exchemist

I am not sure what this means. Can you give an example of the kind of copper object in question?

The UK NHS does keep such a record, though I don’t know how reliable it is in all cases. There’s nothing “mandatory” about it for the citizen, but everyone has an NHS number and a medical record which in the past followed them from doctor to doctor when they changed location and registered with a new local doctor. Nowadays it is computerised.

Yes I think that looks better.

Blimey! Do they polish their sidecars on a Sunday afternoon, then? 😄

I would expect it to be the same mechanism, just in 2 stages, with an alkene as the intermediate step. In both alkynes and alkenes you have π-bonds which can bind to the metal surface. Kinetically, I imagine it may be a bit faster for alkynes, as they can approach in any orientation and still bind to the surface. There are descriptions of this on the internet. Here is one: https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/2011/11/25/hydrogenation-alkenes-palladium-on-carbon-pdc/. This link suggests that alkynes are more readily reduced than alkenes. The only respect in which I think the mechanism you have drawn may not be quite right is that, according to my understanding, the alkyne or alkene itself binds to the metal via its π-bonds, whereas you have shown the molecule staying above the H atoms, rather than binding to the surface itself before reacting. (There is a diagram of the mechanism in the link.)

On the contrary, a measuring device sees electrical activity in particular parts of the brain, when particular types of thinking take place. See for example this paper on music: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618809/. This kind of work strongly suggests thoughts are due to such electrical activity. The rest of your post seems simply to be arguing that human beings are capable of thinking about abstract concepts. We have a word for that: abstract. As for "inner voice", what is that? I sometimes talk to myself without speaking the words. Is that all you mean? If so, it is just a process of conscious thinking, rendered into words so that I can rationally follow and audit the process of thought. I do it when I am making sure my reasoning is sound, e.g. when working with electrical wiring, or doing an algebra problem. I do not see why this need be anything more than a form of electrical activity that happens to engage the "language programming" of my brain.

It is you that is asserting there is such a thing as a mental "space". The rest of us could be forgiven for not understanding why you call it a "space". That word immediately creates connotations of a dimension. It is not obvious that that is a helpful way to think about the subject, for the reasons pointed out on this thread. Surely the cognitive processes of the brain can be thought of as its activity, rather like the operations of a computer? Consciousness can thus be seen as an activity, not a "thing". This way of thinking about it has at least the merit that electrical signals can be detected in the brain to show there is activity, activity which for example stops when someone dies. Why the need to treat it as a thing, existing in some unobservable "space"? That seems to me to be a category error, albeit one with a long and distinguished history.

Actually not that much becomes converted to ammonium and hydroxide. Most of it is still NH3(aq) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_solution As I recall, ammonia is not much of a reducing agent as it can't give up electrons easily, only share them in a covalent bond, as in H3N:->H+ . (If it actually reduced H+, hydrogen would be evolved.) But yeah it's easy to get in a muddle with Lewis acids and bases. It's one of those concepts I tended to dodge, not finding it awfully helpful on most occasions. No I don't think so. Sugars have hydroxy groups on them that can be protonated in acid conditions, i.e. R-OH + H⁺ <-> R-OH₂⁺ , but they are no more liable to be protonated than a water molecule, i.e. H₂O + H⁺ <->H₃O⁺, so that won't raise the pH. (While sweet substances make acidic substances taste less acid, they do not do so by neutralising the acidity. It's just a trick of the taste buds.)

Not necessarily. For example, some cations form complexes with OH-, thereby causing water to release H+, acidifiying the solution. Both in the case of ammonia and in the case of metal cations such as Al 3+, water is caused to split, by abstracting either H+ in the case of ammonia or OH- in the case of Al 3+, leaving behind extra OH- or H+ respectively and thus altering the pH of the solution.

Think of ammonia. It does not dissociate appreciably in solution but accepts H+, causing water to dissociate, and thereby raises pH. Stomach acid has a pH ~2, so has plenty of free H+. I can't see why this would in itself cause other substances to dissociate, though protein dissociation is catalysed by enzymes in the acid environment of the stomach, I believe.

All you are saying is that science is a method which, like many things, is an abstract concept. Nobody would deny the usefulness of abstract concepts. Mathematics is abstract, and you can't do some sciences at all to any degree without maths. What you are demanding seems to be something different: the existence, not of an abstract concept but of an extra dimension. This implies that objects can be situated along this dimension and assigned intervals, relative to one another, in terms of it, by some kind of measurement.

Do you think distance is unobservable then? After all, all we can measure is distance intervals. Also consider that with something like energy, all we can measure is energy differences, which are a kind of interval too.

On what grounds do you demand recognition, from physicalists, of something for which there is no observational evidence? Surely you understand that for the physicalist, unobservable entities are dismissed as non-existent?

I'm certainly not going to use that Philadelphia stuff. 😝 I'm going to use a hard cheese with some flavour. But that picture looks as if it may be sweet cassava flour (polvilho doce - doce may mean sweet, like dolce.) As I say, I have a recipe. All I need is to source the right kind of cassava flour. The recipe calls for sour not sweet (polvilho azedo). I'm going to ask my cleaner to get me some, from the Brazilian shop close to where she lives in Streatham. If it works, I may post it for comparison. The key thing will be to get that special chewy texture that you can't get with wheat flour. They are nice with a cup of tea, in the afternoon, as an alternative to the cheese scones I sometimes make.

As far as I can tell it seems to be the same stuff, basically. There seem to be two versions of cassava flour, sweet and sour, the latter being fermented before final preparation. I am interested in this as I want to make pan de queijo, which one of my son's Brazilian nannies/babysitters used to make and which I found delicious. I now have a Brazilian cleaner who brings me some occasionally but she doesn't make it herself and it is not quite as good. Cassava flour is not easy to find in London, though there are Brazilian shops where one can get it. I have a recipe that I found on line that calls for sour cassava flour.

Disappearance of the major component of the tides, with a devastating effect on intertidal organisms and probably other ecosystems that benefit from the flushing action of tides.

Me for a start. What did you mean by suggesting he might (rhetorically) have a gun to the back of his head? What a needlessly aggressive and uninformative remark. And then you made a further ridiculous statement about it being naïve to think taxes and tariffs can "solve" problems. Nobody suggests they "solve" anything of course. Alternatively, to deny that taxes and tariffs can play a role, by modifying the behaviour of commercial enterprises, if that is what you meant to say, would be equally absurd. In this case there is a particularly strong case for taxes and tariffs, since one of the great problems in addressing climate change is the lack of any direct market-based feedback between the products (and their pricing) available to consumers and the resulting costs down the road for us all due to climate change. So, all in all, a fairly poor post from you, I thought.

The problem, as @chenbeier says, is that a carbonyl group will react with a Grignard reagent much faster than a carboxylate. So any acetophenone produced would immediately react in preference to the remaining carboxylate. I’m not sure whether a carboxylate anion will react at all with a Grignard reagent. Nucleophilic attack on an anion seems like a bit of an uphill struggle, though it’s true most of the -ve charge will be on the O atoms.

Carboxylate anions are not very strongly electrophilic, if I remember correctly. What do you think will happen? Something has gone wrong with your post.

What I meant is that it is a bit of a stretch to claim the Holy Roman Emperors represent a continuation of the Western Roman Empire. They were not Romans, they ruled over various chunks of continental Western Europe, and did so from places nowhere near Rome, like Aachen.

Defying Hitler. Synopsis: "Sebastian Haffner was a non-Jewish German who emigrated to England in 1938. This memoir (written in 1939 but only published now for the first time) begins in 1914 when the family summer holiday is cut short by the outbreak of war, and ends with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933. It is a portrait of himself and his own generation in Germany, those born between 1900 and 1910, and brilliantly explains through his own experiences and those of his friends how that generation came to be seduced by Hitler and Nazism." I thought now would be a good time to read how a demagogue, encouraging a cult of personality, can subvert the institutions of the state and seduce a population, little by little.

Sorry typo thanks.

Yes but the Holy Roman Emperor was just an honorary title that developed from the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by the pope, in return for the protection he provided to Rome against the Lombards etc. Whereas the Roman Empire in the East survived in Constantinople until 1543.

I don't think so. The basic problem, as I understand it, was over-extension of the Empire and consequently increasing reliance of the army on colonised people to man it. I think competition from the Goths, notably Alaric, had something to do with it as well. But that was not until c.4th AD. I think it was still flourishing in the c.1st.

Sounds good in principle but I can't help wondering how the industries affected are going to calculate the numbers to submit on imported goods, and how the EU will be able to check they are genuine.