>Here I feel the need for an aside. Many, many people will tell you that the key to reducing bean gas is to eat more beans. Eating more beans, they argue, works because it allows our digestive systems, and the microbiome in them, to acclimate to the beans. Over time, they say, the gassiness will go down. This makes no sense to me. If these oligosaccharides are food for bacteria in our gut, common sense would say that feeding that bacteria more food would, if anything, do the opposite by supporting their population growth while giving them plenty of raw material to digest. It wasn't within the scope of this project to test (and, I suspect, disprove) this theory, but count me as highly doubtful. If anything, I have to imagine that eating more beans more often just makes people more used to being gassy, and that, in turn, makes them notice it less. (Their significant others might have a very different take…)
I agree with this in principle but have to point out a few flaws in practice.
First, the immediate product of fermentation is not methane, despite what your high school biology teacher told you. It's hydrogen. In fact, bacteria do not produce methane at all! Only archaea are capable of methanogenesis. This is a rather surprising fact nobody mentioned in school:
>Organisms capable of producing methane for energy conservation have been identified only from the domain Archaea, a group phylogenetically distinct from both eukaryotes and bacteria, although many live in close association with anaerobic bacteria.
So there is some room for error here. When methanogenesis occurs, the volume of gas is reduced by 80%:
4 H2 + CO2 >> CH4 + 2 H2O (l)
But I have never seen any evidence that the amount of archaea or the extent of methanogenesis in the digestive tract varies with diet. However, it does change under certain circumstances, and more methane in enteric gas is generally correlated with less hydrogen:
>Usually patients produce either hydrogen or methane, and only rarely there are significant co-producers, as typically the methane is produced at the expense of hydrogen by microbial conversion of carbon dioxide. Various studies show that methanogens occur in about a third of all adult humans
(The second study is less optimistic than I am about methanogens reducing intestinal discomfort.)
But there is another thing that can change the amount of noticeable farting: unnoticeable farting. The digestive tract has its own nervous subsystem which reacts to stimuli and processes information. It's plausible that if you produce a lot of gas for a long time, your digestive tract learns to let it out gently. This may reduce irritation of the epithelium.
If you use node, you can do that... until someone decides to add eslint to the pipeline and you get thousands of formatting "errors" that you have to "fix".
In theory, they do. In practice, I have only seen one codebase — ONE — in all my years of programming that was using tabs and yet did not end up with spaces getting mixed in with those tabs at some point along the way. (In the indentation, I mean: obviously once the non-indentation part of the line starts, you want spaces there). And that codebase had precisely two people committing regularly to it. Occasional PRs from other contributors, but only two primary maintainers.
Every other tab-using codebase I've seen (of non-trivial size and complexity, that is), someone, somewhere, had been lazy, or had a misconfigured editor, or something, and spaces snuck into the tabs. The worst offender I ever saw was a file that had been edited by multiple people over the years, who must have had different tab settings in their editors. There was one section where they had tried to line up a bunch of variable assignments and values. (Yes, I know, bad idea, but stick with me for a minute, I'm getting to the punchline). None of the pieces of code that were supposed to line up were actually lined up. (This was C# code, so indentation didn't truly matter like it would in F#, or Python, or ... well, I won't list all of them since I'm trying to get to the point). Here's the really hilarious part. I tried all sorts of tab settings to see if I could get that file to line up. I tried 8. I tried 4. I tried 2. I even tried 3, the setting for the people who can't make their minds up between 4 and 2. Then I tried really oddball settings like 16, 5, or even 7. Nothing worked. There was no tab-size setting I could use that would make the code line up.
That was the day I said "Forget about tabs, just use spaces, you won't have that problem with spaces." Tabs have great promise, but in practice, in my experience at least, you end up having to tell your colleagues "hey, you need to set your tabs to 4" (or 8) "before editing this file". Which almost negates the promise of tabs. They're great in theory, but I've only seen ONE codebase that made them work in practice.
So long as my format is the standard one, that all newcomers an unopinionateds see by default and thus my opinions rule forever... yeah! great idea! otherwise... oh hayol no.
>It's a very comparable game of cat and mouse to spam email filtering. People also tried to claim that spam was over because for a time companies like Google cared enough to invest a lot in preventing as much as possible from getting through. If you've noticed in recent years the motivation to keep up that level of filtering has greatly diminished.
I have a bottle of Colatura di Alici in my fridge. It's great when I remember to use it. But it costs about ten times as much as a Southeast Asian fish sauce, which is a natural consequence of only being produced in one town in Italy.
The US production in your linked article is listed as "W". This is explained as "Withheld to avoid disclosing company proprietary data". But imports consistently exceed exports, so it appears that US production is not likely to make up a global shortfall.
Until the cost of local production (union labor, environmental regulations, etc.) meets the increasing costs of imports during said shortfall. Then we'll just make it here. The shortfall goes away but the price would admittedly be higher.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not arguing that the US will face a shortfall. The data above show that the US imports less than 25% of its bromine, but are redacted to prevent the public knowing the real amount. Factories in America are unlikely to face shortfalls of bromine.
But unless we have an extra 250 million tonnes of production capacity sitting on the sidelines, which would probably mean more than doubling our total output, we're not going to make up the shortfall for anyone else. We're talking about the majority of (disclosed) global production going offline if Iran could manage it (though again it is not clear that they can or will). China will also probably be using everything that they produce. Europe and the rest of Asia will be left high and dry. It's a win for the US strategy of critical minerals resilience, in some sense, but it's still a problem.
The linked article from USGS says nothing about semiconductor-grade purity bromine, but only about ordinary bromine that is used in the chemical industry.
Semiconductor-grade purity bromine is orders of magnitude more expensive than ordinary bromine and the vast majority of bromine producers do not make it.
The USGS article provides no evidence that such bromine is made in USA. I would rather expect Japan to be a producer, not USA, because for many semiconductor-grade purity chemical substances there are major producers in Japan.
Korea does not like to depend on imports from Japan, so I would not be surprised if there was a Japanese source of pure bromine but Korea prefers to import it from Israel. If this were true, they could still switch suppliers in case of a shortage.
The issue is chip production in Korea and possibly Taiwan. And that's where vast amounts of US chip inventory comes from. How to buildout AI capacity if can't source memory chips? This exposes another risk to the high AI valuations which are underpinning market valuations.
The article is timely as it suggests yet another unconsidered risk factor of this war - USA could destroy its own stock market. Or Iran could accelerate that with one missile. I like to think the US military know this hence obsession with missile destruction but it is reasonable based on recent behaviour to assume that the MAGA overlords can't even spell bromine nevermind understand the risk.
The British blockade probably did more for the downfall of Mossadegh than the US influence on the Shah. Iran's economy was severely impacted by the blockade and this allowed the Shah to gain support within the Iranian government for a coup. The US decided to support a coup because it was feared that a collapse of the Iranian economy would open the door to communist revolutionaries, and the US was not prepared to go against Britain and try to stop the blockade. I have wondered, however, if the outcome of the Iran situation in 1953 affected Eisenhower's judgment about the Suez crisis in 1956.
By 1979 it was no longer possible to marshal public anger towards the UK whose empire had been completely dismantled. Meanwhile, the US continued to support the Shah's regime by selling weapons until 1979, and this was probably at least as important as the coup for the image of America as a public villain during the Islamic Revolution.
The largest producer outside the Dead Sea is China by far, and the only other significant producer is Japan (!) which produces a paltry ~10% of worldwide output. It's possible to produce bromine from other places but you'd basically be starting from zero on the infrastructure involved. The short-term risks are real.
However, it may be hard for Iran to disrupt bromine production. They may also not think about it.
EDIT: According to other links in this thread the US produces a significant but undisclosed (?!) quantity of bromine, practically all of which is consumed domestically. So it was probably missing from my data. Not great for other bromine users.
>the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.
Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today.
>If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots.
Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.
> Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years.
I Googled about this issue. It looks like it is multi-factor: legal battles, lack of funding, and significant conflict over growth management vs. environmental concerns.
>The vast majority of MRI machines used today use superconducting magnets made from niobium-titanium (NbTi), which becomes superconducting at 9.2 degrees above absolute zero. This is well below the boiling point of any other coolant, making liquid helium the only practical option for cooling the magnets.
Well, this is part of it. The other issue is that the superconducting phase diagram has two limits: the transition temperature Tc and the upper critical magnetic field Hc. The magnetic field limit is generally highest at absolute zero and drops steeply with temperature. Even for the superconductors with Tc as high as 120 K the Hc at 20 K will be much less than the Hc at 4 K. So in order to make powerful superconducting magnets you need helium regardless of what superconductor you use, since nothing has broken this pattern.
I agree with this in principle but have to point out a few flaws in practice.
First, the immediate product of fermentation is not methane, despite what your high school biology teacher told you. It's hydrogen. In fact, bacteria do not produce methane at all! Only archaea are capable of methanogenesis. This is a rather surprising fact nobody mentioned in school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanogenesis
>Organisms capable of producing methane for energy conservation have been identified only from the domain Archaea, a group phylogenetically distinct from both eukaryotes and bacteria, although many live in close association with anaerobic bacteria.
So there is some room for error here. When methanogenesis occurs, the volume of gas is reduced by 80%:
4 H2 + CO2 >> CH4 + 2 H2O (l)
But I have never seen any evidence that the amount of archaea or the extent of methanogenesis in the digestive tract varies with diet. However, it does change under certain circumstances, and more methane in enteric gas is generally correlated with less hydrogen:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bmfh/45/1/45_2025-044/_...
>However, methane gas production was not changed by dietary intake, suggesting that intervention with prebiotics may be necessary.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1752-7155/7/2/024...
>Usually patients produce either hydrogen or methane, and only rarely there are significant co-producers, as typically the methane is produced at the expense of hydrogen by microbial conversion of carbon dioxide. Various studies show that methanogens occur in about a third of all adult humans
(The second study is less optimistic than I am about methanogens reducing intestinal discomfort.)
But there is another thing that can change the amount of noticeable farting: unnoticeable farting. The digestive tract has its own nervous subsystem which reacts to stimuli and processes information. It's plausible that if you produce a lot of gas for a long time, your digestive tract learns to let it out gently. This may reduce irritation of the epithelium.
reply