I'm late responding, but why no backscattered electron images from the SEMs?
The micropastics should have a really low average Z, I think the stearates will be much higher and distinguishable in a BSE image, and (not to mention if you observe their x-ray spectrum...)
So I'm either confused about something or pointing out that they're hard to distinguish in an SE image is not really a useful point, ... it's more relevant that SEM isn't the typical tool used for these counting efforts.
I'd look myself but I recently moved and the SEM is in parts. :)
might be fun to try to find parameters that agree well with the statistics of hi res lidar data, perhaps conditioned on geological maps. E.g. describe a geological history with layers of different formations and a pattern of uplift, and get a terrain which agrees with it statistically.
Without simulating erosion you're not going to get a faithful recreation of any particular geological history, but you could get something that looked consistent by virtue of being consistent with the statistics of that topography.
How much less? I believe most gold produced in the US is from ore with under a half ppm gold (E.g open pit mines in Nevada).
Maybe the point there is that we already have practically endless supplies of quarter ppm ore ready for the taking on the surface of the earth. Gold is rare only in so far that the current price reflects the breakeven point of these most abundant sources. Adding more supply with similar or worst production costs wouldn't change anything.
All the other precious metals are less than 1 ppm compared to iron, but platinum is more abundant, and by weight it is about 6 ppm in iron.
The advantage of an asteroid is that its entire metal core has 6 ppm of platinum and a fraction of a ppm of gold, while on Earth the quantities of ore containing such amounts of precious metals like a half ppm or a quarter ppm of gold are much smaller.
There certainly exists no "endless supply" of gold ore with a quarter ppm gold, because the average concentration of gold in the crust of the Earth is a few parts per billion, so the few places where the concentration is as high as a fraction of a ppm are compensated by vast areas where the gold concentration is much less than one part per billion.
While an asteroid may have a lot of iron containing 6 ppm of platinum and a little less than 1 ppm of gold, that is not comparable at all with a terrestrial ore with 1 ppm or a few ppm of precious metals.
The precious metals are the easiest to separate from rocks, which is why one can exploit on Earth ores with a so low content of metal. On the other hand, precious metals are very hard to separate from iron, which is the very reason why in any planet or asteroid these metals end up being dissolved in the iron core.
So the extraction of platinum or gold in so small quantities from iron would be extremely expensive on Earth and much more so on an asteroid, where it is impossible to produce most of the chemicals used on Earth, like acids or cyanides.
Those are the average abundances in the iron that forms the asteroid metallic cores, which are exposed in a few asteroids, presumably because of ancient collisions.
The asteroids where such cores are exposed, instead of being buried under huge amounts of rocks, like in the planets, are those that are targeted for mining.
The iron meteorites are pieces detached from such asteroid cores, so they provide samples of their composition.
Some meteorites, the so-called chondrites, come from small bodies that have never aggregated into bigger asteroids or planets since the formation of the Solar System, so they have a chemical composition close to the average composition of the Solar System.
Other meteorites have been detached from big bodies, like asteroids, planets (e.g. from Mars) or from the Moon.
These meteorites are either made of rocks, when they have been detached from the surface of such bodies, or made of an alloy of iron, nickel, cobalt, germanium, some times also silicon, together with other metals that are present in much smaller quantities, when they have been detached from exposed asteroid cores.
Training would imply that it made effective activists, but activism from these quarters tends to alienate outsiders. It's more purity spiral than activism.
Well, no, I don't think training necessarily would make them effective given the context of academic activism. If the whole world would look like a college campus it might but there is such a big disconnect between the real world and academia that even the best trained academic activist ends up doing just what you describe. In some parts of society it has worked though, viz. the rise of the 'DEI' phenomenon driven in part by the infusion of academics into organisations who used their positions to bring in more academics of similar mindset while shunning those who did not subscribe to the desired narrative. Where it used to be said that it did no harm to let those silly students larp revolutionaries because they'd drop all that when they re-entered 'the real world' the truth turned out to be reversed in that they took all that ideological baggage with them into society.
I'm going to guess that for many signers-- or at least the US ones-- their opposition to the United States and "its unbridled hatred" doesn't extend to not accepting funding from the US taxpayer.
Entry requirements and the overhead of dealing with visa hoops are a perennial problem for international conferences, nothing new-- and presumably a part of why it hasn't been held in the US in recent memory. But the language on this petition is particularly extreme.
On what basis do you believe that it will meaningfully reduce the dollars lost or persons harmed by fraud, as opposed to simple shuffling around the exact means used?
Well maybe nothing ultimately changes. Maybe we end up in a world where Android users have to wait 24 hours to change a setting so that their devices will install any apps they want, from then on with no further delays. But this seems to me like a relatively low cost for a potentially huge benefit for victims.
I'd urge everyone here to seriously consider switching to GrapheneOS. It's a far simpler transition than e.g. switching from Windows or OSX to Linux, and many people find that it has basically no friction vs android.
More people moving to GrapheneOS is the best tool we have against Google's continued and escalating hostility to user freedom and privacy and general anti-competitive conduct. (Of course, you could ditch having a smartphone entirely..., but if you're willing to consider that you don't need me plugging an alternative).
I'd like to add that you can start in a really affordable way. E.g. the Pixel 9a is typically 350 Euro here and a perfectly fine way to start out with GrapheneOS - it still has years of support in it.
Would but unfortunately I got screwed with a locked bootloader, either going to go the dumbphone or the (much less practical) cyberdeck + SIM card route.
It's about making sure you can't bypass systems like this-- or rather, that when you use your rights under the GPL to remove this privacy invading crud or just otherwise modify your software you'll be broadly banned from interacting with third party services.
The micropastics should have a really low average Z, I think the stearates will be much higher and distinguishable in a BSE image, and (not to mention if you observe their x-ray spectrum...)
So I'm either confused about something or pointing out that they're hard to distinguish in an SE image is not really a useful point, ... it's more relevant that SEM isn't the typical tool used for these counting efforts.
I'd look myself but I recently moved and the SEM is in parts. :)
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