exchemist

I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg Ron stole Maggie's heart away And I got Sidney's leg. (Douglas Adams. Who else?)

How interesting. (And nice to know his son, like mine, was called Louis.)

That's interesting. I admit I was going on a newspaper report about the outbreak in Hong Kong, where it was said that many older residents had resisted vaccination, due to distrust of the government. Perhaps the report was wrong, or perhaps the attitude of Hong Kong residents is not that same as in mainland China (one can understand why it might not be).

I think a lot of this is about trust in government health measures. In China there is a lot of reluctance get vaccinated because many older people especially don't trust the Chinese government or its vaccine. A lot of the politically aggravated resistance to countermeasures in the USA is due to the same thing, in that case distrust that has been artificially whipped up. In the UK there is a very high level of trust in the public health authorities, which is why the vaccination rate is so high - AND why everyone is now so furious with Bozo for ignoring the rules, in these Downing Street parties we are hearing about.

This is completely wrong. White light from a black body, such as the sun or a filament light bulb, is not composed of a mixture of yellow, cyan etc. There is continuous emission across the whole range of visible wavelengths. So there is light of all the colours detectable by the human eye, from red through to violet and including all the colours in between. Furthermore, shorter wavelength light is deflected through a bigger angle by passing into an optically denser medium, so the dispersion of the incident white light into its constituent wavelengths begins from the moment the light ray first encounters the glass. I haven't bothered with the rest, as since you get so much wrong at the start there seems little point.

The metrics to measure the impact of countermeasures (lockdown is a political scare term)will be things like ICU occupancy rate and rate of change of R number.

How absurd. The main goal of covid countermeasures (the term "lockdown" is a political scare term) in many places, certainly where I live in the UK, was to prevent the health service being overwhelmed by a huge spike in infections. Having medical people in the family, I can tell you with certainty that it was a close call : it very nearly was. No one, to my knowledge has ever called into question the fact that countermeasures reduced the height of the peak and enabled the health service to cary on functioning, through the height of the epidemic before vaccines were available.

But surely legumes can provide ample lysine in a vegetarian diet, can't they? And they also fix nitrogen, reducing the need for chemical fertilisers when grown in rotation with other crops. I don't know whether any domestic animals can synthesise lysine, but since their flesh contains plenty anyway, I'm not sure how a lysine-synthesing animal would help. Unless you are perhaps suggesting that the land area they require is determined by their requirement for lysine. Is that what you are getting at?

Sure, there's always a chance of misclassifying an individual fossil, just as any individual piece of scientific data can be in error or misinterpreted. That's why we don't base our theories around single interpretations of individual fossils.

Well yes, of course, we can only have our own perspective. But that is a perspective and as such has a degree of validity, even if it can't be assumed, on its own, to be objective. And what we do in life - all the time - is compare our perspective with that of others and, if they align, we generally conclude we are not mad and that what we all perceive is real-ish.

What I see in this thread is the usual phenomenon that has baffled me in discussions of this subject in the past, namely that some responders - including me- treat "conscious" as meaning just some kind of ability to sense and respond to stimuli in a complex way, whereas others seem to be addressing what seems to me a quite separate and far more restrictive issue, namely awareness of self. To me, one practical test of what we mean by consciousness would be whether or not we think the organism can feel pain. A wide range of creatures can react violently, when injured or otherwise subjected to some physical insult, in a way that we recognise as similar to our own response to pain. But I would not for a moment suggest they are self-aware.

Hmm, I think you may need someone with experience in the printing industry to advise you. My own experience is the oil industry (lubricants) which isn't very relevant. Looking at the MSDS for Part A I note that it is a mixture rather than a single substance, that it is not flammable (no flashpoint) and that the lowest boiling point component seems to boil at 100C. So a water-based mixture, most likely. From the generic nature of the information provided, it looks rather as if it may be some kind of proprietary formulation. (Some of our lubricant MSDSs were drafted in a similarly unhelpful style, to protect proprietary formulation knowledge.) Quickly looking up a few things on the internet I came across a comment that reaction times and concentration may need control during silanising, to prevent development of an unwanted thick silane polymer layer. I wondered if this formulation may do something to help control that. But no more than a possibility. I confess this is about as far as I can get with this. Maybe others will be able to add more.

Now I lay me down to sleep. Try to count electric sheep. Sweet dream wishes you can keep. How I hate the night. Now the world has gone to bed. Darkness won't engulf my head. I can see by infra-red. How I hate the night. (Marvin, the paranoid android - as if you didn't know..........)

I had to look this up, but it seems that what the aminosilane is doing is "silanising" the surface of the glass, viz. coating it with a chemically bonded film of alkoxysilane molecules, to provide a key for whatever is then to be bonded to the glass - most likely by means of the amine group. It doesn't seem obvious (to people outside the industry) what this other ingredient does. One guess (and it can only be a guess) might be something that cleans or prepares the surface of the glass in some way, perhaps by removing any oily deposits. An alcohol perhaps? Aminopropyltriexthoxysilane itself seems to be already water soluble, so it doesn't look as if it is needed for that reason.

I don't see how there could be. Consciousness seems to me to be a continuum, rather than a yes/no property of organisms. Most people would think a mouse was conscious, or a bird or a lizard. An insect? More questionable, perhaps. A jellyfish? Perhaps not really.

Well done! I look forward to your next enquiry. I'm having to dredge things up from the depths of my memory - which is a good process.

Presumably someone was having a laugh, as "fundament" is or was a euphemism for bottom or arse. Perhaps the "moon" business is part of the same joke. But I don't see why multiple moons can't align at some point and presumably this would then create a combined tidal effect on the planet's surface.

OK. And what are pKa and pH, mathematically speaking?

Shome mishtake shurely? This doesn't seem to me to be about reaction rates. pKa relates to the equilibrium constant for dissociation of an acid. I would think -RTlnK = ΔG = ΔH - TΔS would be where the first equation comes from, wouldn't it? Regarding "f", seeing pH and pKa subtracted from each other reminds me of the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation. Perhaps our friend can take things from there......... (On past form this may be some kind of homework, so I'm not going to get enmeshed in the algebra myself.)

Do you have any particular elements in mind that you want to extract from seawater, by electrolysis? As @chenbeier indicates, there is a general issue with electrolysis from aqueous solutions, in that cations of elements with -ve reduction potential relative to H (which is set at zero by convention), won't be reduced at the cathode, because H+ from the water will be preferentially reduced instead. So what you get is evolution of H2 gas - and a corresponding gradual accumulation of OH-. This applies for example to lithium, which is of current interest as it is present at low concentrations in seawater and is in high demand for batteries. There is a paper here about a technique for extraction of Li from seawater via electrolysis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118302927 You will see that a key feature of this concept is getting Li+ ions alone to pass through a selective membrane from the seawater into a different electrolyte that contains no H+, thereby avoiding the problem of competition at the cathode from H+ which is more easily reduced than Li+. This is quite clever, as it has to leave Na+, H+ and other species behind and only allow Li+ to be transported across. I imagine this will be to do with the state of hydration of the ions (you never have "naked" cations in aqueous solution) and how to break the hydration shell around Li+, only, to get "naked" Li+ through the membrane. But I'm speculating.

I should imagine it will be the same as any electric motor. In the stall condition all the power goes into ohmic loss, but as the motor picks up speed a back e.m.f. develops and it becomes more complicated. So I think the answer is that VI = I²R no longer describes the situation. But I'm very rusty on this: the last time I really studied it was for A Level in 1971. I seem to recall that the power of the motor is actually given by the back e.m. f multiplied by the current, so in total you end up with: VI = EI + I²R. But no doubt someone will correct me if this is wrong.

Agreed. Not being a professional in mental illness, I see little to be gained from engaging someone who seems to be suffering from it.

This appears to be gibberish, unconnected with the passage from my post that you are quoting.

I have just told you why the legal definition of death may differ between countries, in spite of the science being the same. I will spell it out even more explicitly for you: Law is drafted by legislators, not by scientists. A legislator may understand the science or may not. He or she may also listen to the medical profession, the police, religious leaders, pressure groups of various kinds, and also be aware of the prevailing culture of the society he or she is legislating for. A legal definition has to be something that can be established reasonably easily by the medical profession and the police and for which documentary evidence can be produced in court. In the UK, a doctor has to sign a death certificate, which pushes the responsibility for the decision onto the doctor - a sensible thing to do, given that medical practice and techniques do not stand still. There is a description of how this works out in practice, for the UK, in this article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)61064-9/fulltext As for your anecdotes, they ( a ) do not meet the criteria for scientific evidence and ( b ) they conflict with the current understanding of the relevant science, viz. the rapid and irreversible deterioration of the brain in the absence of oxygen and the significance of the cessation of measurable electrical activity in the brain. That being so, someone who claims the science is wrong needs to produce new, properly monitored and documented evidence of that. You haven't.

This is elementary short trading, surely. You have information that the price of sheep is about to fall dramatically. So you arrange to sell 2 sheep you don't have, borrowing them from someone else, then, when the price of sheep drops, you may be able to buy back 6 sheep with the money you got from selling the 2 you borrowed. You then give 2 back to the owner........... and you have a profit of 4 sheep. 😁