exchemist

1960s special effects were pretty primitive.

Indeed. I don't know how diagnostic AI works but I imagine it may look for patterns in the data: X-ray pictures, blood analyses, physical examinations and so forth, and then provide the doctor with an assessment of probabilities of different conditions, or something like that. In this sad case, I imagine the doctor would then have had to make a decision to dismiss cancer from the list of possible conditions presented to him or her in black and white. This would be psychologically hard to do - and to justify in retrospect - if the AI came up with a probability of, say, over 20% for cancer. So maybe it might have prompted an intervention.

Hmm, I think this may be misunderstanding how diagnostic AI works. These are, to my understanding, not LLMs.

Merkel took that decision in 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima accident and long before Putin's invasion of Crimea. At the time, Germany had not yet given up Russia becoming a civilised trading partner. It is true that, even at the time, many other countries thought it a misguided over-reaction, given the climate change imperative (not to mention the absence of earthquake risk in Germany!). But there is no evidence of any "payment" to make this decision, so far as I am aware. This looks to me like just more of your (very Russian, trollish) obsession with conspiracies.

Presumably because GDAE is how a violin is tuned, I seem to recall from when one of my brothers used to play.

Oh so you actually went to see it? We didn't. We just laughed at the posters for it on the Underground, on our way to and from school.

Haha I remember that one: "Krakatoa, East of Java". 🤪 I was at school at the time and we laughed at the idiocy.

That’s interesting. Seems the story of him being on death row is untrue. Also I was wrong about the number who died: 30,000 not 20, 000. Lacroix, who was among the first on the scene, took dramatic pictures of the aftermath which Holmes reproduced in the book, including the sinister “spine”, turdlike, of almost solid lava, which was extruded up to a height of I think ~ 100m afterwards, though it soon crumbled. It even glowed in the dark, creepily, for a bit, I think. You can visit Sylbaris’s cell among the ruins. I found Martinique, being part of France, orderly and good to visit. I tried my first ti’ punch there - something I often make at home now in the summer. Needs rhum agricole, which I buy in France - Bacardi no good at all for it. We also tried sugar cane juice, on the beach. Very good and with far more flavour than I was expecting. (But you will know all this, being in the Caribbean yourself.🙂)

Holmes also contained a dramatic account of the 1902 eruption of la montagne Pelée which destroyed st. Pierre in Martinique, which made a great impression on me. At that time, the term he used for what we now call a pyroclastic flow was une nuée ardente. I think it may have originated with that eruption. Some years ago I climbed the mountain with my wife and son, as far as the 1st crater rim. Bizarrely, she was rung up by her uncle in Paris, just as we reached the ridge. He had no idea where we were. The ruins of St. Pierre are a sombre reminder of the tragedy. 20,000 people perished. I think only three survived, one of them, ironically, a condemned convict in a deep cell in the prison, who subsequently earned a living by showing off the scars on his back from the burns. They never had the heart to rebuild, establishing a new capital at Fort de France.

Yes! That was why my mother, then teaching geography at the local girls' grammar school, bought the book. Plate tectonics was the new thing. She was quite excited by it and so, having a scientifically-minded boy's interest in volcanoes, I read parts of the book myself. Of course the detailed understanding of how volcanoes arise behind subduction zones has progressed hugely since then, but the principle was already there.

I remember reading an account of this in Arthur Holmes's Principles of Physical Geology, as a teenager in the 1960s. At that time Anak Krakatau was quite small, still. Now, I gather, it has grown to adulthood and has even suffered a collapse rather like that of its parent, though not as dramatic.

The question tells you A and B are pure liquids, not mixtures. Why are you asking about the composition of liquid A, then?

I've only just read this. Would it be a silly idea to run a couple of vast flywheels, just to add "ballast" to the system? One could even simply retain a couple of these big turbo-alternator sets, unpowered, and spun up and maintained to 50Hz off the grid.

Yes exactly. So there is a greater mole fraction of B in the vapour phase than there is in the liquid phase, because it has a greater vapour pressure than A. In other words, B is the more volatile component. And you can work out the mole fractions in the vapour phase by multiplying the vapour pressure of each component by its mole fraction in the liquid phase. So I don't see why you think there is a problem. For a physical picture of what is happening, you can consider the molecules on the liquid surface, as it is from this layer that molecules escape to create the vapour phase. 40% of them on the surface are A and 60% of them are B. But in pure liquid form, molecules of A have less of a tendency to escape than the molceules of B. That is what a lower vapour pressure of A than B implies. So in the mixture, not only are there only 40% of A molecules in the surface layer but also, they have less of an intrinsic tendency to escape. Hence we get 30% A and 70% B in the vapour phase. This is the principle behind fractional distillation. In the fractionating column, the mixture is made to evaporate and condense repeatedly as it rises up the column, each time creating a mixture with a higher proportion of the more volatile component. So that at the top of the column you get the more volatile component in almost pure form. (I once worked at an oil refinery🙂)

Just do what I asked you, and make a new post showing your reasoning. I’m going to get up and have my breakfast now (it is 0730 in the UK) and then I can come back to this for you. Let’s take it step by step without the distraction of AI and get the logic clear.