namesake posted:

I prefer the laymans term for it; the straight line make-go-faster.

Pork Pie Hat posted:

I know that NHS staff don't generally get into technical names of the equipment that they're going to use on you, but a linear accelerator sounds so sci-fi and amazing that were I ever in a situation that I needed that treatment, I hope they would tell me.

Are you bombarded by a linear accelerator? That sounds even better.

kingturnip posted:

As a healthcare professional, whenever I read in someone's notes that they (or their parents) have done research on their difficulties online, my heart sinks.
Because you just know that they've skipped over NHS Choices and gone straight for the US websites run by parents of indigo babies or some poo poo.

namesake posted:

I prefer the laymans term for it; the straight line make-go-faster.

Pork Pie Hat posted:

I know that NHS staff don't generally get into technical names of the equipment that they're going to use on you, but a linear accelerator sounds so sci-fi and amazing that were I ever in a situation that I needed that treatment, I hope they would tell me.

Are you bombarded by a linear accelerator? That sounds even better.

baka kaba posted:

Layman's term? I thought this was the professional BBC Science Correspondent term. Research boffins have come up with a gizmo that converts :quote:particles:quote: into a new form of energy


If someone told me I needed something with a name like 'Gammaknife' I'd get pretty drat worried, sounds like the 21st century equivalent of a medicine show. Yes you'll be undergoing surgery with the Cinco Gammatronix 5000 with Turbo-X, it's very impressive it has chrome and everything

baka kaba posted:

If someone told me I needed something with a name like 'Gammaknife' I'd get pretty drat worried, sounds like the 21st century equivalent of a medicine show. Yes you'll be undergoing surgery with the Cinco Gammatronix 5000 with Turbo-X, it's very impressive it has chrome and everything

notaspy posted:

Does it go 'ping'?

HortonNash posted:

If anyone offers you GammaKnife, ask for a second opinion at another big teaching hospital.

But if you want whizz bang medical gadgets they don't come much whizzier than Da Vinci Robotic surgery. They're doing prostate ops at some NHS hospitals with this kit now and I reckon the uses will only increase over time. Looks like one of the droids from the Jawa sand crawler scene in Star Wars.

tooterfish posted:

Much as I think South Yorkshire Police deserve all the mounds of poo poo piling on them on the moment, Saville was a wessie, so unless I'm mistaken he probably didn't fall under their remit.

Wasn't it West Yorkshire Police's job for that particular cover up? Gotta respect the proper jurisdiction.

baka kaba posted:

If someone told me I needed something with a name like 'Gammaknife' I'd get pretty drat worried, sounds like the 21st century equivalent of a medicine show.

HorseLord posted:

You heard it here first, thatcher made every boy in the 80s autistic.

Barudak posted:

Just worked on something involving them and I'd say they make me as comfortable as the red Droid Luke chooses first.

HortonNash posted:

If anyone offers you GammaKnife, ask for a second opinion at another big teaching hospital.

But if you want whizz bang medical gadgets they don't come much whizzier than Da Vinci Robotic surgery. They're doing prostate ops at some NHS hospitals with this kit now and I reckon the uses will only increase over time. Looks like one of the droids from the Jawa sand crawler scene in Star Wars.

glitchkrieg posted:

To me it sounds like the kind of knife that has the same strength as a normal knife but does D4 wounds per hit instead of 1.

Kegluneq posted:

I must have missed a passion for coding becoming the absolute defining trait of all 35-50 year old men in the UK.

OTOH every bio I've read of bedroom coders has them beginning with games and tweaking the code of established products (admittedly these are often the bios of games developers). If you're just talking about treating coding as a simple mathematical or linguistic exercise then you're hardly going to engage the minds of an entire generation. There's only so much fun you could squeeze out of floor robots (or in my case at school, greenhouse controls).

quote:

If you were learning to code aged 10 for the sheer joy of coding alone, you're probably autistic.

glitchkrieg posted:

To me it sounds like the kind of knife that has the same strength as a normal knife but does D4 wounds per hit instead of 1.

Gonzo McFee posted:

Gonzo McFee posted:

Pork Pie Hat posted:

But just think of all his philanthropy to the arms industry! I assume they were the people that did the voting?

quote:

Britain’s economy has been much stronger since 2008 than previously thought, the Office for National Statistics revealed on Wednesday as it tore up the previous official version of events.
With a shallower recession in 2008-09 and more rapid recovery since, Britain’s overall performance compares favourably with other G7 countries and eliminates a significant element of the recent concern over weak productivity.

...

The ONS is introducing once-in-a generation changes to the national accounts, which include the headline gross domestic product measure, later this month and is in the middle of drip-feeding the results of its work to improve the national accounts.
In Wednesday’s publication, the statistical office published revised real and nominal GDP for 2010 to 2012 and a historical series back to 1997. The revisions reflect a combination of changes the ONS was compelled to introduce to bring the UK’s national accounts into line with new international standards, new estimates of the contributions of the charitable sector, the sex industry and illegal drugs and the annual process of looking at all the information about more recent years and considering again the likely growth of the economy.
In each of the three years between 2010 and 2012, real GDP growth was revised higher, increasing the growth rate over these three years by more than 1 per cent.

Guavanaut posted:

They also gave Erwin Rommel an award for "style in the face of true adversity" in 1999, so it's not the first time they've heaped praise on war criminals.

Guavanaut posted:

They also gave Erwin Rommel an award for "style in the face of true adversity" in 1999, so it's not the first time they've heaped praise on war criminals.

Zephro posted:

Er, why does including pot and hookers change the relative performance of the economy? It doesn't seem obvious from first principles. If the economy is 10% bigger when you add pot and hookers then it will have been 10% bigger every year, so the depth and duration of the recession won't change.

It's hard to tell from that piece, but if you selectively add pot and hookers to only the most recent years then of course things will look better, because you're pretending there were no hookers and no pot ten or fifteen years ago.

edit: unless the pot and hookers industries grow faster than the economy in general, which seems unlikely.

Zephro posted:

Er, why does including pot and hookers change the relative performance of the economy? It doesn't seem obvious from first principles. If the economy is 10% bigger when you add pot and hookers then it will have been 10% bigger every year, so the depth and duration of the recession won't change.

quote:

The main categories of improvements to be implemented in Blue Book 2014 are:
1. changes required under new international standards and guidelines: European System of Accounts 2010 (ESA 2010); Balance of Payments Manual 6 (BPM6)1 ; the updated Manual on Government Deficit and Debt (MGDD),
2. changes from ensuring comparability in measuring Gross National Income (GNI) across European Union (EU) countries, and
3. other changes to meet user needs, including implementing the Review of public sector finances (PSF) and alignment of National Accounts with PSF; improved methods for Inventories and Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF); updating base year and reference year from 2010 to 2011; Producer Price Index (PPI) and Services Producer Price Index (SPPI) re-basing from 2005 to 2010.

Wolfsbane posted:

That was really stupid, and you should probably stop trying to defend it because you're just making yourself look like more of an idiot. I don't even know what you're trying to argue any more. You think children are too dumb to program computers? Or they will only learn if they're allowed to make games (which you seem to assume will be banned in schools for some reason)?

quote:

Also, internet diagnosing people with mental illnesses is a lovely thing to do, especially if it's just because they have a hobby you can't or don't want to do.

ReV VAdAUL posted:

A PR move like this suggests Blair will be once again seeking to re-enter British public life. Presumably he's going to try again to stop Labour shifting to the left, especially since the general election is so close.

Which pretty strongly indicates he is insane given how prominent his failings in Iraq are at the minute. I wonder if he'll try to do what a couple of US neocons did and blame it all on people wanting to give up after a mere 11 years of quagmire it didn't work). It will be funny to see if he does that.

The Guardian posted:

Tony Blair rejects 'bizarre' claims that invasion of Iraq caused the crisis
'We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that "we" caused this', argues former prime minister in website essay

Tony Blair has strongly rejected claims that the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq was to blame for the current crisis gripping the country, pointing the finger instead firmly at the Maliki government and the war in Syria.

In a passionate essay published on his website, the former prime minister said it was a "bizarre" reading of the situation to argue that the US-British invasion of Iraq had allowed the growth of Sunni jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), whose fighters have swept through towns and cities north and west of Baghdad over the past week.

"We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that 'we' have caused this. We haven't. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not: and whether action or inaction is the best policy. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.

"We have to put aside the differences of the past and act now to save the future," says Blair, adding that force may be necessary. "Where the extremists are fighting, they have to be countered hard, with force."

His intervention came as the Pentagon said that US defence secretary Chuck Hagel had dispatched the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush and two guided missile ships into the Gulf as a precautionary measure.

Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said the Bush will be accompanied by the guided missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the guided missile destroyer USS Truxton. The ships were expected to arrive in the Gulf on Saturday night. Kirby described the deployment as increasing Obama's martial flexibility "should military options be required to protect American lives, citizens and interests in Iraq", rather than signalling an imminent strike.

And in London, government officials confirmed that British military personnel could be deployed in Iraq to help tackle the growing threat to the stability of the region from Isis.

Although the Foreign Office ruled out full-scale military intervention, sources confirmed they had had discussions about sending military and police as part of a "counter-terrorism" package.

In a defence of his actions in Iraq, Blair attacked as "extraordinary" any notion the country would be stable if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power.

"The civil war in Syria with its attendant disintegration is having its predictable and malign effect. Iraq is now in mortal danger. The whole of the Middle East is under threat."

He said it was inevitable that events across Iraq had raised the arguments over the 2003 war. While admitting that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, he said: "What we now know from Syria is that Assad, without any detection from the west, was manufacturing chemical weapons. We only discovered this when he used them. We also know, from the final weapons inspectors' reports, that though it is true that Saddam got rid of the physical weapons, he retained the expertise and capability to manufacture them.

"Is it likely, knowing what we now know about Assad, that Saddam, who had used chemical weapons both against the Iranians in the 1980s war – that resulted in over a million casualties – and against his own people, would have refrained from returning to his old ways? Surely it is at least as likely that he would have gone back to them?"

Blair said a likely scenario was that during the Arab spring Iraq would have been engulfed in civil war which would have blown sectarian conflict across the region. "So it is a bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today, to claim that but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis."

He added that until three years ago al-Qaida had been a "spent force" in Iraq and that the country had had a chance to rebuild itself. "It did not pose a threat to its neighbours. Indeed, since the removal of Saddam, and despite the bloodshed, Iraq had contained its own instability mostly within its own borders.

"Though the challenge of terrorism was and is very real, the sectarianism of the Maliki government snuffed out what was a genuine opportunity to build a cohesive Iraq. This, combined with the failure to use the oil money to rebuild the country, and the inadequacy of the Iraqi forces, have led to the alienation of the Sunni community and the inability of the Iraqi army to repulse the attack on Mosul and the earlier loss of Falluja. And there will be debate about whether the withdrawal of US forces happened too soon."

He said that the rise of Isis was partly a consequence of the Syrian war. "To argue otherwise is wilful. The operation in Mosul was planned and organised from Raqqa, across the Syria border. The fighters were trained and battle-hardened in the Syrian war.

"At its simplest, the jihadist groups are never going to leave us alone. 9/11 happened for a reason. That reason and the ideology behind it have not disappeared."

He added: "This is, in part, our struggle, whether we like it or not."

Jedit posted:

Erwin Rommel was one of the few senior German officers who didn't commit war crimes and was forced to commit suicide after being implicated in Claus von Stauffenberg's plot to assassinate Hitler. But, he was German in 1940 so I guess he was a Jew-hating fascist, right?

LemonDrizzle posted:

It's not just pot and hookers, although for obvious reasons those are the things the media picks up on. It's actually a whole raft of changes in national accounting practices to bring us into compliance with EU and global norms:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_375872.pdf

Pork Pie Hat posted:

What do you mean if?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/15/tony-blair-iraq-essay


"It wasn't my fault! IT WASN'T MY FAULT! WMD! SADDAM!"

The essay itself is grimly hilarious too: http://www.tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/iraq-syria-and-the-middle-east-an-essay-by-tony-blair/

LemonDrizzle posted:

It's not just pot and hookers, although for obvious reasons those are the things the media picks up on. It's actually a whole raft of changes in national accounting practices to bring us into compliance with EU and global norms:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_375872.pdf

Jedit posted:

Erwin Rommel was one of the few senior German officers who didn't commit war crimes and was forced to commit suicide after being implicated in Claus von Stauffenberg's plot to assassinate Hitler. But, he was German in 1940 so I guess he was a Jew-hating fascist, right?

ReV VAdAUL posted:

Man, how'd I miss this? Thanks for pointing it out.

The Guardian posted:

A well-connected New Labour source says: "Someone who knows Tony very well said to a friend of mine recently: 'He's very unhappy.' It's a false life he's leading. And the rich are boring. What has happened to Tony has elements of tragedy."

Kegluneq posted:

Fake edit: I will concede that there are much better tools for engaging kids with computers now than I had at school, such as the Raspberry Pi, and I'm definitely in favour of pushing thing like HTML at older ages.