Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@social.cleverlibre.org

@Legend

You have to temper this 'announcement' with the knowledge that we now have of the extent to which the Russians are completely full of shit!

This is a nation who can't even keep one single aircraft carrier in running order on the high seas. A nation that has to send ocean going tugs out with its major naval deployments as its warships are so unreliable, a nation whose tanks explode like a jack-in-a-box when hit with an anti-tank missile as they have been unable to develop effective anti-missile systems for their tanks.

Of course they do have the world's largest nuclear arsenal BUT the missiles and the warheads themselves require considerable maintenance and, based on their other 'vehicle's' performance so far in Ukraine, it seems most unlikely that they will have had it! My suspicion is that if they try to use one or more nuclear weapons, there is a major danger that one or more will explode on launch, fail to explode altogether or the missile carrying it will fail to launch.

@TimWardCam

The colour with the worst accident rate was dark grey, unsurprisingly! Mid grey and silver grey were close behind!

Some years back, when I worked for an insurance company, we ran some queries against the motor insurance database just for fun. One of the queries we ran effectively asked the question if there was any difference between the accident rate for different coloured cars.
To our surprise there were significant differences between the accident rates for some colours as against others. The cars with the worst accident rates were dark grey, black, dark blue and dark green and those with the lowest accident rate were white, banana yellow, orange, pillar-box red and lime green.
we assumed at the time that this difference was down to the enhanced visibility of the colours with the lower accident rates.
Ever since then, when buying second hand cars, I have always preferred vehicles that are in the “safer” colour range although they are extremely difficult to find. For whatever reason, people seem to prefer buying cars that are dark grey or black or dark blue and those colours dominate the second-hand car market!

@JohnLoader6 @cabd
Yep - absolutely shitting myself!

@JohnLoader6 @cabd

Myself, likewise! In addition to those you mention, I have also had all the ones you have before going to the tropics; cholera, typhoid and all that lot, plus Hep A + B.

About a fortnight after arriving home, in Luxembourg, after a trip to Thailand, I was contacted by the Luxembourg health authorities who asked me if I had been a passenger on such and such a flight from Bangkok to Paris and when I confirmed that I had indeed been on that flight they asked me if I would be prepared to go for screening for tuberculosis as there had been a passenger on that flight who had had open, infectious tuberculosis. I'm pretty sure I know which passenger it was as there was someone sitting only two or three metres from me who spent the whole flight coughing their lungs up!
Obviously, I agreed to be tested and I was given a Mantoux tuberculin skin test which came back very strongly positive for TB. I was then given another, much more sensitive test which thankfully came back negative; they repeated the more sensitive test six months later and it was again negative.
I asked the Doctor who was supervising the screening why the Mantoux test had been so very positive and he said that it was probably an unusually extended immunity provided by the BCG vaccination that I had when I was about 12. Apparently, in most patients, the immunity provided by the BCG vaccine only lasts for about 20 years however in a few cases it persists for much longer - in my case for 60 years!

@olimould

It's funny - no one is striking where I live in Luxembourg. Maybe that's because nurses and teachers are paid around double what the get in the UK and employees of other public services are extremely well paid as well!

Good luck - I hope you crush the tory cockroaches under-foot!

I wonder what attitude religions will take if, or personally I rather suspect, when, evidence comes to light of the current or past existence of life forms on other planets.
I used to work with a devout Muslim and this subject came up in conversation over lunch in the canteen. He asserted with a startling degree of certainty that no life exists now, has ever existed or will ever exist anywhere else in the universe as that is the Muslim belief!
I am assuming that such people will simply deny the reality of any discovery that goes against their entrenched beliefs. I'm not sure what devout Christians believe in that context but it wouldn't greatly surprise me to find them holding egocentric beliefs similar to those held by some Muslims.
I'm not familiar enough with other religions to know what their attitude to such a discovery might be. Perhaps followers of other faiths might like to contribute to this thread.

https://bgr.com/science/nasa-is-getting-ready-to-examine-mars-rock-samples-that-may-hold-proof-of-alien-life/

Well! According to Tweetsmap, I lost 7 followers last week, all but one of whom appear to have closed their Twitter accounts!