klingon language. Also probably Dothraki.
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May 15, 2019 02:11
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Phy posted:Atomic Accidents is great horror nonfiction. It's written by a guy who was a nuclear power researcher, and when he covers Chernobyl, he makes the case that pretty much every decision that could have been made, from the design of the plant, to its control scheme, its staffing and hierarchy and their training, to the test protocol that led to the meltdown - every decision made was a bad one that an idiot would do, and that if anyone with an ounce of sense in their head had made even one choice the other way, Chernobyl wouldn't have been as bad as it was. Definitely read that book. And definitely watch the HBO show. I haven't watched the second episode yet but the first was amazing and terrifying. Actually the really terrifying thing wasn't even the radiation, it was the response of pure denial. "The core's gone." "Don't be an idiot, an RBMK reactor can't explode." "The dosimeters are reading 3.6 roentgen/hour, but that's their maximum reading." "Hrm, 3.6 R/hr? That's not great but it's not terrible. Obviously this is a minor feedwater leak." "Uh..we found another dosimeter that goes up to 200 R/hr." "What's it reading?" "200 R/hr." "Don't be a loving idiot, how do you get 200 R/hr out of a minor feedwater leak?" "There are chunks of graphite laying around outside. I saw them with my own eyes." "You didn't see graphite!" "Dude, there are firefighters with skin burns puking their guts up laying around outside." "Socialism will prevail!" You know this Bloom County cartoon?  That's a joke, sort of, but not really. Chernobyl started because they were running a test of what would happen in the event of a worst-case scenario, because they wanted to see if the rotors in the generator had enough momentum to keep generating electrical power to long enough to keep the coolant pumps running until the backup diesel generators could power up. To start this test, they deliberately had a button installed that would: 1. Shut down the flow of steam to the turbine to simulate an emergency shutdown (which means that all the heat in the steam that would be flowing into the turbine instead stays in the core, so the core heats up). 2. Disables the Emergency Core Cooling System (which would just dump a big amount of water on the core in the event of an actual emergency; since this was just a test, they were concerned that dumping a big amount of cold water on the hot core could damage it, so they...decided to turn it off). 3. And oh by the way prevents the diesel backup generators from starting, because if they started up and started generating power it would interfere with them from learning what they wanted to learn from the test: how long the coasting-down turbines could keep generating electricity. So they actually *installed the lever* portrayed in the comic. And then they pulled it. Chernobyl was an inherently incredibly dangerous design being operated and managed by people who were utterly incompetent to do so. And it still killed way fewer people than coal power does each and every year. M_Sinistrari posted:After the atomics class and History of Science class I took, absolutely nothing could surprise me. After all, when they were working on the bomb out here by me during the war, they had someone just driving with some uranium in a box in the front seat of his car like it was no big deal. Well, that is no big deal. Airliners use depleted uranium as control-surface counterweights because it's so dense. They also used a chunk of pure gold as a doorstop. But no, nothing going on at Chernobyl would surprise me more than, say, control rods that actually increase the reactivity of the core for at least few seconds as you insert them. Phanatic has a new favorite as of 02:31 on May 15, 2019 |
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May 15, 2019 02:25
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Phanatic posted:"Socialism will prevail!"  Yes, this is definitely the lesson they are trying to get across. Fake edit: just saw it was Phanatic lmao
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May 15, 2019 02:38
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Solice Kirsk posted:They created the Klingon language. Also probably Dothraki. Ah, some culture at last!
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May 15, 2019 02:45
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packetmantis posted:
Dude, that's a scene directly from the show. Here, I'll quote directly: quote:Petrovich (guy on the Pripyat Executive Committee): You saw men, outside, vomiting. You saw men with burns. There's more radiation than they're saying. We have wives here, we have children. I say we evacuate the town. That's verbatim. Tell me, do you think I misrepresented this in my earlier post? Do you *not* think this is "definitely the lesson they were trying to get across"? You need to work on your epistemology.
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May 15, 2019 02:55
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I had to google epistemology because I thought it had something to do with disease and was very confused.
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May 15, 2019 03:25
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Phy posted:Atomic Accidents is great horror nonfiction. It's written by a guy who was a nuclear power researcher, and when he covers Chernobyl, he makes the case that pretty much every decision that could have been made, from the design of the plant, to its control scheme, its staffing and hierarchy and their training, to the test protocol that led to the meltdown - every decision made was a bad one that an idiot would do, and that if anyone with an ounce of sense in their head had made even one choice the other way, Chernobyl wouldn't have been as bad as it was. The actual actions taken on the day of go past simple stupidity and enter the realm of 'sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice". If you got a highly paid team of nuclear engineers and told them to make the plant blow up they literally could not have done a better job of it.
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May 15, 2019 03:43
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christmas boots posted:Name one thing linguists have accomplished since then. Go ahead, take your time. I'll just wait around by these definitely stationary goalposts The Lord of the Rings.
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May 15, 2019 12:38
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christmas boots posted:Name one thing linguists have accomplished since then. Go ahead, take your time. I'll just wait around by these definitely stationary goalposts One wrote a really dull fantasy epic. E: gently caress Pvt.Scott has a new favorite as of 13:09 on May 15, 2019 |
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May 15, 2019 13:06
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Azathoth posted:There was some video of a nitrogen compound that they got to violently combust by slightly moving the paper(?) it was sitting on. The explanation was it was so unstable that the friction of some pieces of it moving when the paper was disturbed was enough to cause a chain reaction. I wanna say that Lowe wrote about a guy who made something that would blow up when hit by light
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May 15, 2019 13:17
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aphid_licker posted:I wanna say that Lowe wrote about a guy who made something that would blow up when hit by light Azidoazide azide. Kept blowing up when they shined infrared light on it for Raman spectroscopy. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/01/09/things_i_wont_work_with_azidoazide_azides_more_or_less
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May 15, 2019 13:26
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If memory serves that's the chemical that was literally impossible to keep from exploding. It just hates existing. You put it in a perfectly climate controlled container with nothing else to possibly set it off then ignore it and it goes "gently caress you I'm exploding anyway."
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May 15, 2019 15:21
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May 15, 2019 16:13
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showbiz_liz posted:There's a chemist named Derek Lowe who used to write a great column called Things I Won't Work With, spotlighting various terribly dangerous or volatile or smelly chemicals. This discussion reminded me of a post of his where he excerpts a paragraph from a book on the history of rocket fuel science, which was apparently not much more responsibly handled than nuclear science in its infancy: All of this and more is covered in this excellent thread that used to be titled "Things that go FOOF in the night": https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3602006
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May 15, 2019 16:15
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kanonvandekempen posted:Something strange is unfolding in Germany right now So, it turns out that the man was a cult leader and the women were members (/victims). The cult was some kind of sex circle based on medieval times and he dominated the women physically and psychologically. He owned a shop selling medieval replica weapons and offered courses in sword fighting. They haven't figured out how the whole murder/suicide thing with crossbow went down yet though. https://www.rtl.de/cms/armbrust-drama-mit-fuenf-toten-was-wir-wissen-und-was-nicht-4339582.html
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May 15, 2019 16:50
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Any good books or long form articles about creepy medical stuff? I really enjoyed 83 days.
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May 15, 2019 16:50
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subpar anachronism posted:Any good books or long form articles about creepy medical stuff? I really enjoyed 83 days. You might enjoy reading about harlequin ichthyosis. It's extremely 
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May 15, 2019 17:30
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subpar anachronism posted:Any good books or long form articles about creepy medical stuff? I really enjoyed 83 days. Oh gently caress dude. Richard Preston's An Error In The Code, about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a chromosomal disorder that gives you crippling gout and also compels you to eat your own face.
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May 15, 2019 17:31
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subpar anachronism posted:Any good books or long form articles about creepy medical stuff? I really enjoyed 83 days. You've probably read this one already, but Hot Zone's about the first appearances of Ebola. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007DCU4IQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
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May 15, 2019 18:14
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Pvt.Scott posted:Any quick examples of the sorts of shenanigans that got left out of the Chernobyl miniseries for being too unbelievable? I can only imagine someone using a chunk of depleted uranium as a doorstop to prop open a door that should be sealed at all times. On the companion podcast, the showrunner described this story he thought was too unbelievable for the miniseries: Right after the explosion, Plant worker A was helping Plant Worker B out of a damaged area. Worker B was having trouble walking and so A had B's arm over his shoulder. After Worker A and B got to a hospital, Worker A found a red radiation burn on his back in the shape of a palm. Worker B had been exposed to so much radiation, his own hand was radioactive enough to cause burns on Worker A.
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May 15, 2019 18:18
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subpar anachronism posted:Any good books or long form articles about creepy medical stuff? I really enjoyed 83 days. Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague. Came out the same year as the Hot Zone but isn't anywhere near as overly sensationalistic.
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May 15, 2019 18:32
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subpar anachronism posted:Any good books or long form articles about creepy medical stuff? I really enjoyed 83 days. The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, by D. T. Max My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully
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May 15, 2019 20:10
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Winklebottom posted:The cult was some kind of sex circle based on medieval times
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May 15, 2019 20:35
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theflyingorc posted:I know you mean the period of history, but I'd love a cult based on popular Dinner-and-a-show restaurant Medieval Times There were no vibrators in medieval times, so there are no vibrators at Medieval Times.
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May 15, 2019 20:39
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M_Sinistrari posted:You've probably read this one already, but Hot Zone's about the first appearances of Ebola. There's a mini series coming out this month https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4131818/episodes?season=1&ref_=tt_eps_sn_1
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May 15, 2019 21:03
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theflyingorc posted:I know you mean the period of history, but I'd love a cult based on popular Dinner-and-a-show restaurant Medieval Times Be the change you wish to see in the world
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May 15, 2019 21:26
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Medieval Grinds
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May 15, 2019 21:33
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theflyingorc posted:I know you mean the period of history, but I'd love a cult based on popular Dinner-and-a-show restaurant Medieval Times
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May 15, 2019 21:54
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well, if you look at the contents of this USB drive someone left at a medieval times...
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May 15, 2019 22:01
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:well, if you look at the contents of this USB drive someone left at a medieval times... 
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May 16, 2019 00:26
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Winklebottom posted:So, it turns out that the man was a cult leader and the women were members (/victims). The cult was some kind of sex circle based on medieval times and he dominated the women physically and psychologically. He owned a shop selling medieval replica weapons and offered courses in sword fighting. Gee it's almost like all men into this poo poo are hosed up weirdoes.
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May 16, 2019 03:36
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Phy posted:Oh gently caress dude. Richard Preston's An Error In The Code, about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a chromosomal disorder that gives you crippling gout and also compels you to eat your own face. That's beyond horrifying. I've had dreams where it feels like I have extreme OCD or something and am consistently about to injure myself accidentally/unable to stop myself from hurting myself and I always wondered how insanely terrifying/frustrating/exhausting it has to be to put up with that at an almost constant rate. It's kind of nice to see the people with the disorder specifically mentioned there seemed pleasant and able to live lives that weren't totally crushing to them and that the one Japanese kid was doing well with the brain stimulation implant though.
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May 16, 2019 03:41
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Phy posted:Oh gently caress dude. Richard Preston's An Error In The Code, about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a chromosomal disorder that gives you crippling gout and also compels you to eat your own face. quote:One boy, known as J.J., ended up living in Nyhan’s research unit for a year, when he was eleven. He was a gregarious child, whose hands seemed to hate him. Over time, his fingers had got inside his mouth and nose and had broken out and removed the bones of his upper palate and parts of his sinuses, leaving a cavern in his face. aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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May 16, 2019 11:25
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Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, about patients who went into static, motionless, emotionless states during the 1920s encephalitis lethargica syndrome and stayed there for decades. In 1960, Sacks started treating those patients with the newly-discovered L-Dopa. At first they were overjoyed; then they had problems with having gone into the hospital and waking up 40 years older in a new culture. Then, for some of them, L-Dopa stopped working and they drifted back to sleep.
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May 16, 2019 16:27
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Aesop Poprock posted:That's beyond horrifying. I've had dreams where it feels like I have extreme OCD or something and am consistently about to injure myself accidentally/unable to stop myself from hurting myself and I always wondered how insanely terrifying/frustrating/exhausting it has to be to put up with that at an almost constant rate. It's kind of nice to see the people with the disorder specifically mentioned there seemed pleasant and able to live lives that weren't totally crushing to them and that the one Japanese kid was doing well with the brain stimulation implant though.
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May 16, 2019 16:34
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if you “enjoyed” that article on Lesch-Nyhan or The Hot Zone, Richard Preston also wrote a fictional thriller called The Cobra Event, about an altered version of L-N being used as a biological weapon. haven’t read it in years so it might suck but I recall it being more enjoyable than the average pulp at least! ^^ ah fuckkk gotta check that one out
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May 16, 2019 16:34
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, about patients who went into static, motionless, emotionless states during the 1920s encephalitis lethargica syndrome and stayed there for decades. In 1960, Sacks started treating those patients with the newly-discovered L-Dopa. At first they were overjoyed; then they had problems with having gone into the hospital and waking up 40 years older in a new culture. Then, for some of them, L-Dopa stopped working and they drifted back to sleep. It plays a big part in the Sandman comic series too. A lot of characters are struck by it but in the story it's because Dream is locked away for decades in a magical prison 
Aesop Poprock has a new favorite as of 17:27 on May 16, 2019 |
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May 16, 2019 17:25
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