sahmeepee

You probably need a sputter coating machine too for most applications, and, at least in some cases, tricky consumables like liquid nitrogen.

I'm with you in wishing that they were more accessible, though. So many people want to do skydives, bungee jumps etc. that have never experienced the thrill of exploring the anatomy of tiny insects in incredible detail. They don't know what they're missing! That's before you even get onto cool stuff like WDS/WDX which I remember thinking was like science fiction when I first saw it.

Average US home.

In Europe it is around 6-7 kWh/day. This might increase with electrification of heating and transport, but probably nothing like as much as the energy consumption they are replacing (due to greater efficiency of the devices consuming the energy and other factors like the quality of home insulation.)

In the rest of the world the average home uses significantly less.

I've got to admit I found that 32% claim staggering. Does anyone know the source of that and what exactly was measured?

Za'atar is the name of a herb and also a spice mix

Thanks - the comments are worth reading too

I did a similar proctored digital coin toss type experiment at uni back in the dark ages.

In the proctored experiment the best rate of pay was achieved by those who just skipped trading for each of the 15 days and left after 2 minutes with $50 in their back pocket.

I would like to see the payout distribution graph with random trades for comparison against the students.

A similar method is handy for some mental arithmetic involving squares, e.g. it's easy to calculate 1005² because it's 1000² plus two added blocks of 5 x 1000, plus a small 5² block, so 1,010,025. Going the other way, 995² is 1000² minus those same two 5 x 1000 blocks, plus 5², so 990,025.

(Edited due to formatting fail!)

That is quite an offensive and uninformed comment.

I worked in that sector a long time ago and your hipshot is very far from my lived experience. If you want to educate yourself in what the large community of typically very dedicated IT workers in UK schools do to protect children from online harm, search for edugeek and take a look through their "filtering" related forum.

Back when I did that kind of work the web filtering tools were stil mostly commercial, e.g. Websense, and we maintained reasonably good control, but it was a cat and mouse effort. As just one example, for blocking games it wasn't enough just to block all game websites (new ones every day) and all "proxy" sites as they were known (new ones every hour), you'd also have to block things the kids brought in. At one point we wrote a script that scanned files to find all Excel documents with Flash games embedded within them via an activex component and nuke them.

This is all against the backdrop of maintaining an incredibly diverse IT setup where commercial software often had utterly appalling requirements but was mandated from on high. I now work in an organisation with >£1bn turnover and it probably has fewer licensed software packages than just one secondary school I used to work for.

What you realise over time is that the technical tools are not really the solution. Classroom teachers need to use their skills to keep children on task. Schools need to use their existing disciplinary protocols when children don't follow the agreed rules. IT staff need to provide a baseline level of safety to ensure that no child can accidentally or casually break the IT rules.

Not really comparable because these are 12 year old children.

Not only could the phones be put away at night, but universally available parental controls could be used to lock the phones at a specified time each night.

We do this. It is just part of parenting, like deciding the time of bedtime.

The advertising for this on TV was also confusing in this regard.

It's only because most UK secondary schools already ban phone use in school time that (in context) it obviously means round-the-clock.

I agree that this study didn't separate the two very well, but it's a difficult task to be fair.

They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.

I don't think you have the appropriate context here. This isn't about "good" (in person?) friends vs digital friends known only online. This is about schoolkids who almost all have smartphones losing a channel of communication with their schoolmates and thus being excluded from much of what goes on in the social group outside of school.

I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours.

There are a small number of kids in the year group with "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get older and more independent their needs for communication tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.

If you mean a printed book describing how every feature of (say) Chrome works, then no. They don't produce one. The "manual" for Chrome is Google's support Web pages for the browser, which I have read in conscious preference to the often inaccurate folk knowledge that comes back from a general Google search.

It's an interesting point you make about the effort involved in making a dish. I'm on a mission to eat, and mostly home cook, food from as many countries as possible. I'm at about 25% of the world's countries now after several years of gradual chipping away.

From that experience I feel that there are some food traditions which will be more durable than others and, as you suggest, this is not just a matter of tourist influence but I think capitalism/market forces are behind most of it.

Factors which I think will work against long term survival include:

-high effort: more families where both parents work for money and where the family unit is very small mean fewer opportunities for elaborate preparation. In my family we think of that type of cooking as a luxury afforded to us because we are wealthy enough to have enough free time from work to do it once in a while, but in the cultures where the food originated it was built into the schedule.

-scarce ingredients: 25% is a lot of the world's countries but I know I will never reach 100%, even if I live to 110 years old. Some countries, especially island nations, have specific local herbs and vegetables that aren't available elsewhere. Over time, the market for cultivating these will decline as it is squeezed out by cash crops for export or non-indiginous crops that grow more reliably or productively. This has happened to some regional foods in my (western) home country and while they are still available, they at risk of disappearing. Another reason for scarcity is overuse e.g. with herring overfishing and surströmming scarcity.

-banned ingredients: as food standards regulations around the world gradually harmonise to allow free trade, some ingredients will be banned. This is an ongoing global war which will carry on for decades, but it already means that some cuisines aren't available in other territories. In the longer term they could be lost from their home countries (bush meat etc.). Again surströmming features in this category and only has a temporary reprieve from the EU.

-unavailable methods: in some cases it's already a stretch to say that I'm cooking the food of a country when I'm improvising with the methods and materials. I don't have a tandoor in my back yard or a wood-fired oven for baking shakh plov; I've not really got the option of digging a hole to ferment some hákarl either. With increasingly urban populations globally, many traditional cooking methods will be unfeasible for most people.

While there are good reasons for some of these influencing factors, like food safety, others are clearly unintended side-effects. There is a strong (non-economic) case for national governments dedicating resources to conserve their cultural heritage by giving their local cuisine some protection from external pressures.

An argument can also be made for a similar effect on language. In the UK in recent decades I've noticed a trend towards young people from various regions adopting a specific south London accent or dialect. Ironically although this seems to be part of adopting the culture of south London, it is also abandoning the dialect of their region which traditionally in the UK has been a very powerful source of identity.

In the town in England where I grew up I could easily tell if someone was from the nearest town (<10 miles away) within a few sentences, or the city a similar distance in the opposite direction. I suspect that won't be possible once the current generations have died out.

Homogeneity is just a natural result of more effective mixing.