exchemist

Agree about the Iranian economy. I read in the Financial Times that they can struggle on for about a year without oil income. Iran is an industrial nation of 90million with quite a lot of other regional exports, not just a bunch of desert tribesmen with oil wells. So they can, apparently, last a year. Whereas the US mid terms are in 6 months and a blockaded Strait ensures higher inflation and fuel prices for US voters. Therefore I imagine Iran can afford to tough it out and wait, while the electoral urgency mounts for Trump. They can see the US public turning against him. They can also see he is going nuts, hence their on-line trolling to wind him up in the hope of further mad outbursts that will damage him further. (He now seems to be doing his best to alienate both the Catholics and the Evangelical Right, quite unnecessarily.)

OK so 0.07N/m. Let's say someone spread-eagled on the water has a total waterline length of 9m. That will generate ~0.6N of upthrust, compared to a body weight , for a (light) 60kg person of ~600N, i.e. of the order of 0.1% of what is required to make them float. But away from the question about floating bodies, yes at the cm scale surface tension starts to make itself felt. I have a badly designed colander with 0.5cm holes in stainless steel and I can never get things in it to drain properly. My parsley, coriander or whatever is always dripping wet, no matter how long it is left to drain.

You mean surface tension, like a pond skater? That would depend on the length of the contact line between water and skin. But surely the effect would be negligible, wouldn’t it?

Erm, that doesn't seem to mean very much, to be honest. I really don't think it's a good idea to bandy around sciency words without thinking what they mean. If all protons are the same that means they do NOT have unique features, surely?

There is a lot of chalk in Dorset, whereas I don’t think there is much in Devon and Somerset. Lying on your back in water can’t increase buoyancy, as that has nothing to do with surface area. Buoyancy is a matter of how much liquid is displaced by the floating object, cf. Archimedes’ Principle. But if you lie on your back with your lungs partly inflated, your mouth and nose should be above the water level, whereas if you are vertical the water level is somewhere around your eyes (I think). It makes quite a difference how much your chest is inflated as obviously your chest displaces more water then so you float higher.

What do you mean by “quantum information”? (I’ve an awful feeling you have been at the woo again😄)

A wave is not energy. A wave has energy, among its various properties. Energy is just a property of a physical system, like momentum. A wave is created by a displacement of some medium from its equilibrium value, e.g. when you drop a stone into a pond and a wave spreads out. Water has been displaced, giving it extra energy and the displacement travels outward in the form of a wave. A vibrating object can give rise to a wave if it is in contact with a medium which it is able to displace. That will absorb energy from the vibration and damp it. A vibrating tuning fork displaces the air it is in contact with, creating the sound waves that you hear. And this will damp out the vibration eventually.

Mr President, what is your Vice President doing (at the height of the Iran crisis, WTF) in Hungary, interfering in their forthcoming election by publicly accusing the EU of.............. interfering in their forthcoming election? 🤪🤡🔫 Has he no sense of irony, or indeed self-awareness?

Dead right. I remember at school and university the stories of deaths and torture by the Shah's secret police, SAVAK. One of their specialities was something called the toast rack, whereby they strapped people onto red hot bedsteads. Ugh. The Shah of course was given great support by the USA and I think NATO. But as you say it all goes back to the overthrow by the US and the UK, of Mossadegh in 1953. Churchill was behind that because of threat to nationalise the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (which became BP). A late spasm of imperialist meddling, well past its sell-by date.

Oh that was just about Gazan real estate for Jared Kushner. It seems to have gone nowhere now that Trump has other things on (the remnants of) his mind.

I'd stay away from the word "vibrations" if I were you, though. It is far too redolent of woo, conjuring up visions of Deepak Chopra and sundry other charlatans.😁 A vibration requires something to be vibrating. It is meaningless to speak of a vibration unless you can say what is vibrating. It's a bit like the common mistake people make about energy. You can't have energy on its own: it has to be the energy of something. I think you are on better ground to think of waves as fundamental entities. A wave is something that oscillates with a frequency. Vibration of an object also has a frequency, so it is a bit similar, but a wave is different because it travels, whereas vibration is oscillating motion that occurs on the spot. But even waves have to be waves in something (in this context a field) that is doing the "waving". These are your excitations of the matter fields. At least, that is how physics currently models matter at a fundamental level. Personally I think it is useful to keep in mind the idea of models of reality, as distinct from absolute claims about its true nature. Mathematical treatment of these matter fields and their excitations correctly predicts what we observe in experiments, so to that extent they seem to be real. But it has to be an open question to what extent they are real or are just a mathematical technique that works. In science, all "truth" is provisional, pending the arrival of a better model. (In chemistry it is common to have more than one model of the same thing. These are acknowledged to be only approximations and are chosen according to how suited they are to the problem at hand.) On your point about information, there are physical properties that are conserved in the course of interactions, so these can I suppose be thought of as information that is carried over. But trying to see "vibration" as fundamental seems to me to be barking up the wrong tree: the only fruit of that tree is woo, I fear.🙂

Bullshit, I opened it and was able to read it without any subscription. Here is the list from that article of the ridiculous conspiracies and quack notions RFK has endorsed: - He claimed vaccines can cause autism - He claimed Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates exaggerated the covid pandemic to promote vaccines - He said covid targets caucasians and black people - He claimed the FDA "suppresses" advances in health - He said wireless technology can cause cancer - He has promoted the theory that AIDS is not caused by HIV - He said fluoride causes diseases - He said mass shootings are linked to prescription drugs - He believes the CIA was involving in John F Kennedy's assassination plus a couple of other things that are a bit obscure to people who don't live in the USA. So he is without question a 6-cylinder nutter. That of course does not mean that 100% of what he says must be false. But it does mean it is useless to rely on what he says.

One minor error is that wax for candles comes not from fuel oil but from the dewaxing of lubricating oil fractions. The residue from the primary distillation depicted can undergo vacuum distillation to produce lubricating oil feedstocks. The vacuum distillates undergo either solvent extraction to remove aromatic compounds (Shell uses, or used, furfural) or hydrotreatment (to convert the aromatics to paraffins), which leaves a highly paraffinic material. This is then dewaxed to produce lubricating base oils with an acceptable "pour point" (i.e. so they don't set solid at low temperature because of the presence of paraffin wax). The residue from vacuum distillation undergoes an additional process known as de-asphalting, to get rid of "asphaltenes", which are high molecular weight, fused-ring aromatics. This residue becomes "bright stock", the most viscous grade of lubricating base oil. Actually, wax is generated from the older solvent dewaxing process, which uses a solvent such as methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) to precipitate the wax, after which the solvent is boiled off again for re-use. There is also a more modern alternative known as catalytic dewaxing, which uses hydrotreatment to break up the long chains of paraffin wax into shorter paraffins with a lower pour point. So that doesn't produce wax as a byproduct. Residual fuel oil (RFO), which is produced by simpler refineries without a luboil train, is the stuff burnt by large marine and power plant diesel engines. This is quite challenging to use as fuel, as it needs to be hot in order to flow, is often full of sulphur which forms sulphuric acid when burnt, corroding the cylinders, and asphaltenes, which are tarry substances that can gum up parts and block filters. It also can have vanadium in it, which erodes the valves in an engine. But it is cheap, which is why big ships and power stations use it. Engine designers and luboil manufacturers go to great lengths to overcome the challenges of burning this stuff without damaging the engines. Turbines are unable to burn it. They need distillate fuel or gas. But of course a steam turbine can be fed from a boiler burning RFO.

“….of Nazareth”. As Pilate wrote on the inscription on the cross, according to the gospels. In fact it seems we do not know the first name of Pontius Pilate. Romans had three names, praenomen, nomen and cognomen. Pontius was the nomen or family name. Pilatus or Pilatos was the cognomen, a sort of nickname, which in his case may have meant skilled with the javelin (pilum).

With hydrocarbons, none. The residue from distillation is sold either as residual fuel oil for ships or processed into bitumen, or via further vacuum-distillation to produce lubricating base oils. The sulphur removed from distillate fuels is also sold. In some cat cracking processes surplus carbon is generated as petroleum coke. This can also be sold for a number of purposes. When I first joined Shell and went on the induction course, we were introduced to the "carcass of beef analogy". The butcher buys a whole carcass and divides it up into valuable and less valuable cuts of meat, plus bones and offal. All of these can be sold for some kind of price, though many of the cheaper cuts command a price that is actually less per kg than was paid for the whole carcass. But even though these may look at first glance as if they are sold "at a loss", it make sense to sell them for whatever you can get. They can be seen as "byproducts", with some value though not very much. So it is with crude oil. It gets converted into multiple products and byproducts but all have a price and can be sold.