exchemist

It seems to me the way to control the effects of greed in political life is laws, standards and codes of conduct against corrupt practices, transparency, and a vigorous, free and serious press. (The role of law is vital, which is why recent events in Israel are so troubling.)

What makes you think those in power are any greedier than other people? Do you have evidence for that? Could it not simply be that, when one is in power, the opportunities to satisfy greed are greater? After all, many people enter politics to make the world a better place, as they see it. Most able people, if they are motivated simply by greed, can get greater rewards in other professions.

There is no evidence so far that gravitons even exist. They are just a conjecture at this stage, suffering from problems with the mathematics. From what I understand, detecting gravitons - if the maths is ever sorted out - is expected to be a practical impossibility, requiring enormous, planetary or stellar masses. To date, gravitons are not part of any physical theory, since we have no theory of quantum gravity. The whole idea may turn out to be misguided.

It looks to me as if Rayleigh waves, as observed in earthquakes, seem to be of this type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_wave

But surely in the gravitational case it is only -ve relative to infinite separation of the bodies concerned, which we arbitrarily set to "zero" by convention.

Could it be a Rayleigh wave? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_wave

He was clearly that. But then so are many of the best educators. Often, however, these are not the best researchers. Feynman seems to have managed to combine both. But there was obviously quite a big ego at work.

But can't we reach the same conclusion about c being a speed limit just by considering limits? I'm no mathematician, but I understood the point about limits is you can see where a function is going without resorting to infinities.

Plenty of people publish papers who are not "renowned". He could have been a PhD student or something, or he could have simply left academia to do something other than research. Does it matter?

A microwave oven will not generate high temperatures in anhydrous silica gel.

This issue has now been adequately answered by several of us. You are becoming a bore.

No. I'm out of this now.

The point about lack of coherence is that your "arguments" are almost impossible to discern. And frankly, there is no reason why we should all make a superhuman effort, just for a random unknown person on the internet. So you need to get coherent somehow, either by yourself or with appropriate help, and maybe people will pay attention.

Yes, but the issue here is that it is not deception per se. It's more subtle than that. As I understand it, it is rewarding researchers that manage - whether by good science, luck or bending their findings - to get the sort of results the big man hopes for, to support his theory. And presumably by burying the careers of those unfortunate researchers that can't replicate the findings, or get positive results. In medicine in particular, there seems to be a culture of the big man: the eminent doctor or surgeon whom everyone wants to consult, whom everyone wants to study under and who has extensive powers of patronage. So, without any actual overt malpractice, a system can be created that is biased towards finding convenient rather than inconvenient results. And then the temptation to fabricate, to discard -ve data and so forth is there.

The thing about consciousness is a fairly widespread popular misunderstanding, often associated with quantum theory and sometimes, in egregiously ignorant or stupid cases, with relativity. But I won't go further, as your post is not very coherent.

If you are a member of the professional class, active and in work, you won’t see that much of the unhealthy portion of the population. Commuting to work in London, one notices how young and healthy many people are, compared with say a coastal English town that one might visit on holiday. In the US I suspect there is also a strong ethnic divide, with poor health prevalent among groups one meets fewer of. But I see they include as chronic disease anything that lasts over a year and requires treatment. That strikes me as very broad.

I also read that zinc coffins have been used in the USSR to repatriate the bodies of dead soldiers. True, but lugging around a supply of compressed hydrogen would be worse than water.

OK, I may have found the basis of this: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.1c02368 Translating the jargon into normal language, this is based on barium sulphate, which the authors say has a high band gap - which makes it non-absorptive, i.e. white, in the visible region of the spectrum, while having a "9μ phonon resonance", i.e. vibrational excitation of the crystal lattice, making it a good absorber and emitter in the infra red. In effect, this paint is white in the visible but "black" in the IR! Very clever. But no Maxwell's Demon. Thermodynamics continues to rule.

Something odd here. An efficient emitter of thermal radiation is a black body, not a white one. Do you have a link describing what they did in more detail? As for Maxwell’s Demon, no. The surface of the ground at night will often be cooler than the air, if there is no cloud cover. That’s because from a radiation point of view the ground is trying to get towards thermal equilibrium with space - which is very cold.

I knew it is advised not to store tomatoes in the fridge, but not why. Is this the reason, perhaps?

Where did you get this picture from?

OK I've found it now, near the end. Thanks.

I couldn’t see anything about sealed coffins in that description. Does it say that?

That was a story for kids. Anyone back in the 60s who knew any science realised the concept of a “radioactive spider” made no sense. In sci fi there is often a macguffin to enable the plot that is scientifically dodgy, (faster than light travel being perhaps the most obvious). But writers, even today, have a blind spot about radiation. I was appalled, in the 2019 TV dramatisation of the Chernobyl disaster, to see them claim the bodies of workers who died of radiation sickness had to be buried in sealed coffins, as if they had become radioactive as a result of exposure to radiation. That’s utter bullshit - but makes for suitably harrowing TV, with distraught relatives unable to say goodbye to loved ones etc etc. So they put it in, regardless. It appalled me as I think it irresponsible to perpetuate superstitious myths about the effects of radiation, among the general public. And especially in a drama documentary with pretensions to accuracy. It made me suspect there were other fictions in the series - as indeed there were.

The fat, which provides energy to the body, does so by being oxidised to water and CO2, just like carbohydrates, but involving a different reaction of course. The CO2 is exhaled through the lungs and the water is excreted via the usual processes.