exchemist

Well, Montmartre is where the ladies of the night used to hang out.........

You mean like Evelyn, Beverly, Vivian, or Leslie/Lesley? I know Sidonie is a French girl's name, but that has 3 syllables. Perhaps Sidney for girls is a variant of that. But it sounds weird to my ears, I must admit. I suppose the geeks might have deliberately picked an androgynous name.

I suppose it's a trivial observation, compared with the scandal of not backing off from disruptive intrusion into someone's human relationships, but it also seems tone deaf to a person's likely sexual orientation, given that he is married to a woman and Sidney is a man's name. "Nul points" to the guys with spiky hair on this one.

I just wish these geeks would put half the effort they waste on this stuff into controlling the dissemination of falsehoods. Haven't they damaged society enough, without looking for new ways to do even more damage?

Yes, it doesn't bother me too much either. I lived in The Hague for a few years and came to appreciate Dutch directness. I also rowed for many years and am used to being coached, and then there is choral singing, in which coaching can also be fairly direct! I find your posts clear, knowledgeable and informative. And indeed, I think we are all here to learn, not just to pontificate.

Yes exactly. In fact one reason I hang out in these places in my retirement is to repoint the brickwork and replace loose roof tiles.

I think it is disconcerting to find that something you thought you knew is wrong, especially when it relates to a subject area that you regard as your citadel of knowledge, i.e. helps to define your self-image. I'm now old enough to tread increasingly carefully, even there, as I'm finding a false memories sometimes catching me out. This is a phenomenon I expect to become more pronounced in the years to come. But taking exposure of error or ignorance as a deliberate attempt to belittle is something else. Normally I think most of us can tell whether someone is just correcting us or whether they are using it as an excuse to indulge in patronising or point-scoring. But perhaps some are over-sensitive and imagine negative motives when there are none.

This reminds me of Spike Milligan:" Hey, who turned on the dark?" You get into trouble with the idea of "coldness" when you have to deal with absolute zero. You can't make something as cold as you like, whereas you can make something as hot as you like. So there's an asymmetry there. Just as, with light, you can make something as bright as you like but you can't make it as dark as you like.

Understood: caveat noted.

Actually I think that change served a deliberate purpose. Given that the model of the atom changed radically from the Rutherford-Bohr model to the modern (Schrödinger?) model, the word "orbit" became objectively wrong, so orbital was chosen instead, to signify the new model. P.S. Another name change in chemistry that bamboozled me briefly is from ESR, which I remember from university, to EPR, which is virtually the same thing. I suppose there is in principle a change, in that EPR implies one thinks in terms of the more general J, rather than S.

Yeah but it is handy, in a long thread that is being sensibly discussed, to be able to refer readers back to specific earlier posts. This is the only forum I've been on where the posts are not numbered.

Indeed. But with oil, which is used for cooking and to dress salads etc, one can reduce it a little without adding anything to replace it. I had been thinking that plenty of it was a good thing, because of HDL. So I can cut it back to just what is necessary. (I don't have a problem with my weight, which has been stable for years at: 66 +/-1 kg and 1.76m in height.)

Agreed. I think this would be very helpful. It seems to be available on other forums.

Yes, Carnot applied the concept of caloric in that way in his analysis of heat engines. And got it essentially right.

It wasn't his theory, though. It was Lavoisier's, which Carnot inherited as the then prevailing model and which he suspected was faulty, as some of your earlier extracts from his Appendix A showed.

Chaleur shurely? 😄 Chauler is a verb, meaning to lime or whitewash. Here is a link to Carnot's original: http://www.numdam.org/item/10.24033/asens.88.pdf Chaleur just means heat and, so far as I can see, will have long predated Lavoisier''s scientific concept of caloric. Lavoiser seems to have introduced caloric because he realised the idea of phlogiston didn't work.

Alles klar.

Not interesting ones perhaps, but chemistry is always undergoing revisions to terminology. What used to be carbonium ions when I was at university are now carbocations. The numbering of groups in the Periodic Table has changed. Lots of little things like that. But it was ever thus. I remember my grandfather teasing me, when I was studying for A Level, that I did not even know what muriate of potash was. It turned out to be potassium chloride, KCl, - muriatic acid being an Edwardian-era name for hydrochloric acid (my Grandfather had been born in 1901!). But as for trying to build significance into a particular word translated from early c.19th French, that strikes me as a real fool's errand.

OK, if you are just calculating radiation intensity, your numbers look good to me. (I used these NASA distance numbers.https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/pdfs/scaless_reference.pdf )

That old walrus again? I thought he had disappeared along with the Project for the New American Century. (What a laugh that has turned out be.)

Agreed. However the trouble with cranks, as some of us know to our cost from previous encounters, is that getting us to accept strange and potentially misleading terminology is quite often a rhetorical ruse to promote their crank ideas. In this case it is likely to be, in some way yet to be disclosed, his notion that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is false or can be broken. (This individual has spent over a decade, off and on, on various forums, obsessing about this.) This is why we are wary of agreeing with his peculiar statement without qualifying it. We would not be nearly so cautious if the poster had a track record of posting in good faith.

It's not clear what you have done. Are those diameter measurements?

I can still cycle to Wimbledon and back, up and down the hills, to buy bread, as I did before I went on statins, so I'm not worried about muscle weakness. And don't worry, I like olive oil too much to cut it back a great deal.

Except that the quantity of heat that produced the ΔT cannot be all transformed into work, only part of it.

But you don't understand: confusion is the object of the exercise. 😄