exchemist

In any mass <-> volume conversion you always need to take into account density. The density of water happens to be 1g/ml, strictly speaking at 4C but close enough for most purposes at most temperatures. I spent my career in the oil industry, where we handled a variety of oils all with different densities. This made it very important to use the correct figure when using volumetric meters, drum filling scales etc. and also to correct for the way density changes with temperature. Liquids tend to expand with rising temperature, so the density decreases. Many organic solvents have densities considerably below 1g/ml. For instance n-hexane has a density of 0.66g/ml at 25C. Others are considerably denser than water, e.g. carbon tetrachloride has a density of about 1.5g/ml.

I've heard that one can use a corked wine for cooking, as the cooking allegedly gets rid of the cork taint, but this seems to be disputed.

Ask your parents.

You got a wine based 100% on merlot from France? I wonder where that came from. But don't believe the best wine is sold abroad. That might be true of the most exclusive "trophy" wines that millionaires buy: that market is fully international of course. But for ordinary mortals, wine from much the same selection of producers is available in France and the UK. I normally stock up with a bit from the local Carrefours when we go to Brittany each summer. The rest I get chiefly from the Wine Soc., that pillar of the bourgeois professional classes in the UK. 😄

I don't think I've ever drunk wine from 100% merlot. My wife was very French and had been brought up chiefly on Bx, mainly left bank, so usually blends: Cab Sauv/Merlot/Cab Fr/P Verdot. Right bank (St. Emilion, Pomerol) usually doesn't have Cab Sauv and for that reason is thought to mature earlier. Merlot ripens more easily I think and is less tannic, hence easier on some palates that find a lot of tannin too astringent. I have to confess the wines I really enjoy best these days are based on Nebbiolo: Barolo, Barbaresco, Langhe Nebbiolo, Valtellina, Gattinara etc. But I'm very slowly working my way through all the Bx. that was bought when my wife was alive and before I had a dicky ticker. Definitely a 1st world problem.

Merlot is blended with Cabernet Franc in St. Emilion. I don’t think you find it on its own much in Europe.

OK, I've had enough of you now. You are going on the Ignore list.

Whut? So an overseas part of the Netherlands then. This is what the French do. I've been to Martinique and to la Reunion, both of which are France d'outre-mer. And I've been once on business to Surinam, which is independent but fairly Dutch. I remember I flew back (KLM to Schiphol, of course) on the Queen's birthday and all the stewardesses wore orange ribbons.

Well Dutch cheese is generally nothing special. There's a lot of it, but it's almost all just variations on one variety, so far as I can see: the Gouda type, in those huge wheels. When we lived in The Hague we did find a boerenkaas that had good flavour but even that was just similar to a good Cheddar or a Comté, so nothing very special. Everything is from cow's milk. They make one blue cheese in the whole of the Netherlands and that is a recent introduction. As for the beer, my impression was most of the good stuff came from Belgium. But I expect there are some good little breweries if one seeks them out. Where are you? Surinam?

Amarone is powerful stuff. I used to find it a bit dehydrating. I've never been bothered headaches from wine, but I have always had a large glass of water to hand when there is wine on the table. Nowadays my intake is restricted, especially in the evening, due to a tendency for getting A Fib at night.

Blind tastings are very common in the wine world, and often reveal surprises that put previously little known producers on the map.They can also expose lazy winemaking by those who trade on previous reputation.

Oh yes I agree it's better to drink wine with food generally speaking. My story is simply to show that a wide group of people, with different experience and tastes, can come to a common judgement about the relative merits of different wines, and that that judgement correlates with the judgement of those who get to determine the price. This ought not to be surprising, as there are centuries of experience and expertise devoted to making good wine. These French and Italian vignerons have been doing it for generations. It's not just for fun or to bullshit the public. It wasn't from me but your point, whatever it was supposed to be, was unclear to say the least.

Are you stupid? I've just told you we did not know what the wine was until after we had commented on it.

..or even "that which I don't understand".

Proof? Proof is for logicians. But evidence? That I can give you. OK, when I was at Shell a group of us got invited to a wine tasting evening at Berry Bros. We were a complete mixture, some with some knowledge of wine, others not. We had a lot of fun learning the difference in taste between Beaujolais (Gamay) , Pinot Noir from different places etc. At the end they gave us one more to taste, without telling us what it was. Everyone - and I mean everyone - went quiet and said it this something really special, way ahead of anything else. They then revealed it was a £100/bbl mature Bordeaux. People can tell. It's not just bullshit. It's a bit like my late wife, who expressed no interest in cars. However once in a while she'd comment: "Ooh , that's a nice car", to which my reply would be: "That's a Rolls-Royce" or "That's a Jaguar".

Speak for yourself.

The same is true of written Arabic, at least for some vowels, presumably owing to their common root.

I've looked this up. It seems high diastolic pressure can be a problem in itself, indicating an abnormal degree of resistance to blood flow, rather than lack of elasticity in the arteries. I don't think 120/80 is particularly good. It seems nowadays to be regarded as the upper limit of normal. But at least it's not on my list of health conditions to worry about. I have others, as most people my age do.

Well I admit I'm not in the US but my impression is he has lost support, at least among people who are not crazy. After last time, I doubt huge numbers would turn out to try to overthrow the forces of law and order just because he gets his collar felt for knobbing this woman and trying to cover it up.

I'm looking forward to this. If he is arrested, then I suspect no more than a handful of obvious crazies with beards and MAGA caps will show up. That will do wonders to marginalise him. But he probably won't be arrested. The BBC has a great picture of him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65000325 He looks like just another crazy old man with dementia.

The logic of your post indicates 90. Is this a trick question? I presume the difference between the two is a measure of elasticity in the arteries. A difference >40 could suggest inability to stretch sufficiently, under the pressure of the pulse of the heartbeat. But I'm not medical. When I was still rowing, mine used to be 100/60. Nowadays it is 120/80. I'm 68.

Going backwards with your mind seems to be a personal speciality. Look, "in science", as a schoolteacher friend of mine says, "you can't just make shit up". You need evidence from observation and you need to show that your theory can predict what sorts of further observation we should expect. Without that, it's what on this forum is known as a WAG, a Wild-Arsed Guess. That isn't science - and the moderators here won't like it. I'm not sure what you mean by electrons being little spherical balls, but that has not been the model we have of the electron for the last hundred years.

There are several acids: tartaric, citric, malic and maybe more. Tartaric and malic are dibasic and citric is tribasic. Each carboxylate group will have a different tendency to release H+ (different pKa). All are contributing to the overall H+ concentration. To make matters worse, you can get (as a winemaker you may indeed want) malolactic fermentation, which converts some of the malic acid into lactic acid, which is monobasic, with a fairly low pKa. I imagine the mouth feel and perceived acidity of the wine may depend on how much of each is present. Since saliva is slightly basic, you could perhaps get a sort of buffering situation in your mouth. Quite complicated, I would think.

I assume the idea of titration is to determine the amount of acid present rather than just the pH. As there are several weak acids present in wine, the pH will tell you the concentration of H+, but that won't tell you how much of the acid molecules there are, since they are only partially dissociated and if there are several you won't be able to correlate an H+ concentration with the total amount of all of them. But I'm guessing a bit.

There is an account of what has been found here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-19-origins-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-data. which is not behind a paywall. It seems the international team has found evidence from details of DNA sequences, uploaded by the Chinese analysts who sequenced the Covid +ve swabs in question to an international database called Gisaid. These sequences have since been taken down without explanation by the Chinese, but not before they have been copied. So the mystery now is why the Chinese researchers originally claimed there was no animal DNA, and why they seem now to be covering the fact there was in fact animal DNA after all. One might think that the Chinese authorities would be very keen to claim the virus came from animals and not from a leak from one of their own labs. It is also not clear to me at least, exactly what these swabs were, i.e. from where and when they were taken. I start to wonder if there is a disinformation game of some kind going on.