Some things make you laugh

I always thought the microplastics thing was stupid. Another N-ray scientific delusion. Like the population bomb famine and the climate catastrophe.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It is pretty stupid to call tiny particles "stearates"

The 18-carbon straight chain back bone of stearic acid is going to look something like polyethylene, which is built up of very long chain (but cross-linked) hydrocarbons but it ought not to be all that difficult to tell them apart.

Which says a lot about John Larkins ignorance of science. N-rays were a complete nonsence, the population bomb famine was merely mindless extrapolation, and the climate catastrophe is prefect real and actually happening, just not fast enough for John Larkin to notice.

One would expect that homogeneous plastic that chemically weathered down to submicron size would rapidly disappear, because the massive increase in surface area would similarly increase the rate of weathering and reduce any local depletion of reactants. (Somewhat like a dust explosion, but without the huge temperature increase.)

Someone recently sent me an article that purported to show fairly massive arsenic contamination in a wide range of children’s candy.

My alarm bells went off when I noticed that all the measured concentrations were 400 +- 200 ppb, implausibly high and even more implausibly tightly grouped.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There was super anguish when we had that Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in the Gulf Of Whatever. Critters eat anything organic down there. Oil spills are treats. So I figure that if there is really lots of microplastics in the ocean, things will eat them.

Give a postdoc a decent microscope and they will count lots of little globs.

The thing about medical studies is how small the sample sizes tend to be, and how contradictory they are. I suspect that there is publication bias towards the most horrifying.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The guys who sniffed out a problem, found the solution and warned everyone else; were stupid?

It is a common control method, however, to include known standard media in tests to guarantee the basic validity of the process, and the tools used.

RL

That the researchers using the gloves did not do that, unbelievable!

On 5/04/2026 7:01 pm, john larkin wrote: > On Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:09:54 GMT, Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@comet.invalid > wrote: >

It is pretty stupid to call tiny particles "stearates"

The 18-carbon straight chain back bone of stearic acid is going to look something like polyethylene, which is built up of very long chain (but cross-linked) hydrocarbons but it ought not to be all that difficult to tell them apart. > I always thought the microplastics thing was stupid. Another N-ray > scientific delusion. Like the population bomb famine and the climate > catastrophe.

Which says a lot about John Larkin's ignorance of science. N-rays were a complete nonsense, the population bomb famine was merely mindless extrapolation, and the climate catastrophe is perfectly real and actually happening, just not fast enough for John Larkin to notice.

I think mechanizm creating microplastics is quite different than you suggest. I have seen oldish plastic things disintegrating into small pieces after light touch. That seem to indicate that mechanical strength got quite low. This low strength is likely to be enough to keep micro parts together, at least for some time but bigger pieces will be under bigger strain and likely to break down into smaller ones. To put it differently, I think that process may by mostly mechanical and no longer work once pieces get small enough.

Microplastics may be related to push for biodegenerable plastics. When I saw plastics as a kid, they looked rather durable, even pieces that were old at that time. But newer plastics when they get old tend to break into pieces.

A laugh is good. (S.

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |------------------| |"N-rays were a | |complete nonsence"| |------------------| Professional physicists are fools. Remember polywater and anomalous water. (S.

Cold fusion too.

Not so much fools, but still people.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Some of them are. Feynman wasn't. The guy who exposed the N-ray nonsense (by taking out the prism and seeing the experimenters get exactly the same result) wasn't either.

Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics" exposes a more subtle problem.

Coll fusion was electrochemists, rather than physicists, and there was something odd going on which still hasn't been sorted out though it probably isn't any kind of nuclear reaction. Martin Fleishcman was a professor at Southampton University when I was a post-doc there, and he wasn't any kind of fool.

Everybody wants any odd thing that happens in their experiment to be a world changing new discovery. Mostly it's a mistake - like the faster than light neutrinos - but optimism does seem to be the default condition.

Don't know how many times I've found production hipot testing running with open cct test connectors.

Basic procedure should be 'test a short cct' before any series of tests. No special calibration equipment required.

RL

Lab contamination is a chronic problem. Cells, viruses, DNA stick to glass.

With enough PCR cycles, one DNA molecule can ruin your career.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I am a bit worried about US science and engineering After 50 years or so to get it right the toilets on the Artemis 2 spacecraft stopped working:

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |---------------------------------------------------------------------| |"> Professional physicists are fools. Remember polywater and | |> anomalous water. | |> (S.

I painfully know that many professional physicists are fools, because I am not a fool whereas I am unfortunately a professional physicist.

|---------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Feynman wasn't." | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|

Feynman is not a fool.

|---------------------------------------------------------------------| |"The guy who exposed the N-ray nonsense (by taking out the prism and | |seeing the experimenters get exactly the same result) wasn't either."| |---------------------------------------------------------------------|

I agree.

John Larkin wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------| |">Professional physicists are fools. Remember polywater and| |>anomalous water. | |>(S.

Far fewer physicists used to believe in cold fusion than N rays; polywater and anomalous water.

|-----------------------------------------------------------| |"Not so much fools, but still people." | |-----------------------------------------------------------|

Fools are persons.