El Sid

The state of the world has driven me to drink.... Geopolitics, beer and other stuff.

Retweets = worth a read, not necessarily agreement

@[email protected]

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@Andercot There was a British government report about a decade ago that suggested you needed to build at least 5GW before SMR (possibly assuming the RR 450MW units rather than 50MW???) became cheaper than big ones.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

Paray-le-Monial is 30 miles west of Macon, 50 miles SW of Beaune - and it's currently a desert.

Grapevines like a bit of water stress, but there's water stress and there's desert. It's going to be a weird vintage in Burgundy...

[Dr. Serge Zaka (Dr. Zarge) @SergeZaka]

L'anomalie de l'indice hydrique des sols (caractérisant l'eau disponible pour les plantes) présente un déficit extrême pour la saison de la Vendée à la Bourgogne avec jusqu'à -95%. Il ne reste plus que 0.02% d'eau sur les deux premiers mètres du sol vers Paray le Monial. Soit autant que dans un désert.

Au 20 juillet, il s'agit de la plus grosse sécheresse des sols depuis le début des mesures fiables à ce sujet (1947) dépassant très largement 2022 et 1976. S'il ne repleut pas (conséquemment) d'ici la fin du mois, il devrait atteindre l'indice hydrique le plus bas jamais observé en France tous mois confondus.

Je n'ai jamais vu la végétation souffrir autant qu'en 2026. Les forêts sont dans un état lamentable. Partout en France, un nombre conséquent d'arbres dépérissent, et beaucoup sont déjà en train de mourir.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@highersorcery The family spread is not great - with Miliband, Reeves, Eagle we must be close to a record for Cabinet attendees who are siblings of a one-time minister.

Then add in Cooper and Kinnock, the pool does not run deep.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@OldLondonW14 Some councils put labels on new trees explicitly encouraging people to water them, and to tell them about sad looking trees :

https://t.co/9RZRcouCrC

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@Britains___Pubs Getty dates it to 1930.

If you squint, the sign to the right says Silver Lion Court, a notorious slum demolished in the 1930s.

So it is presumably the Silver Lion at 65 Pennyfields E14 (formerly #42 before renumbering), just north of Canary Wharf. Demolished in the 1960s.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@path_dependent @thomasforth @duncanrobinson Surely if it was agglomerated successfully, it would just be "Shields"?

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@cremieuxrecueil You can't talk about British economics in the mid-80s or the late 90s without reference to the two peaks in oil/hydrocarbon production at that time - the first driven more by giant oil fields like Brent and Forties, the latter more gas driven (and at a time of lower prices)

[LiorLefineder @lefineder]

By looking at archaeologically dated slag heaps and furnaces, one can get a general estimate of Roman iron production in Britain. At its height, close to 2,000 tonnes of iron were produced each year. From the Crisis of the Third Century, the large-scale Roman iron industry declined and then came to an end with the collapse of the empire.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

This is really interesting, important step towards understanding how snakes became so weird.

Eg their bodies are too narrow for two lungs so disrupting some genes involved in body symmetry means their left lung is vestigial if it grows at all.

[News from Science @NewsfromScience]

Snakes are weirdos among vertebrates. Their bodies are typically too thin for more than one lung, they smell with their tongues, and—perhaps most importantly—they have no legs.

An extensive effort to sequence the genomes of more than a dozen snake species has uncovered mutations that likely helped make these appendages vanish, as well as the DNA underlying other unusual traits.

Learn more this #WorldSnakeDay: https://t.co/hqcz8WnXlp

[Rose @Rose_McN]

My latest first author paper is now out! (https://t.co/j6dUcFKDOr)

In this study we generated giant starch granules in wheat. These granules are twice as big as we see in nature and may have uses in food and industry.  (1/6)

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@pinstripedline

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@thomasforth I'm sure the nation of Lehrer, Sondheim and Cole Porter can do better than my 5-minute version:

Because...
Maybe...
Balogun gets red card safety...
And after all...
He's playing soccerball...

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@mattyglesias Nah - Robert Falcon Scott made fewer unforced errors than Brazil.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@PeaceNascimento @theiaincameron @MikeDelgado12 Not quite true - Australia, NZ, a state of the US (Hawaii) and various Canadian entities have flags that include the Union Flag and hence are partly based on the flags of two teams at the World Cup, Scotland and England.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@edwardstrngr65 In this case, the fact they're buying in the already-developed Aegis rather than maintaining a sovereign capability is part of it.

But as today highlights, stability/predictability of funding matters as well, see eg the Swiss Rail Infrastructure Fund:
https://t.co/lTHFcRVtPl

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@B0ATsmith @thinkdefence Still better than Ajax.

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@tandleman @euronics_UK Dedicated drinks fridge is the way forward, and in my case it also has brewing yeast in the fridge and hops in a third of the freezer section....

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@wraggi74 @thinkdefence https://t.co/hue6qEtdA5

[NBC News @NBCNews]

Sam Adams says from Thursday to Sunday, the Tartan Army drank four times as much Boston Lager as it normally sells during a typical four-day holiday stretch like the Fourth of July. https://t.co/g8NvYxiQD6

[El Sid @El__Sid]

@SolidEvidence If there's a 20-25% chance of any one game being a draw, then there's a 1 in 256 to 625 chance of any four games being all draws.

There's been 964 WC games before this tournament, so if anything we were a bit overdue for it to happen.