exchemist

Oh God, I’d never advise someone to repeat a mission statement. They are always such bland BS. You could talk about your own perception of the company and its activities, personal factors that make it a good fit for you - and best of all, you could perhaps find a way to turn it round and ask the interviewer questions. I was always impressed by candidates who could turn the interview round.

Yes, you must be right about the expansion, I think. I had difficulty seeing why that would have an effect.

On the density of seawater he seem to me to be substantially right. At 4000m depth it is typically 1.046: https://www.britannica.com/science/seawater/Density-of-seawater-and-pressure , due to the compression effect he referred to.

Really? My experience is that @sethoflagos is one of the more rigorous posters on this forum. While you can have legitimate disagreement on the science, It seems to me that accusing him or her of bad faith, as you are doing here, is quite a stretch, to put it politely.

I did not intend to judge your invention, just perhaps think about how you might bring it to market. I repeat, the invention is already in the public domain, as that is what happens when a patent or utility model is granted. But OK, good luck anyway.

I don’t think we can help very much without knowing what this is. As you have a monopoly and the invention has been published by the patent office, it is now public knowledge and you can safely reveal it. Can you provide a link to the published invention? Do you mean they offered to manufacture it for you , if you paid them to do so? So they can make it but don’t want to take on the business risk. That seems rational.

From @chenbeier's link it looks as if NaBH4 reduces one of the carbonyls to a hydroxy group, i.e. form dihydro to tetrahydrouridine. So that does not open the ring. Hydrolysis of the amide with KOH will open the ring of course and, by the look of it, may evolve ammonia and CO2, destroying it completely.

The yellow is fluorescence. The emitted light will be scattered from the beam and will not be coherent. It will be near monochromatic if only one transition is excited in the fluorescence process but will have the line shape of that emission line. In a thin film some of the beam may emerge on the far side but if it does it will be what remains of the original beam, i.e. green.

Ah yes, a "petty patent" or Gebrauchsmuster. I had quite forgotten about those. Well, it's a monopoly on whatever you have invented, for a limited period of time. So to exploit it, you either need to bring your invention to market yourself or licence it to someone who will, for a fee. What is it for?

Per millimetre? Millimetre of what?

The judge here would know:

Yes, I did the same about 20 years ago, since I need to be able to write with my right hand while using the computer. You don’t need much dexterity to operate a mouse.

This article explains almost nothing, so it's impossible to say. It looks like a gimmick to me. What's the point, especially since the light has to be supplemented with electricity?

The difference is the way they get their energy input to work against entropy, basically. Desalination plants often use reverse osmosis, in which pressure is used to force water molecules through a semipermeable membrane that does not allow the larger, solvated, salt ions through. (Although an individual Na+ or Cl- ion is smaller than an H-O-H molecule, these ions in solution are surrounded by a solvent "cage" which is quite tightly bound to it and makes their effective size a lot bigger.) Alternatively distillation is used, often under reduced pressure to permit boiling at a relatively low temperature. (Boiling greatly increases the surface area for evaporation, accelerating the process, due to the surface area of the bubbles). The very large desalination plant at Jebel Ali, in the UAE, used that method, I remember, from when I lived in Dubai in the 1980s. It employed waste heat from the Jebel Ali steam power station - quite clever. A solar still relies on heat from the sun, rather than an artificial energy input. So the energy input is in a sense "free" - and non-polluting, of course - but you are limited to the energy density of sunlight. Solar stills also have to rely on evaporation at atmospheric pressure, which further constrains their capacity.

Mine is how to preserve wine in good condition after opening a bottle, if you don't have enough people to finish it. I bought some screw cap half and quarter bottles of wine at the supermarket and kept the empties. Now, when I open a bottle, I decant half into an empty half bottle, making sure to fill it almost to the top so there is negligible oxygen to oxidise the wine, screw the cap on tight enough for an airtight seal and keep it in the fridge to slow down any reactions that may take place. If I'm on my own and only having a quarter bottle with my meal, I put the 3rd quarter into one of the quarter bottles on the same principle. I have found it is certainly possible to keep both red and white wine for a week this way, without noticeable deterioration - and even 2 weeks at a push, though it does tend to get a bit thin. This method is infinitely superior to those pumps and stoppers you can get e.g."vac-u-vin", which in my experience barely work at all. I resorted to this due to my tendency to atrial fibrillation, which can be brought on by alcohol. It has enabled me to continue to enjoy modest amounts of wine without getting into medical problems. ( I have just had an ablation, which I am hoping may get rid of the AF, but I need to let my heart settle down for a couple of months and learn the new conduction pathways before putting it to the test.)

On forums, watch out in particular for bogus posts made to promote journals from the SCIRP family. SCIRP does this a lot. Perhaps you have noticed the same thing. Posts made by new members, on the subject of journal reliability, are always worth treating with a degree of circumspection.

What were you going to calculate, based on valence electrons?

Splendid, splendid.

Do you want to discuss chemistry or computer programming?

OK, I'm delighted you have replied. We get a lot of bots and drive-by spammers and I thought you might be one of those. I do think there's a problem with multiple oxidation states. Higher oxidation states of, for example, transition elements, tend to form bonds that have a lot more covalent character than lower oxidation states of the same element. This is not surprising when one thinks of the ionisation energies or, which comes to the same thing, the polarising power of a highly charged cation. I also wonder if you might give a better overall sense of what is going on if you were to use a colour coding scheme to distinguish the types of bond, instead of writing out the text each time. After all, you only mention 2 or 3 types of bonding. But good luck with your project.

Oh I see. Good idea, then. Although in my view the table would still be of highly doubtful utility.

Thanks. But making your readers go to that trouble doesn't seem a great way to make the table someone's first choice as a reference.

Quite so. I've often had cause to remark on how many Tory politicians seem either to be aliens, who make you want to exclaim "Christ! They've landed!": Or people who you expect to see being pursued down the street by men in white coats: I could post more images, but perhaps not appropriate for a Sunday morning............

I don't find this table useful, to be honest. You can't see the row and columns headings once you are in the middle of it. It also makes simplistic - and therefore incorrect - generalisations for those elements that can occupy a variety of oxidation states, for example the transition elements. I really don't see the point of such a table. Far better to look at the Periodic Table and consider electronegativities and oxidation state for each case.

I assume the objective must be to precipitate MgCO3. Mg(HCO3)2 does not exist as a solid (presume the Mg ++ cation is too small for 2 big HCO3- anions) so it won't precipitate as bicarbonate. Or alternatively just to convert dissolved CO2 to HCO3- in solution. But it seems at first glance a bit daft. Where would anyone get huge enough quantities of Mg(OH)2 from, in order to make an impact on the vast amount of CO2 dissolved in seawater? I've found the publicity blurb from the company in question: https://www.planetarytech.com/projects/cornwall/. It looks as if it is just a small scale exercise to confirm some models. There is no explanation of where they would get enough minerals to make a real change to the oceanic CO2 level, or what the effect might be of jacking up dissolved bicarbonate and metal cation concentrations. I do not believe it would be biologically neutral.