exchemist

I agree with this. It has to be borne in mind that charcoal, which is what is left after the volatiles have been driven off and burnt, requires a very high temperature to make it burn. If you turn a partly burnt log so that the charred side is upwards, the charcoal will lose heat and may stop burning. If you want to burn the logs completely to ash you ned to maintain a high temperature in the centre of the fire. Disturbing the logs will increase the temporary heat radiation from the fire but by the same toke will cause it to lose temperature. You may end up with less heat in the end, if the result is a lot of unburnt charcoal left behind. Also, if the logs still have some moisture, you risk actually putting the fire out, by diverting even more heat into evaporating the moisture. I think it is best to keep a really hot centre to any wood fire, which is best achieved by periodically moving the logs closer together as they burn, and not by turning them.

More or less. Mind you one good effect of the privatisation of rail was that we finally got some decent investment in new rolling stock. When BR was a nationalised service the government was scared of investing properly in the trains. But we've ended up with absurdly complex fare deals and lack of integration across different providers. Trying to split the track from the trains, so that multiple companies' trains could run on the same track, never worked properly - and corners were cut on track maintenance, leading to a fatal accident due to no chain of responsibility among contractors and subcontractors. So the track part has been back in public ownership for a while. It's a dog's breakfast. Water seems to be a disaster due to lack of effective oversight from the regulator, on both the operations side and on not stamping on inappropriate financial engineering. But energy and telecoms seem to be a success, so I wouldn't say privatisation has to be a catastrophe for all utlities.

What has happened is the franchise system for rail blew up. Most of the companies were in financial trouble and the pandemic has holed them below the waterline, forcing the government to step in. Franchises have now been abandoned. They may stay in full public ownership, or they may try to get the private sector back in the game in a less risky way, by contracting them to provide a service defined by government and remunerated based on how many trains they run, or something. The London Overground, part of Transport for London's network, uses that model, I believe. But the risk involved in planning and recruiting demand and then investing in the assets to meet it has gone for ever, it seems. Water privatisation has been fairly disastrous. The companies loaded themselves up with debt, using their assets as collateral, and paid their directors and shareholders huge dividends and bonuses while neglecting the basic service they were supposed to be providing. Almost every month now there is a new story of operational mismanagement. Both rail and water privatisations came at the tail end of the privatisation boom started by Thatcher and which finished under Major. While telecoms and energy seem to have worked, more or less, these two never did. Both were privatisations too far.

The "representative element" seems to be barely used, and I would agree with you that it seems to be a fairly useless concept. Representative of what? The division of groups into A and B has long since been given up. It makes far more sense to speak of s, p, d and f blocks of the Periodic Table. I don't know how representative (haha) my personal experience is but I, at least, went through a 4 year chemistry degree course back in the 1970s without the term "representative element" being used once, so far as I can recall. The term does not appear anywhere in my 1972 edition of Cotton & Wilkinson. I'd actually be rather interested to know who is suggesting to you that this terminology is relevant, and why.

I notice those two notes form the Devil’s Interval (the tritone), appropriately enough. 😁

They are in the process of being renationalised, by this Tory government, ironically enough.

To do that to Fe metal would involve make a "ferride" anion, Fe⁻ or something. That would not happen. But Zn metal could give electrons to Fe²⁺ or Fe³⁺ cations, reducing them to Fe, while the Zn was correspondingly oxidised to Zn²⁺.

Trains, and anything involving Serwotka.

I certainly think in the UK there may be a resurgence of union membership, due to greater bargaining power by labour. However it seems to me this is caused more by Brexit and the consequent disappearance of the EU labour pool that provided us with so many workers, from care homes, to fruit and vegetable picking, the restaurant trade and on to lorry drivers. One has to hope that the unions will be far more modern and business-literate in their attitude than they were back in their heyday of the 1970s. Certainly, the unions representing occupations such as automotive work seem to have moved with the times. Public sector unions, not so much. There is in my view a crying need for someone to stand up for the poor sods in the "gig" economy, on zero hours and p***poor hourly rates, and people in distribution warehouses etc., like Amazon - what one might call the surveillance economy. Amazon tries hard to keep unions out but if they get in Amazon will only have itself to blame for shafting its workers. It is less clear to me why the pandemic should shift market forces in the direction of more power for labour, unless perhaps fear of infection drives a lot of people out of the labor market permanently. I am dubious about that.

I'm sure there has been an effect caused by the disruption causing people to rethink their lives. Often, we need a chance to stand back for a while if we are to get a perspective on where we are going and have time to ask ourselves questions about it all. Commuters, in particular, and their employers in urban offices, have learnt what can be done via IT and may not want to resume the daily commute ever again. That will affect businesses that provide services to city workers, reduce real estate prices in city centres, and will be a boost to services provided in the places where the workers live (food shops, cafes etc). It will also affect the economics of commuter public transport. Some of these changes could well be permanent. The effect on the airline industry could be lasting, too, especially with climate change imperatives coming along next. Some of the wage rises in the labour market seem due to the temporary state support to people laid off during the pandemic. It's not clear to me whether these rises are permanent or will die away as the support is withdrawn. I don't see any of these changes as affecting the essence of capitalism per se, but they certainly will affect business. When it comes to capitalism, one thing the pandemic has taught us all is the importance of central government. The facile libertarian notion that all government is bad has been shown to be absurd. Without government support and organisation we would have had no vaccines and a lot more of us would be dead or disabled.

If they broke the law they could be done for tax evasion and fined. What they and other multinational companies do is exploit, by perfectly legal means, the differences in tax regimes between countries. That's why Biden et al want to harmonise taxation - or at least set a minimum level - to reduce the ability of these companies to engage in (legal) tax minimisation by arranging for the bulk of their profits to be on the books of their entities in low tax countries. What they do is avoidance, not evasion. Ireland has benefitted hugely over the last couple of decades by offering low corporation tax to attract companies to arrange to generate their profits there. This can be done in various ways. One method is for the operating company in each country to have a service agreement with a service company in the same corporate group, with service fees set at a level that effectively makes the operating company make little money locally, while the service company becomes highly profitable. You put the service company in Ireland and, hey presto, most of your profit is only taxed at Ireland's rate. All perfectly legal, so long as you can justify the service fee in some way. No doubt there are many other methods.

Not if their legalese contravenes the local law where they trade. And anyway, a company like Amazon has no interest in breaking local law: it could cost them the right to trade there.

Indeed. I would have expected a technology-worshipping nation like the US to have been already all over this like a rash, with acoustic and microwave sensors for all frequencies, in every embassy and consulate across the globe.

The curious thing is that nobody has yet detected the putative microwave beams. Though I see there are now some devices being deployed in an attempt to do that.

I did this as child, using yoghourt pots and string. It worked very well. With tin cans I imagine it depends on how free the base is to move, so a thinner one will be better. But there is no doubt that it works in principle, so long as you keep the string taut.

Yes, FOB, CIF, and so forth. A lot is to do with who insures the cargo, who arranges the freight, etc. I’ve forgotten most of it.

Hmm, interesting. I found this from Which, which refers to another piece of legislation, the Consumer Rights Act 2015, which seems to support your contention: https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/regulation/consumer-rights-act-aKJYx8n5KiSl So, indeed, I don't know how this is reconciled with the earlier Act, e.g. whether it repeals the relevant provisions of it, or how it can be reconciled, if at all, with Amazon's T&Cs. It looks as if you may need to find a lawyer specialising in consumer rights law, to get to the bottom of it.

The first paragraph quite explicitly states (highlighted by me in red) that delivery to the carrier is deemed to be delivery to the buyer. That's exactly what the Amazon T&Cs are saying, too. The 2nd para qualifies this by saying that if the seller uses an inappropriate contract for delivery, for the goods involved, then the buyer can hold the seller responsible for any loss or damage.

If you are a fine art student at a university, perhaps you can get in touch with someone in the chemistry department to help you further. Most things that the human nose reacts to are organic compounds that are not themselves gases but whose vapour, at low concentration, is detected by the olfactory system. But it's a very complex business. One of the chemists I studied with at university went into the wine trade and tried to analyse what gives wines their individual flavour. It's just about a lifetime project. The smell of roast chicken probably involves hundreds of compounds. Or, if you are interested in something more poetic, like the smell of a wet city street after rain, I have no idea what you would be looking for or at what concentration levels. But it sounds rather fun to try.

Yes, presumably GC-MS.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by capturing. Do you mean a complete chemical analysis of a sample of air? The issue with that will be down to what threshold of detection, because there will be traces of all sorts of things at very low concentrations. The other issue is you need to have some idea of what molecules you are looking for in order to pick the best analytical method to use. If this is a smell project I imagine you won’t be interested in the major gases, but more in organic compounds , and possibly at the ppm level. Is that right, or are you thinking of inorganic components that the human nose detects, e.g SO2, H2S, etc?

It seems to me that consciousness is not an entity at all but an activity: the activity of the brain. I think a great deal of time and energy has been wasted by misclassifying an activity as a thing. It's a category error, in my opinion.

What’s wrong with a window, or skylight?

Is your first name Quentin, by any chance?😁

Interesting, but I wonder how applicable this would be in cultures in which people don't rely on cars as much as they do in N America. If you take someone who lives in a European city, for example, they may not drive enough to start with for much change to be detectable. Perhaps it could work on GPS monitoring of somebody's mobile phone, though. That might work even if you get around on foot, public transport or by bike.