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Boots (a large UK pharmacy chain) sells it, but it's "behind the counter" so you have to ask for it. They will also only sell you one pack of 12 per visit

It's the same for codeine-mixed products. Recently I got denied a simultaneous purchase of pseudoephedrine and ibuprofen/codeine - I was I was only allowed one.

I'm not sure if it's policy, law or I just looked suspicious.


Thanks. Looks like the buying limits are a legal requirement: https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/pseudoephedrine-and-ep... ) Seems like it was also classified as Pharmacy only (behind the counter) or prescription instead of just OTC.


Two 'weird' places I have visited this year that required an IDP were Japan and Taiwan.


Indonesia and Sri Lanka require it too.


Before the Ballmer/Zune use of the term I remember my father talking about data being squirted to A2A missiles (he was military) prior to launch, so perhaps that is one of the niches.


I take that back. An old issue of Wired had a jargon watch mention of “squirt the bird” as bouncing something off a satellite, which I remembered only because they misspelled it and I wondered what “quirt” meant.

So yeah, maybe that’s a military or adjacent thing.


Interestingly helicopters don't fall out of the sky when they lose power. Air moving over the rotorblades causes lift, as they are after all wings. During normal flight the blades are turned by the engine generating lift in the expected way. If you are already above the ground and start descending, the airflow over the blades as you descend will cause them to rotate and generate lift. This is known as autorotation[0], and allows control over the unpowered descending craft.

It is a normal procedure to be able to safely land this way when power has been lost, and in some ways is safer than a gliding fixed wing aircraft as you don't need a runway to land on.

Of course catastrophic failure is possible in a helicopter where the rotorblades can't turn, and then autorotation won't work. But then if a wing falls off a fixed-wing aircraft, they generally can't be controlled (interesting exceptions do exist like with the Israeli F15[1]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision


The Jesus nut[0] failing is one such catastrophic failure; the rotor would separate. I just think it's neat that it has a Wikipedia page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut


> With a roundabout, you only have to look in one direction

When being taught how to ride a motorcycle, one of the lessons is a series of extra checks that you're not taught when learning to drive a car. These are known as lifesaver checks.

Entering a roundabout is a left turn in Ireland (right turn in right hand drive countries) so you would check over your left shoulder to make sure nothing was on your left. This is performed after doing a normal right and ahead check for traffic already on the roundabout.

I have never caught anything with a roundabout lifesaver (I have in other situations) but I can see how it's useful on roundabouts with multiple entry lanes, or if something like a bicycle had appeared on your right.


I'm somewhat confused with the analysis of his predictions of the price of PV panels.

Is it saying Smil said (is that meant to be countered with?) PV would cost 0.05 USD/W in 2020? Or was that meant to be Al Gore claiming that price? It seems it can't be his predicted reduction as he said 25% less, so did he want to say that is would be 3.38 USD/W in 2020 (75% of the 2009 price)?

And the current cost - 0.2W/USD is 5 USD a Watt - are the units reversed there? A quick google shows a variety of prices, with nothing being 20 cents a Watt [0] - $0.5-1.50 for the less efficient thin film types quoted here. All seem quite a bit cheaper than $4.5 a watt though.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...


One detail here is that 1981 dollars aren't 2023 dollars, so to compare they need to be adjusted.

Using [0] $3.5 bn in 1981 would have been worth $11.7 bn in 2023.

Another comment [1] noted (but unfortunately didn't cite) that two years later the damage was assessed at $36 bn, or $110 bn in 2023 dollars.

[0] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41295116


No, they don't need to be adjusted. The linked website has already adjusted for CPI. There's even an option to turn on/off adjusting, and it's on by default. I didn't cite because this is using the same data / website as the original claim.


> Normal glasses are recyclable

Is this the case in reality? Everywhere I've lived drinking glasses were not accepted as part of domestic glass recycling due to their composition [0]

Perhaps there is a commercial recycling route for pubs though? A quick google didn't turn anything up.

[0] https://www.friendsofglass.com/ecology/what-glass-can-you-re...


I assumed my city wouldn't accept drinking glasses due to safety issues. The assumption being that the most likely case someone would recycle a drinking glass is after breaking it and they don't want their workers getting cut. Turns out it isn't really compatible with recycling beer and wine bottles.


> The assumption being that the most likely case someone would recycle a drinking glass is after breaking it and they don't want their workers getting cut.

All the places I know (Denmark/Germany) the glass you want to recycles is getting dumped in containers where it breaks most of the time when you toss it in.


Interesting!

The recycling containers here have separate containers for clear glass and coloured glass and I've always thought glass is glass.

Now I checked in detail what is accepted, and sure enough, drinking glasses and mirrors are specifically disallowed.


AFAIK (but may be massively wrong) is that most clear glasses have many composition types and don't mix well and the industrial brown/green is all the same.


I take that back then. Would these hardened glasses be recyclable though?


"Yes"

From a glass making point of view you don't want them messing with expansion coefficients and bulk properties so they're off the table there - it's a waste of energy to reheat them up to ~ 1,000 C.

But you do end up with large volumes of glass .. a relatively consistant material, you might want to crush and tumble that (to take the sharp edges away) and use that sized grit | frit as driveway material, as additive to concrete where structurally sound, as fish tank "sand", etc.


IIRC concrete aggregate should be jagged so that it interlocks with itself. You actually can't just use any old sand, you need sharp sand, which is an increasingly scarce resource.


My bad .. mentally insert more commas and juggle the clauses :-)

The tumbling was only meant to be applied to application requiring rounded grit, you're correct that concrete and other uses might prefer jagged.


"you need sharp sand"

Hmm, practical concerns about acquisition aside, would lunar dust work?



I don't have an opinion on the health effects of sweeteners, but as I noted in a longer comment on this page, multiple sweeteners are commonly used together and aspartame is far from universal in the mix.


> Virtually all artificially sweetened soft drinks in the Uk are sweetened with aspartame

A quick look at a few soft drinks I could think of, and their UK sweeteners:

  Fanta: Aspartame, Acesulfame 
  Coke Zero: Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, Enzymatically Produced Steviol Glycosides
  Pepsi: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
  Irn Bru: Aspartame, Acesulfame K
  Tizer: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
  Old Jamaica Ginger Beer: Sucralose
  Lipton Iced Tea: Steviol Glycosides from Stevia
  Ribena: acesulfame K, Sucralose
There seem to be no clear winners, with the most noticeable finding that multiple ones are usually used.


Acesulfame-K and friends is normally used in small amounts with aspartame; individually they both taste bloody awful, particularly Acesulfame K, but together they taste borderline acceptable.

Must say I wasn't aware there was so much sucralose in use.


A personal guilty pleasure is sugar-free red bull. Sorbitol, Sucralose, Ace-k unfortunately.


Huh, how much sorbitol do they put in it?! I thought that one was mostly only used in low-volume applications, because in large volumes, it's a laxative (AIUI this is why you rarely see sugar alcohols used as sweeteners in drinks.)


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