Fertilizer Dump Spoils Intel's Pure Water 211
An anonymous reader writes "Intel had to shut down part of its Irish plant for a while because of the extreme cold and the fact the local council polluted the water supply with fertilizer. Apparently it got down to -12 degrees C at the Intel plant in Leixlip, County Kildare. But to make matters worse, the local council ran out of rock salt to grit the roads and opted for fertilizer instead. There were fears that ammonia and nitrates in the fertilizer might have contaminated the local water supply. The problem for the chipmaker is that it needs extremely pure water for its manufacturing processes."
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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But... (Score:5, Funny)
It's got what plants crave!
why tagged gatorade instead of brawndo? (Score:3, Funny)
Brawndo's got what plants crave. They crave Brawndo. It's got electrolytes.
Water Filters? Hello? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was in this very plant a year or two ago and seem to recall them saying that not even filtering was good enough, they actually had to distill the water they got because filtering won't remove all impurities (enough for most practical purposes, but I think the reason they need absolutely pure is because pure H2O doesn't conduct electricity, but the slightest impurity will).
I find it very hard to believe this same plant shut down because they didn't consider the possibility of their water supply (completely outdoors and unguarded) being contaminated somehow.
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Interesting)
But if they have to distill their water anyway, I don't see the problem. Unless the salts mess up their still.
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Informative)
Distillation only removes sediments (mostly). You don't get rid of evaporating chemicals that easy, you'd actually have to use refining distillation combined with reverse osmosis filtering to get clean water. And that gets slow and expensive fast.
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Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Informative)
I work on this site and here's what really happened. Ireland, especially the Dublin area had a 1 in 100 year event, with the lowest ever recorded temperatures, that lasted for over 3 weeks. As road salt was running short all over the country (and across Europe) and it was getting hard to get deliveries into the country, Kildare County Council switched to spraying urea on the roads instead of just rock salt.
Levels of Ammonia in the local water supply shot up, especially as the water reserves are way below normal (our drinking water at home, 5 miles from the plant, has been shut off every night for 12 hours since 7th Jan). Our systems were not prepared for this as it was such an unlikely event and for a period of several days we were unable to use the local water supply. The levels in the water did not make it unsafe to drink at all, we were unable to purify enough for use in our oldest factory (over 15 years old). The other 2 fabs on site were not affected. We brought water in via tanker until our off-site testing confirmed that it was once more safe for use.
Quite how this becomes news is beyond me, we dealt with it as an internal matter, laid no blame on the council as it was such an unexpected event, and made no public statements as we didn't want to cause a fuss. I guess someone else did want to rant on about it though...
And yes, I'm posting anonymously because I'm not authorised to speak for the company...
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Informative)
No, salt can be easily removed from water by distilling. But some organic matter has a boiling point at around the same temperature than water and thus is not removed by a simple distilling process.
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I've been involved in projects for the food and medical industries requiring "pure" water, though those do not have requirements as exacting as the purity required for chip making. The systems I've seen have multiple stages through various levels of increasing efficiency filtration, softening, and deionization beds. One of the bigger problems is that pure water is very
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That's purifying, but not exactly distilling. Distillation is a method of separating mixtures based on differences in their volatilities in a boiling liquid mixture (see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). So to actually distill water, you have to boil it.
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Maybe there's more to this story, but it'll end up being something rather mundane.
I worked for a time at a chip fab in Allentown PA [answers.com] and they were slavish about the use of only sand to lay down over icy walkways in the winter. The least amount of urea or sand was said to 'poison' the chips despite the mammoth water filtration system in the basement.
The contamination they're worried about is not from process water, I would wager.
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A book (isbn: 9781846270697) about waste water will tell you that Irelands sewage and water distribution systems are sub par, a couple of years ago the Irish in some areas where having to boil there water to remove bugs.
Ireland might be a tax free paradise for american corps, but investment in the basics like water treatment leaves much to be desired.
No surprises here that it got shutdown.
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but investment in the basics like water treatment leaves much to be desired.
Water treatment is fine, the problem is in the 1940s supply infrastructure, debates in the Dáil have gone on record as saying that 45%+ of the water that is processed leaks from pipes en route to the taps. This is the legacy of the incompetents in charge of the country at the moment, who would rather bow to public sector union demands for pay rises than fix this infrastructure. Not to worry though, the Greens in the ruling coalition are going to inflict a new water rates tax on us to ensure that the un
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Regarding southern U.S. states, the ones I've lived in actually have a fairly moderate sales tax. Illinois and California have much higher sales tax rates than Texas, for instance, and they have state income taxes to boot. Yes, you need taxes for civilization, but efficiency in the use of tax dollars plays a role in how steep the taxes need to be.
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Linuxrocks123: what do you consider "fairly moderate sales tax"?
Case in point, Cleveland, TN (just north east of Chattanooga, TN) has a 10.25% sales tax. The local municipality decided to add 1% to cover basic infrastructure improvements such as roads to the already high 9.25% statewide sales tax.
The good side of living in Tennessee is that there is no state income tax and low real estate property taxes. So, it is a great place to earn a living, as long as you don't buy a lot of stuff.
Oh, and that 10.25%
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add Cook County's 1.75%
add the Regional Transportation Authority's 1%
Add Chicago's 1.25%
Add Chicago's special tax district (which soaks the areas around downtown and the McCormick Place convention center) 1%
That adds up to 11.25%, unless you're buying soft drinks, where it rises to 14.25%.
To be fair, the taxes on food and medicine are lower (2.25%, but restaurants do not qualify as food)
Then again, Chicago has among the highest gasoline taxes in the nation.
And Ill
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I would prefer a built-in tax, too, for the simplicity. Although that would probably encourage tax hikes since we can't really see what slice the government is getting.
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Informative)
Have materially lower living standards (like Ireland)
Would you mind clarifying exactly what you mean by that comment? According to this, Ireland [mapsofworld.com] is in the top ten places in the world in terms of standard of living, and was selected as the happiest place on earth by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2005.
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Places with "low taxes" either:
You can't get a modern civilization for pennies on the dollar.
Ireland doesn't have much lower taxes than elsewhere, income tax and VAT are quite average I believe, there's a very high tax on alcohol and cigarettes (Seriously, look at the prices of these here if you don't believe me, I doubt you'll find somewhere more expensive to drink and smoke in without some effort), as is, IIRC, tax on petrol.
It's only really corporations that pay low tax, and it's made up for in many ways.
Also lower living standards? What the fuck comes to your mind when you think of Ireland, peo
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Ireland does have the lowest overall tax burden in the Euro area and one of the lowest rates in the EU. So, you aren't being "progressive" enough by taxing a lot, therefore obviously you must live in a complete shithole.
Can't say much about the living standards as I haven't been there, but from what I've heard there's a pretty decent level of services available to people.
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Low taxes, other things being equal , necessarily lead to higher standard of living and better civilization. The obvious extreme case is communist countries up to the breakdown of the USSR, which had an extraordinarily low standard of living because for all practical purposes the government took everything.
The key issue, as always, is incentive. If you can't keep what you earn, why bother? The second issue is that government is inherently nonproductive.
Modern civilization relentlessly pursues improvement,
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:4, Interesting)
The water used for chip manufacture is a very ultrapure water created through an involved process using mixed media beds, filters, and reverse osmosis membranes. The fertilizer would have never made it to the chip but would have likely fouled the ultrapure water production equipment as it needs repetitively clean feed water. The molecules in the water actually etch the surface of the silicone if they are not removed. - according to an ultrapure water production class I attended.
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in a semiconductor foundry, although not something on the scale of Intel. Foundries need ultrapure water not to get electrical insulation, but to remove contamination. Sodium, for example, acts as a mobile charge centre in silicon dioxide and changes the electrical properties of the devices.
Foundries use reverse osmosis filters (not distillation) to get their deionized water, where they push water at pressure through a semipermeable membrane (i.e. permeable to water, not contaminants). RO membranes can get destroyed by unexpected contaminants, and so usually there are prefilters in place to take care of them. Some years ago we lost a (very expensive) membrane when the prefilter was accidentally swapped out but not replaced. My guess is that the fertilizer in the water supply had something that the prefilters/RO membrane couldn't handle, or couldn't handle so much of. Either they lost the membrane or shut things down as a precaution.
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Makes me wonder if an electrolysis->fuel cell system would be a good way of doing this... You'd just have to clean out the electrolysis cell periodically and replace the energy lost to heat (hopefully similar to what the RO pumps were using).
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Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:4, Insightful)
They surely have, as the water in the water supply are never pure, but there is a difference between purifying normal water, and contaminated water.
I'd guess their system could not handle, (or could not process enough of), the contaminated water.
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This is testable. Add 100g of nitrate fertilizer to 4 liters of water, and let it sit overnight. In the morning pour the water through your filter of choice and then drink the result. Delicious right?
Filters and purification mechanisms have limits, those limits are chosen at design time based on the range of pollutants expected in the input water. If you increase those pollutants by orders of magnitude it's likely the purification system you have just won't cut it.
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You want to use active charcoal, as it has two things that are very important: the carbon itself, and the huge surface area due to the pores. Actual coal has a pretty low surface area for its volume.
Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:5, Insightful)
Water filters aren't magical devices. They can only filter so much crap out of the water before they need to be replaced. It might not make financial sense to continue operating the plant if they have to replace the filter for every fifty gallons of water they use.
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Use water synthesis Re:Water Filters? Hello? (Score:3, Interesting)
Use water synthesis:
1. Buy hydrogen and oxygen.
2. Burn the pure hydrogen with pure oxygen into a fuel cell.
3. Get electricity in the process
4. Get pure water
Sure, the process would not be cheep.
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For example it's not good enough to get 99% pure alcohol let alone 100%. Similarly it's not good enough to get 99% pure water if alcohol has been in it.
It's official. (Score:5, Funny)
Intel processors stink.
What a fucked up move (Score:5, Interesting)
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It practically never becomes that cold in Ireland. It's quite rare to get sub-zero temperatures here, nevermind -12. This situation was unprecedented. There was not enough equipment or supplies of salt and grit and this was a last resort. It's easy for someone living in a country which experiences this regularly to criticize the actions of a country who doesn't. In my lifetime I had never seen snow at 6" before. The councils and the people were extremely unprepared and I'm sure that the last thing on Kildar
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still, "extreme cold" in summary just sounds braindead.
as for decisions on salting and such, is ireland somehow isolated ? no internet, no traveling chances ? could have tried asking countries a bit to the east how to deal with snow...
anyway, salting is a very bad thing anyway. it does serious damage to plants/trees, cars, boots and probably doesn't improve water, as in this case. additionally, it indeed only works for a few degrees below zero, thus resulting in complete ice as soon as temperatures drop bel
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could have tried asking countries a bit to the east how to deal with snow...
To which the answer is "have deep snow and persistent below-freezing temperatures every winter, so that you can justify the expense of maintaining the infrastructure and experience to deal with it".
Which doesn't help much when you're faced with a once-in-20-years weather event (after an apparent trend - whatever the cause - to milder winters). How many snowploughs and blowers do you buy, maintain and keep manned if they're only going to be taken out of the garage for a few days every third year?
Anyway, th
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Sub Zero for you dingbats using the metric measurement isn't cold. Bitch when it's -12 below Zero f
...then everybody buys snowchains for their car, a fur coat that would make you pass out with heatstroke if you wore it in a typical UK or Irish winter, and builds tunnels or covered walkways between buildings. Simple.
Now try dealing with temperatures hovering around zero C for a few days at a time, where you rarely get enough snow to use chains or studs and the water is continually melting and re-freezing and where years or even decades can pass between bouts of nontrivial winter weather. Its a different
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Indeed, this is often the problem in the Dallas area, so we have a lot of sympathy for them. The Chicago/New England arseholes like to point and laugh because people freak out over a single day of snow with 3 inches of accumulation, but our problem isn't that it snows/ices like this. The problem is that it only happens for an average of 1-2 days per winter. Some winters we have zero ice and snow. Others we have 5 days, but never more than a week.
How can you justify a huge fleet of salt trucks, snow plows, p
There are different type of salts (Score:3, Informative)
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So they should have just sprayed a fine layer of Guinness? That would provide a nice thermal blanket for the roads, traction, and by the time the head forms you'd know it's time to spray again.
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And fertilizer (ammonium) actually works down to about 20F (-7C)
see more here [about.com]
In practice, a combination of plowing, very high sodium chloride levels, and the action of rolling tires can make roads fairly safe to drive even below 0F.
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Oh, and for those that will bring up that the tires are studded, I never used studded tires, and many people don't. I was hoping that the state would ban them (the level of damage they do to the roads in absurd, and the ruts they create cause more damage than the loss of the studs would), but they'll never get around to it, despite c
Re:What a fucked up move (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually for about 3 weeks there were only about 3 days where there was a thaw at midday - and that was the situation further south. It was pretty dramatic weather for somewhere that normally has relatively mild winters (even the usual week or two of more extreme weather is just a few degrees below freezing at night, and as you say, about zero by day). The outdoor temperature one morning at 10:30 AM (admittedly an hour and a half to go till midday) was -11C with freezing fog causing rather pretty ice constructions to stealthily grow on every surface!
The council's actions were pretty much an act of desperation. It was awkward enough over the Christmas holidays (and people did die on the roads) but once people went back to work, with supplies pretty much exhausted and neighbours all having to conserve rock salt too, things were pretty dire.
We'd have been completely snookered but for some investment in winter gear for the councils during the boom years. Previously in the 80s/90s a lot of councils probably would only have had a pick-up truck with guys with shovels to spread grit - now there are fleets of gritters with snowplough attachments and also supporting off-road vehicles with plough attachments - plus afaik some councils in parts of the country where it is more necessary have actual snowploughs too. However circumstances were nevertheless exacerbated by councils having limited 2009 budget left for paying overtime, so some of this kit stayed at home during Christmas.
Things were bad enough that parts of the motorway network were temporarily reduced to one lane operation, and there was consideration given to closing even some major routes if the thaw hadn't arrived when it did.
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The council's actions were pretty much an act of desperation. It was awkward enough over the Christmas holidays (and people did die on the roads) but once people went back to work, with supplies pretty much exhausted and neighbours all having to conserve rock salt too, things were pretty dire.
You know what they should have put down? Sand. With temperatures that cold, they should have given up on melting the ice while conserving their rock salt supplies. When warmer temperatures return, they'd be able to resume salting the roads. Oh well, that's the power of hindsight.
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One thing's certain- Intel better donate to them next time they need salt and equipment. MY company would have. Now Intel's whining and losing money, but if they had foresight to be good neighbors in the community and help out, there would be no problem.
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especially given that salt at -12 will just get you that - salt on top of ice. with all the added environmental damage when it gets warmer.
Use Irish Whiskey instead . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Alcohol melts ice, right? And Ireland is awash in whiskey . . . well at least Killinaskully seems to be. So they could have sprayed whiskey on the roads instead of fertilizer.
Of course, the road crews would ask:
"So we're to be spraying good whiskey on the roads to clear them of ice, are we? Do ye mind if we pass that whiskey through our kidneys first?"
I'm not sure what effect whiskey in the water supply would have on Intel's manufacturing process, but the public wouldn't mind having a wee bit in their morning tee.
Actually, the general public would be so toasted that wouldn't give a damn about Intel.
Re:Use Irish Whiskey instead . . . (Score:5, Informative)
You are closer to the truth than you think: the fertilizer they were spreading was actually urea [independent.ie]!
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Isn't that the stuff they put on pretzels to make them golden-brown?
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Germany and/or Austria used wine for a while after the big scandal about wine adulterated with illegal sweeteners like ethylene glycol.
Similar thing happened to Inmos in the 70's (Score:5, Interesting)
What had actually happened, as we found out three months later, was that on Christmas Eve the engineers at the local reservoir decided to celebrate. They were supposed to stay on site, so what they did was to dump 100 times the standard level of chlorine into the water supply, then go off and have a Christmas party. That chlorine totally ruined our semiconductor plant. The result was that the Americans said, "These Brits don't know what they're doing. Get rid of them!". The semiconductor facility was taken away and put under the control of the Americans who were deemed to understand these things.
Seems the the Yanks can't defend themselves against this sort of thing either! http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/CCS/res/res33.htm/ [manchester.ac.uk]
Superfund site karma (Score:4, Insightful)
A generation later Intel now needs its water cleaning up.
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Since you didn't cite anything, I will do so from the first Google result. From IntelSuperfundCleanup.com [intelsuper...leanup.com]
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Nice omission of detail there, buddy. http://intelsuperfundcleanup.com/ [intelsuper...leanup.com]
In early 1982, concern about widespread contamination in the area's shallow ground water led the California Regional Water Quality Control Board (Regional Water Board) to send chemical use questionnaires to over 2,000 facilities regarding the use of hazardous materials. Intel Corporation (Intel) was among the few questionnaire recipients that responded proactively by installing ground water monitoring wells adjacent to their undergrou
"Filtration" ?? WTF?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"Filtration" ?? WTF?? (Score:5, Informative)
RO is just one step of many to make Ultra Pure Water - Urea has been a problem in semiconductor fabs for a long time - enough can sneak through the reverse osmosis, electrodeionization, ion exchange, etc, to get incorporated in the photoresist, which then breaks down under the UV light when it gets exposed, and splits into two ammonia molecules, which shifts the pH and causes under cutting of the photoresist. Intel in Portland OR added a few million dollars of processing equipment to react out the urea before it can cause a problem.
How do I know all of this? I make 20,000 gallons per day of Nano-Research grade water, which is even purer than semiconductor fab water. Which means I hang out with the all the ultrapure water people from Intel, TI, AMD, IBM, etc
Urea contamination is old news........
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cold? (Score:2)
Slashdot is a strange place.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Water supplies in the US and around the world are being contaminated to unsafe levels by industrial waste, agricultural runoff and mining effluent on a daily basis.
Nobody cares until Intel can't use it to make chips? Slashdot is a strange place....
Nobody cares because the only pollution that matters any more is Carbon.
Urea not the crazy pollution made out to be here. (Score:2)
Re:Priorities, people (Score:5, Funny)
You've never been to Ireland, have you? 96% water [wikipedia.org] is more than enough.
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I guess it all depends on what that other four percent is. I mean, imagine if someone were to dispose of old thermometers by draining the remaining mercury near a local water supply. And you know they say that we need to drink eight glasses of water per day to stay healthy.
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That said, I always thought Guinness was more like 7% abv?
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Guinness is more than a dilution of Everclear.
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Did the wiskey makers stop making wiskey?
Re:Priorities, people (Score:5, Informative)
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"100% pure water will do no harm to you, whatsoever. Or your gut bacteria"
Know how osmotic pressure works?
Pure water, much like pure oxygen, is bad for you over extended periods of time.
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You're right, technically. Distilled water won't directly harm you. There is no mechanism by which H20 disrupts body functions directly (disregard blocking O2 absorption in the lungs for a second). What happens though is that pretty much every membrane in your body is porous for ions and minerals. If you drink nothing but distilled water for an extended period, you're losing minerals through osmosis very quickly. The first effect is that your neural system starts to act up, because Potassium and other ions
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This is based on the assumption that you're not ingesting any ions in the food you eat. That would pretty much require a diet of pure paper or complete fasting. Anything that was once alive and hasn't been completely purified (paper or pure gelatine) is going to have some sodium, potassium, and calcium.
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Of course. However, depending on the quantity of distilled water you're drinking, you will have to adjust your diet. If you do not modify your diet to account for the fact that you're losing ions and minerals to your intestine, you will end up with a deficit. The deficit will stabilize somewhere, but at a sub-optimal level.
Re:Priorities, people (Score:4, Informative)
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum [wikipedia.org]
Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: "reduction to the absurd") is a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications to a logical but absurd consequence.
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Of course, the absurd consequences might be true. Just ask Saccheri.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccheri [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Priorities, people (Score:5, Informative)
The fluid which eventually reaches the gut bacteria has a ton of secretions in it, from the salivary glands all the way down to the liver and pancreas, and bears no resemblance to the originally swallowed fluid. As such makes no physiological sense that drinking pure water is toxic to the beneficial gut bacteria (any more so than drinking whiskey).
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"The human digestive system is a polymer (poly-phospholipid) lined tube that is impervious to water absorption. "
Only the stomach. Most water absorption happens from duodenum to descending colon.
Even taking a bath in purified deionized water is bad for you over time.
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I just graduated medical school and have worked with hundreds of patients, and while I have not seen as many patients as a 20 year old veteran I can count the number of patients that eat a proper nutritious diet on one hand.
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So how do you know that the bacteria in the water is the good kind or not? Fertiliser also has lots of bacteria in it...
You test it. And if not fit to drink, bring in drinking water from an unaffected area while the local supply is treated.
And if the fertiliser was used as an alternative to salt to keep the roads passable, they would not have used organic fertiliser. Shovelling shit on something only works in PR and politics.
Re:Frosty (Score:5, Funny)
thats a Frosty Irish piss in your chips
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Re:filters work to make water pure (Score:4, Funny)
The resistance rather depends on how much of it you have and how it's arranged. Put it another way: resistance is not a property of substances.
That's inconceivable. I'd expect it to be a little ova that.
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Kairo? Is that the KDE version of Cairo?
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Sort of, but it's not the alcohol, but the hops that made the water safe.