Random Thread

[Pabappa]

Hmm. Well, I thought the idea of mixers was to enhance the flavor of the drink, not cover it up. But maybe some people just don't like the taste of alcohol. I guess that helps explain how people get hurt.

Anyway I see now that the test subjects were given a low dose, 100ml.... but I still know that I personally would not be fooled for more than the few seconds it takes me to swallow and for my stomach to notice what I've just taken.

[Linguoboy]

Hmm. Well, I thought the idea of mixers was to enhance the flavor of the drink, not cover it up. But maybe some people just don't like the taste of alcohol. I guess that helps explain how people get hurt.

It depends who you are and why you drink.

Anyway I see now that the test subjects were given a low dose, 100ml.... but I still know that I personally would not be fooled for more than the few seconds it takes me to swallow and for my stomach to notice what I've just taken.

Um, congratulations on being in the same group as 37% of the experimental subjects? That and $2.50 will buy you a 40 of Colt 45.

[Moose-tache]

Pabappa, I believe you, but I also wonder if that confidence was also held by the 63% who felt "ghost intoxication." Here's a quick test. When you drink alcohol, what happens in the next 10 minutes? It takes about that long for alcohol to have a physiological effect on your brain, so literally any effect that you feel during that time has to be psycho-somatic.

[Raphael]

Pabappa, I believe you, but I also wonder if that confidence was also held by the 63% who felt "ghost intoxication." Here's a quick test. When you drink alcohol, what happens in the next 10 minutes? It takes about that long for alcohol to have a physiological effect on your brain, so literally any effect that you feel during that time has to be psycho-somatic.

Somewhat related question: When you drink anything, with or without alcohol, how long does it take, physiologically, for the fluids to go to your digestive system, into your blood vessels, through your kidneys, and eventually into your bladder? I'm asking because, when I drink something, with or without alcohol, I sometimes get the feeling that I have to pee immediately afterwards, as in, after a few seconds. I'm not at all sure that that's purely physiological.

[Pabappa]

Alcohol feels "warm" to me. My belly has a very distinct reaction which is immediate, and which is why I say i will know within seconds if I've been served the real thing or not.



Oh I think it takes 30 minutes or so for the body to process fluids but pressure may build up more quickly.

[Linguoboy]

I'm asking because, when I drink something, with or without alcohol, I sometimes get the feeling that I have to pee immediately afterwards, as in, after a few seconds. I'm not at all sure that that's purely physiological.

Yeah, I get this frequently. In fact, when I'm asked to give urine for a medical test, I always request a cup of water. I don't even have to drink it all; usually one sip is enough to trigger a response. Obviously the water can't work its way to my bladder that quickly so I assume there's some kind of feedback mechanism that's like, "Oh hey, we're getting more water so maybe we don't have to keep holding onto what's already in the bladder for reuse."

[chris_notts]

I'm asking because, when I drink something, with or without alcohol, I sometimes get the feeling that I have to pee immediately afterwards, as in, after a few seconds. I'm not at all sure that that's purely physiological.

Yeah, I get this frequently. In fact, when I'm asked to give urine for a medical test, I always request a cup of water. I don't even have to drink it all; usually one sip is enough to trigger a response. Obviously the water can't work its way to my bladder that quickly so I assume there's some kind of feedback mechanism that's like, "Oh hey, we're getting more water so maybe we don't have to keep holding onto what's already in the bladder for reuse."

I'm terrible for this. During the day a big drink leads very quickly to a trip to the toilet. But I don't normally need to go during the night or for long periods when I'm not drinking a lot so I think bladder capacity itself is normal.

[Pabappa]

We might just see this year pass without a new record high in carbon emissions, due to changes in consumption and of course the slowdown of industry due to the epidemic. The residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is apparently four years, so there will be a lag time in detected levels, and we may not have actually yet gotten to the part that's going to be unusual. We are getting snow here tonight ... even in this climate that's a bit unusual, and in Boston there is actually going to be up to six inches of snow. So it made me go check to see if CO2 has been dropping lately, or at least increasing more slowly. I found this:

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/c ... nd_mlo.png

#FlattenTheCurve

[chris_notts]

I saw an estimate that was reposted on LinkedIn that the lockdowns might decrease 2020 emissions by 4%, which is pretty depressing if you think about it. If closing half the economy only gets us a 4% decrease in global emissions, it feels like there's no way to hit the required decarbonisation rate. In the long term, we're all f*****.

[chris_notts]

Here it is. Seems the estimate has been updated to 5.5%, still lower than the annual decline needed. Given we've wasted decades not doing much, the only way to hit global carbon targets now is probably permanent Great Depression conditions:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-co ... -emissions

Update 15 April 2020: This analysis was updated in light of new forecasts for global oil demand in 2020, which suggest a significantly larger drop this year. The original version had put the potential impact of coronavirus at 1,600MtCO2 in 2020, equivalent to 4% of 2019 emissions.

This updated tentative estimate is equivalent to around 5.5% of the global total in 2019. As a result, the coronavirus crisis could trigger the largest ever annual fall in CO2 emissions in 2020, more than during any previous economic crisis or period of war.

Even this would not come close to bringing the 1.5C global temperature limit within reach. Global emissions would need to fall by some 7.6% every year this decade – nearly 2,800MtCO2 in 2020 – in order to limit warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

[Raphael]

Here it is. Seems the estimate has been updated to 5.5%, still lower than the annual decline needed. Given we've wasted decades not doing much, the only way to hit global carbon targets now is probably permanent Great Depression conditions:

Or finding different ways of doing similar things.

[chris_notts]

Here it is. Seems the estimate has been updated to 5.5%, still lower than the annual decline needed. Given we've wasted decades not doing much, the only way to hit global carbon targets now is probably permanent Great Depression conditions:

Or finding different ways of doing similar things.

Yes, I know that's the cunning plan, but I have severe doubts that we can rebuild our core infrastructure in 10 - 15 years while continuing to grow the economy and achieve greater annual emissions reductions than produced by an immediate reduction in GDP of up to a third. All roads to this goal suggested by the IPCC rely on negative emissions technologies that either don't currently exist or raise severe land use issues.

Don't get me wrong, I want to solve climate change, but I also don't believe we can hit the targets we've set ourselves without sacrifices that people are not willing to make. The best we'll achieve is delaying the worst impacts. In the best case, hopefully to a point where the worst impacts will skip both my and my son's generations. My son not suffering the global collapse is my realistic best case.

[Kuchigakatai]

Pabappa, I believe you, but I also wonder if that confidence was also held by the 63% who felt "ghost intoxication." Here's a quick test. When you drink alcohol, what happens in the next 10 minutes? It takes about that long for alcohol to have a physiological effect on your brain, so literally any effect that you feel during that time has to be psycho-somatic.

I don't drink much really (we're talking about maybe a glass per year on average...), but IME alcohol definitely makes an immediate reaction in your tongue and throat as you sip and swallow it... I wonder about the nature of the placebo used, which the paper doesn't mention at all. It would explain your guys' disagreement, maybe you're just assuming different things. The placebo may have been contocted to have a similar immediate physical reaction in the mouth and throat as that of alcohol, but Pabappa is perhaps assuming they were given water as the placebo.

Somewhat related question: When you drink anything, with or without alcohol, how long does it take, physiologically, for the fluids to go to your digestive system, into your blood vessels, through your kidneys, and eventually into your bladder? I'm asking because, when I drink something, with or without alcohol, I sometimes get the feeling that I have to pee immediately afterwards, as in, after a few seconds. I'm not at all sure that that's purely physiological.

Surely that's psychosomatic. That said, years ago, there was one time when I got sick with an odd kind of disease (I don't think I was even given a confident diagnosis of what it was in the end?), and first day at the hospital they told me to give them three or four urine samples, and for that they just told me to drink a lot of water. I definitely felt a great urge to pee in about 12 minutes or so.

I find it kind of interest to see people with psychosomatic habits like yours or Linguoboy's. I know someone that normally goes to pee fairly often, maybe about every hour and a half, but who I've also seen going on long 5-hour hikes up a mountain, finally going to the washroom at the top, and then holding out fine for that many hours going down without any problems... The presumed embarrassment of peeing among the trees is enough to stop the psychosomatic reaction, but as far as I could tell that person didn't even think of it that way, and just saw the urges as simply not happening when hiking.


Also, from a quite a number of pages back:

All this said, I once heard of someone who filed records and CDs by the dominant colour of the front cover.

I knew a woman whose bookshelf was organized by color. At first I thought it was stupid, but once I looked closer, I realized that it perfectly sorted the books by theme. Publishers and marketeers really know what they're doing.

So you're telling me it is actually meaningful that the Twilight series was published with a black cover?

[alynnidalar]

So you're telling me it is actually meaningful that the Twilight series was published with a black cover?

Of course. A dark color scheme with strongly contrasting accent colors (white/red) immediately draws the eye, especially among more complex/busy book covers. Using black gives it a "goth" feel appropriate for a paranormal romance series. The hands and apple are relatively neutral images, so you know it's not a horror novel, and the hands are almost in a heart shape, which again hints that this is a romance novel. The use of photographs (rather than other types of art) and generally modern, minimalist look points to the series being contemporary fantasy.

This is hardly unique to (or even started by) the Twilight series--the first House of Night book had a fairly similar cover--black background (goth-y!), contrasted with a saturated dark pink (romance!) and a black-and-white image of a woman staring confidently at the reader ("strong" female protagonist!). I was in high school at the time and you could spot a paranormal romance from the other side of the school library. Feels like everything that came out targeted at my demographic had a dark-tinted cover with some over-dramatic image on the front...

[Moose-tache]

Yes, I know that's the cunning plan, but I have severe doubts that we can rebuild our core infrastructure in 10 - 15 years while continuing to grow the economy and achieve greater annual emissions reductions than produced by an immediate reduction in GDP of up to a third. All roads to this goal suggested by the IPCC rely on negative emissions technologies that either don't currently exist or raise severe land use issues.

Don't get me wrong, I want to solve climate change, but I also don't believe we can hit the targets we've set ourselves without sacrifices that people are not willing to make. The best we'll achieve is delaying the worst impacts. In the best case, hopefully to a point where the worst impacts will skip both my and my son's generations. My son not suffering the global collapse is my realistic best case.

A couple of years working in a petroleum lab taught me one very important lesson: 99.9% of the population has no idea what is entailed in saying things like "zero emissions by 2xxx!" The initial buy-in is huge. If you built a solar plant large enough to power the world for the same cost per annual kilowatt hour as solar plants in the US, it would cost $325 trillion (about 44 months of global GDP). And that doesn't include the cost of the batteries or the extra capacity needed to account for energy loss in the batteries (scaling up will probably lower costs, but remember large solar plants are only about 15% cheaper to build than home installations, so don't expect magically low numbers). But if you ask an environmentalist in the US what sort of up-front cost is necessary to power the world by solar energy, they will have no idea, guaranteed. Also, you have to consider the cost of grid electricity while you're doing this. Nearly all the power needed to expand energy capacity comes from the grid, meaning that for the time being the economic feasibility of building those millions and millions of solar panels is dependent on existing energy sources staying as cheap as possible. If you scale back natural gas production, or greatly increase the annual energy demand to build those photovoltaic panels, then you will increase the up-front costs of building those solar plants even more. Since solar panels require about 3.64 times as much energy to manufacture as they produce in a year, you couldn't expect to build solar capacity to 165 annual petawatt-hours in less than a generation without putting a serious strain on the existing grid.

[Linguoboy]

Pabappa, I believe you, but I also wonder if that confidence was also held by the 63% who felt "ghost intoxication." Here's a quick test. When you drink alcohol, what happens in the next 10 minutes? It takes about that long for alcohol to have a physiological effect on your brain, so literally any effect that you feel during that time has to be psycho-somatic.

I don't drink much really (we're talking about maybe a glass per year on average...), but IME alcohol definitely makes an immediate reaction in your tongue and throat as you sip and swallow it... I wonder about the nature of the placebo used, which the paper doesn't mention at all. It would explain your guys' disagreement, maybe you're just assuming different things. The placebo may have been contocted to have a similar immediate physical reaction in the mouth and throat as that of alcohol, but Pabappa is perhaps assuming they were given water as the placebo.

For this particular study, I'd simply assumed that they'd been given a similar drink without any alcohol, not a plain glass of water. After all, that's how similar studies have been designed. (Google "alcohol placebo effect" and you'll find loads of them.) Acidic mixers such as orange juice or lemon juice can produce similar "burning" effects, for instance, and alcohol-free drinks that imitate wine, beer, and other beverages exist and are convincing enough to fool at least some people some of the time.

[chris_notts]

A couple of years working in a petroleum lab taught me one very important lesson: 99.9% of the population has no idea what is entailed in saying things like "zero emissions by 2xxx!" The initial buy-in is huge.

A bit like you, I work in the energy industry, although a bit downstream of extraction. Over the last decade plus I've done all kinds of work in power, gas and renewables - I started out writing schedulers for thermal power stations, and branched out from there. I spent a while doing financial optimisation of windfarm designs and layouts, a while on energy storage projects, a while doing simulations of the future European transmission network etc. And as you say, people have no idea. I've seem so much wrong-headed thinking out there - a particular bad example that springs to mind is a report that Poyry did for Greenpeace many years ago which claimed that going green was cheap and easy on the basis of simplistic LCoE (levelised cost of energy) numbers, completely ignoring the absolutely massive immediate capital investment that would be paid back of 30 - 50 years (the lifetime of many of the assets in question). In the power industry, changing the fuel mix significantly over a decade or two is incredibly fast, not slow.

If you built a solar plant large enough to power the world for the same cost per annual kilowatt hour as solar plants in the US, it would cost $325 trillion (about 44 months of global GDP). And that doesn't include the cost of the batteries or the extra capacity needed to account for energy loss in the batteries (scaling up will probably lower costs, but remember large solar plants are only about 15% cheaper to build than home installations, so don't expect magically low numbers).

Batteries don't solve this problem for most of the world. They are not designed to be cheap for low power, high energy applications like weekly or seasonal storage.

Maybe, in a very sunny location near the equator, adding a battery or two to a PV system does the job. But if you want reliable baseload power in Europe, you have to deal with the situations where there's no wind for a week in the winter. Unless you're lucky enough to have a tiny population and lots of hydro, like Sweden, that means one or more of three things:

1. Maintaining massive overcapacity in thermal power generation so that you can use to fill the gaps
2. Building massive overcapacity in renewables so that there's still enough power at very low load factors
3. Use of other storage technologies which can store more energy, but at the cost of lower cycle efficiencies (which means they're only economic to run if the value of the energy in is almost zero)

You also, as you mention, have massive problems with the grid. You need to invest to keep the grid stable: inertia, frequency response, etc. Currently thermal plant provides most of these services, but if you really want 100% green energy then you need alternative solutions.

And on top of that you need massive grid investment to allow other energy demands to be shifted to electricity. In the UK, homes consume much more energy in total in the form of gas (for heat) and fossil fuels (for transport) than they do electricity. The proposal to green these other sectors is primarily to electrify them: we should shift to electric vehicles, install heat pumps, etc. This means that annual electricity transmission will have to increase to multiple times its current level. So not only do you need to build renewables to replace existing electricity demand, they must also feed new electricity demands, and you need to be able to transport all that energy that currently doesn't travel via the transmission and distribution networks. The current electricity grid was constructed over generations and is deeply embedded in other physical infrastructure: bits of it, especially at lower voltage levels, are buried in the ground, embedded in roads etc. The sheer amount of investment required to upgrade all of this is staggering.

The other choice is to surrender the goal of reliable power. This is the fundamental reason why governments are looking at smart meters, demand side response etc. The idea is simple: let's avoid paying for some of the backup capacity and grid upgrades by making demand match available supply instead of vice versa. This can either take the form of charging people more when there are supply problems ("smart" meters) or paying people to consume less when there are problems (demand side response). Typically smart meters are targeted at individual consumers, while DSM and interruptible supply contracts are targeted at businesses. There are two problems with this approach:

1. Cultural

The pricing required to make enough consumers pay attention to their smart meter and, for example, not run their dishwasher when the grid is stressed would be punitive, and severely politically unpopular. Energy pricing is already a big political issue - how big will it be when people are forced to sync their lives to the needs of the grid instead of vice versa?

2. Economic

In the industrialised world, most manufacturing and high energy industry is optimised to be high CAPEX, low OPEX. Investment is made to reduce variable operating costs, but this means that you must run baseload to minimise CAPEX per unit output. As soon as you have to stop your process regularly, a massive amount of investment becomes stranded because you can't pay off your shiny factory designed for baseload production, unless you hike prices of course.

If you scale back natural gas production, or greatly increase the annual energy demand to build those photovoltaic panels, then you will increase the up-front costs of building those solar plants even more. Since solar panels require about 3.64 times as much energy to manufacture as they produce in a year, you couldn't expect to build solar capacity to 165 annual petawatt-hours in less than a generation without putting a serious strain on the existing grid.

I also truly believe that energy is a key, necessary but not sufficient input to economic growth. Economists talk a lot about innovation driving growth, but all physical processes require energy to take place. Efficiency can be increased, but only to a certain extent. When we talk about subsiding renewables, paying for backup capacity, upgrading the electrical grid, ... and all these other measures that will increase the total price of energy (either direct or indirect via taxation for subsidies), what we're really saying is that more energy and other resources will be redirected back into the energy supply system itself, leaving a lower net amount of gross production available for the rest of society. There's been a lot written by others on Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), but we're effectively lowering it, at least during the investment phase and probably permanently, which will have a lot of knock-on impacts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_re ... y_invested

[linguistcat]

It's my (admittedly shallow) understanding that any system that requires continual growth to be successful is doomed to failure anyway. Something will come along (like a pandemic) that will stop that growth or reverse it. Instead of a system like that, we need to find a way to use the resources we have more efficiently, and not producing just to produce.

In a lot of sectors, the work we used to need a full 8 hr day to do can be done now in less than an hour and a half. Meanwhile we don't have enough workers in sectors that scale with population, like teachers and health workers. Capitalism was supposed to make us more efficient and productive, and while it HAS made us more productive, it's also made us busier.

I don't know what system will end up replacing it; I'm personally a fan of democratic socialism but I know that every system has its own problems. But I can't imagine capitalism in the form we have now lasting much longer and I'm worried what shape it will take in the future if things don't change. This is only tangentially related to the talk of carbon emissions, but lowering the amount of work people are "required" do and things they produce would at least help. And if we have plans for when growth is not possible to mitigate or alleviate suffering, that would go a long way in lowering emissions as well I'd assume.

[chris_notts]

In case it isn't obvious from my comment about energy driving economic growth, I also believe that the economy is fundamentally a physical system and therefore finite just like the world itself. The "exponential" growth of the last century or two was just the growth phase of a logistics (saturation) curve. Eventually the global economy will either stabilise at its maximum extent or oscillate violently as it overshoots and then collapses repeatedly. Fingers crossed for stabilisation.

It is also clear that the current economy will not function very well in a world where growth is ~0%. Too much has been built on an assumption that growth is perpetual. But I struggle to see how we get to a good world with no growth. In principle we could house and feed everybody to a reasonable standard with currently available resources, but instead we have billionaires and homeless people. Do you really think those with economic power will voluntarily accept limits so others have a fair share? And do you think politicians will be willing to break the power of the currently economically powerful?

The past twenty plus years of globalisation has been about curtailing the power of countries to limit the rich. Bretton Woods gave way to a system where countries are terrified of capital flight. Treaties pushed by the economic orthodoxy limit the power of governments to try new models or impose punitive fines via ISDS courts stacked with corporate stooges. Now we do have nationalists challenging this, but they're from the right not the left. What we'll get if growth continues to dwindle is mostly either neo-feudalism or neo-fascism, because both allow the existing powers to grap as much of the cake as possible and resist any form of redistribution.

[Kuchigakatai]

For this particular study, I'd simply assumed that they'd been given a similar drink without any alcohol, not a plain glass of water. After all, that's how similar studies have been designed. (Google "alcohol placebo effect" and you'll find loads of them.) Acidic mixers such as orange juice or lemon juice can produce similar "burning" effects, for instance, and alcohol-free drinks that imitate wine, beer, and other beverages exist and are convincing enough to fool at least some people some of the time.

While I have no doubt that drinks that imitate the burning sensation of alcohol exist, man, what kind of orange juice or lemon juice was that!? I've never had any that gave me anything near the burning sensation of alcohol!