exchemist

Surely that would be shukran?My understanding is shukriya, or shukria, means thank you in Urdu and possibly in Hindi as well. As least, it was widely used by people from S Asia when I lived in Dubai, including by my Goan secretary. To your question, it seems they are taking STP to be 273K and 760mmHg. This seems consistent with the IUPAC convention, though there are others, as you can read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_temperature_and_pressurehttps://oxfordre.com/planetaryscience/planetaryscience/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190647926.001.0001/acrefore-9780190647926-e-145 The purpose of the multiplication is stated in the text you originally pasted. It converts the measured volume change into a volume at STP. The purpose of that is so you can calculate how many moles of gas have been generated: https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/Heartland_Community_College/CHEM_120%3A_Fundamentals_of_Chemistry/06%3A_Gases/6.11%3A_STP You are quite right that standard Gibbs Free Energies are generally quoted at 25C (298K). This is annoying I agree, but it is the way it is.

It reads like mad rubbish.

Indeed. Though these clips of Musso also put me in mind of P.G. Wodehouse's immortal character, Roderick Spode. He was a large, irascible man, prone to violence, who ran an organisation called the Black Shorts, in which young men wore black shorts, because all the shirts had already gone, and to whom he gave rousing speeches. He also, ahem, ran a ladies' underwear boutique in Bond Street..... Wodehouse was clearly taking the piss out of Oswald Mosley here. He is quite merciless, having Bertie Wooster observe: "I don't know if you have even seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words on the occasion of the opening of a new skittle alley, but that was what he reminded me of." There is also, contrary to the macho, strutting image, the subtlest of hints of incongruous homosexuality here, which makes it funnier. The stories in which Spode appears were written in the 1930s.

This reads as if you are smarting from having some academic submission rejected. if it is, I have to say I am not wholly surprised, as your writing style is rather rambling and disjointed. It is hard to work out what you are trying to say. This won't endear you to the readers of any academic submission you may make. As for the accusation that submissions are rejected due to "personal pet peeves" this is not in general a warranted conclusion. There is such a thing as the recognised body of knowledge in a given subject. Far from consisting of personal pet peeves, this is a consensus reached by numerous experts in the field as a result of study and, in the case of science, verified observations of nature. It can of course nevertheless be shown to be wrong or incomplete - that is how science advances - but the person wanting to do that has to do quite a bit of work to show where the problem lies, how it can be remedied and why the proposed remedy is valid. To do that, the person needs to understand the existing body of knowledge before proposing something that contradicts or extends it. This is what Einstein, whom you quote, did. By the way, what is this "oath of seat of position" you mention? I can't say I recall anything like that at my university other than to observe the customs, statues and privileges of the university, which one did by saying "Do fidem" when receiving one's undergraduate degree. I do agree it is useful to be aware of applications of scientific phenomena, as a way to make them seem more real and immediate to a person learning about them. The examples you give of GPS and MRI are nice ones. But like other responders I am in the dark about these horrific biases you allude to.

Yes but there doesn't have to be a question of "why" those values are the case. There has to be a set of values and the ones we observe are no less probable than any other individual set. So they, er, just are, it seems to me.

No we're talking about the same thing, I think. I'm just saying that, while the probability of the universal constants coming out so as to support chemistry and thus life, out of all the possible values one can envisage, would appear to be infinitesimally low, whatever values they had would have the same low probability. Yet for any universe to exist they have to have a value. So the values they actually have are no less probable than any other individual possible set.

I think history shows a lot of Germans knew, or could very easily have known by asking a few questions, but they chose not to lift that particular stone for fear of what was crawling beneath. Once you know a thing like that you feel impelling to take some kind of action, whereas in fact they were powerless. So they chose not to know for sure. I think this happens quite a lot, actually.

I have World at War on DVD. Comprehensive and excellent, marred only by the irritating quibble of Olivier continually mispronouncing Stalin as Shtalin. No idea why. S and sh sounds have separate letters in the Russian alphabet.

I found your comment about the (H-bonded) polarity of water as a solvent leading to the exploitation by life of 2 phases (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) rather insightful. I immediately thought of bi-lipid membranes, for instance and the mechanisms for selective transport across them. Your final remark suggests we could try to imagine life developing with the use of other solvents. Liquid ammonia perhaps? Liquid CO2? Under suitable pressures, these could perhaps be feasible at temperatures high enough to give reasonable rates of reaction.

Modesty is not mentioned in the Agreeableness category, as far as I can see. My experience is that a lot of egocentric people can be socially very agreeable. It may be one of the things they use to dominate other people, being "the life and soul of the party" as a way of drawing attention to themselves. In fact I am always suspicious of "Hail fellow well met" types, as I've found in business they are often crooks, or out for themselves! But maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by "agreeableness" in this categorisation.

I think there is a spectrum there, from the perfectly normal to the pathological. Consider anyone working in the performance arts, politics, legal advocates or even surgeons. Many people enjoy performing to an audience, without being narcissists. Many of the classical musicians I know are quite shy and retiring people but put a violin in their hands or sit them behind a keyboard and they are away. I myself have performed solo, which I found very stressful but compensated by the reception from the audience. Enough to persuade me to do it again, a year later. But thinking more about this I suppose your point is that, with televangelists in particular, the performance often seems to be largely about them. There is more about them than about the gospels, even though the gospels are ostensibly the subject matter. That certainly does suggest narcissism. I don't myself think that consideration of a multiverse is required to dismiss the Fine Tuning Argument. It seems to me, rather, that the FT Argument rests on a misunderstanding of probability. Just because a particular outcome is one of millions does not mean that the outcome we observe is "impossible" and therefore must have been influenced in some way. After all, there has to be an outcome, which will be one of the millions of possibilities. For instance the probability of dying by being struck by lightning is vanishingly small, yet people do die that way.

You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment.😉

We did have a discussion about that. I’ve decided to give him or her the benefit of the doubt for a bit. We’ve established this person is using Indian textbooks written in English but I don’t know how easy they find conversing in English.

There are also attempts at logic, e.g. the fine tuning argument or the (idiotic) entropy argument. Though you don’t often see the latter these days. It seems they’ve mostly worked out that one doesn’t fly.

Well it is a decent solvent for a great many things, including a wide range of gases and metal ions and, perhaps more important, is liquid over a temperature range at which chemical reactions proceed at a decent speed but sufficiently gently that complex molecules can form and avoid decomposition. But I take your point that the insolubility of catenated hydrocarbon chains offers a 2 phase environment that is exploited by life. Given that carbon's propensity for catenation is unique in the Periodic Table , a solvent that dissolved any complex carbon chain structure would not seem to be a good one for life.

I think that is a rather different aspect of human nature, though, isn't it? Televangelists are not setting out to be contrarian, I'd have thought. They probably have a complex set of motivations. They may (mostly?) be genuine in the beliefs they preach, but they also love performance, showmanship, the adulation of crowds and, in all too many cases, the money they can rake in. So they may start out more or less genuine and get corrupted by success, as so many do in so many walks of life. But certainly I would agree a lot of conspiracies are peddled with a view to gaining adherents in order to serve some ulterior motive. We see a lot of that in populist politics.

Yes I was about to make that point. Some people love to oppose convention for its own sake and get a kick out of being in a select, special group where they can indulge in feeling persecuted. Contrarianism is definitely a social psychological phenomenon. They may or may not really believe the position they adopt: for some it may be they are just striking a pose.

Yes, it is hard to envisage a biochemistry that does not require catenation, to permit the development of polymers and other complex compounds. Also I think it is hard to envisage a satisfactory alternative solvent to water. I used to like to imagine methane or liquid ammonia or something as an alternative, but it seems hard to make a convincing case.

This is a science forum, not Mumsnet.

Oh yes now I see. Thanks. So, to spell it out for @HbWhi5F , they say p(1).V(1)/T(1) = p(stp).V(stp)/T(stp) and rearrange to get just V(stp) on one side of the equation: p(1).V(1)T(stp)/T(1).p(stp) = V(stp) and then insert values of 273K for T(stp) and 760mmHg for p(stp). So evidently they are measuring p(1) with a mercury manometer. It might have been clearer if we had access to the figure 8.15 that the text refers to.

Yeah I think that's the right idea. In H₂S, the nominal oxidation state of S is -2 and H is +1. In effect you are pretending the compound is ionic, even thought it is covalent, giving a +ve oxidation number to the more electropositive atom and a -ve state to the more electronegative. Cl, being in elemental form, has an oxidation number of 0. After the reaction, H is still +1, but Cl is now -1 and S has gone from -2 to 0. So one can say that Cl has been reduced, whereas S has been oxidised and H has not changed. So H₂S overall has been oxidised by Cl₂. Something similar will go for the rest of them. And you are right NaH is a bit weird. But Na is more electropositive than H. This compound is called sodium hydride. It is in fact ionic and contains an actual anion of H, the hydride ion, H-. This has 2 valence shell electrons, making it isoelectronic with helium. Needless to say this compound is pretty reactive. Oxidation numbers are a bit of a strange convention in chemistry that takes some getting used to. Your problem 7.3 is easier in that you have some obvious metals that will have +ve oxidation states and obvious halide or oxide partners that will be -ve.

I recognise 273K as 0C and I recognise 760mmHg as standard atmospheric pressure expressed, in old fashioned style, in millimetres of mercury. The IUPAC definition of STP specifies 0C, i.e 273K (actually 273.15K to be exact but nobody bothers with that detail) and 1 bar (100kPa). But exactly what they are trying to do here is unclear to me from the snippet you have provided. In particular I don't see where mmHg comes in. I feel there must be some extra text that discusses this.

OK, no, I asked you how many electrons there are in the valence shell of a neutral free oxygen atom. How many is that? I now realise in my first reply I mistakenly spoke about the -ve O atom, not the +ve one you actually asked about, so apologies for confusing you. However the same principle applies. For working out electric charge you count 100% of the electrons in the lone pairs, as they are located 100% on the O atom, and you count 50% of the electrons in the bonds, as these are shared (almost) equally between the O atom and the atoms it is bonded to. Then you compare that with the number of valence electrons there are in a free neutral atom and see if you have the same number, or more, or fewer. So the +ve O atom has one lone pair plus a half share of 3 bonding pairs right? How many is that in total?

OK I’ll stop reporting them then and wait to see what happens. They are fairly obviously bogus, though to what purpose remains unclear at this point. We’ll just have to let them evolve and maybe the objective will become clear in time.

Yes I'm in Europe too (London). You are now broadening this out to encompass fanaticism of all kinds though. I think that's a different subject. Creationists don't have to be fanatics, just people brought up with a set of beliefs that sets them against science in certain specific respects. Often they will be at pains to tell you they accept science in general and its products (e.g. medicine, engineering etc). I even once came across an astronomer who was a YEC! He accepted all of astronomy apart from the origin of the Earth, specifically, as the home designed by God for mankind! Weird what people can do to manage cognitive dissonance sometimes. Yet I think we all live with degrees of cognitive dissonance in our lives, of one sort or another. In fact I suspect it is probably what keeps us sane. If we insisted on joining all the dots, across every facet of our lives, into a seamless self-consistent whole, I think we would go mad. But that too is probably another discussion.