exchemist

That's interesting. Clearly even that part of it is more nuanced than what one reads in the papers - not surprisingly, I suppose.

This differential equation is irrelevant. In your ferrite ring, the vibration is excited by the AC current: either by the stretching of the coil I referred to or the magnetostriction effect or both. The vibration causes the contact force from the table to vary, since the surface of the ferrite in contact with the table is moving up and down. This accelerates the centre of gravity of the ferrite, first in one direction and then in the other. It is just like you jumping up and down on the spot.

No, the "active chlorine" % quoted on a bottle of bleach is a measure of the strength of the bleach. It tells you how much chlorine a certain concentration of hypochlorite is equivalent to. 2.5% means that the concentration of sodium hypochlorite (in your case) has the same strength, as a bleach, as a solution containing 2.5% dissolved chlorine. It behaves like a chlorine solution of 2.5% , even though sodium hypochlorite is not the same substance as chlorine gas. I understand you are concerned with possible corrosion of electronic components. My advice would be that your sodium hypochlorite solution is likely to be just as corrosive as 2.5% chlorine would be.

Right, so nothing about investigating the source of epidemics, which is what I asked you. That was my point: the WHO can only investigate with cooperation. Regarding your second point, there is no dispute that China was far too slow to report the outbreak - and you have quoted an international law they appear to have infringed. Now what? What do you propose to DO about that, given that the US has spent the last 4 years weakening and undermining just about every international institution, from the UN to NATO, to the WTO, the Paris Climate Agreement and, last but not least, the WHO? The Chinese will just laugh.

I explained the vibration of your washing machine twice, but you ignored it, just demanding all over again that we provide an explanation. Both I and @swansont have explained why your ferrite ring vibrates, and I have explained, twice, why that can lead to motion. But you have ignored it and now you are demanding all over again that we explain it. In neither case has there been any engagement from you with what we have had to say. If you will not even address our explanations, what is there for us to do? Repeat ourselves? As for Newton's laws, I will tell you, one last time, that Newton's laws require only that the centre of gravity of an object continues in a straight line at constant speed if no net force acts. If it is non-rigid, and part of it is in motion relative to the CG, then Newton's laws demand that there be a correspondong motion elsewhere, to maintain the CG moving in this way. As I told you before, gas molecules, floating in free space between collisions, vibrate. This is entirely in accordance with Newton's laws. You have got this wrong notion from somewhere that a non-rigid body, free from external forces, can't be in a state of vibration. That is just ballocks, I'm afraid.

There is no connection to your eccentric mass (washing machine - type) example whatsoever and I find it depressing that you have still failed to grasp how to analyse that example. It is commonplace for vibrating devices placed on nominally horizontal surfaces to move. The object is in effect jumping off the surface many times per second, so any tiny source of asymmetry of forces in the contact zone can cause it to move. This is why kitchen appliances like my blender have suction feet on them. Forget this crank nonsense about Newton's laws being broken.

There is certainly a kind of wilful asymmetry in thinking abroad at the moment that fails to recognise the emergence of China as a - basically unfriendly - world power with a chip on its shoulder and something to prove. The US political Right seems far more interested in hunting for scapegoats than in dealing with the epidemic - in fact positively obstructing efforts to do so, by turning simple countermeasures into political totems. Blaming China, or blaming Fauci, or blaming the WHO is not going to get anything useful done. It will just make everyone angry, which is how cooperation is destroyed. What standards are you referring to? What is there in the UN charter about investigations into the source of epidemics? I share your frustration, but we need to be geopolitical realists. So far as I can see there is no way to force China to accept an independent investigation from the WHO or anyone else, especially when there is no evidence they were responsible for the outbreak.

OK if it makes a loud sound it is vibrating. This will make it tend to move if there is any asymmetry in its contact with the surface it rests on, or if there is any force from strain in the the wires. It will also make it move more readily in response to gravity, if there is any slope at all in the surface it is resting on. Coils actually expand and contract in synch with the current flow. You have a conductor in a magnetic field, so it will experience a force at right angles to both, by Fleming's Left Hand Rule, which stretches and then relaxes the coil. So it will vibrate. (Electric motor armatures have to be very tightly wound for this reason - to stop the windings coming loose when energised as the windings stretch.) I think this vibration may be the source of the motion.

The WHO is not a police organisation. It relies on cooperation between sovereign nations. So it is hardly surprising that their power to force China to allow investigators in is limited. This reliance on cooperation has been true of world affairs since the time of the League of Nations. It's not great but it's a fact of geopolitical reality. So we may never know for sure what the source of the outbreak really was. But there is a very good chance it was of completely natural origin.

OK. So you have a high frequency alternating magnetic field in this ferrite ring, and when you energise it you find the ring slowly slides across the table. I notice the table has metal legs and that there are various large metal components also on the table. It is unclear whether or not the table is flat. I have two questions for you. First, if you hold the ring in your hand, do you feel any vibration, or when it is on the table, can you hear any sound from it? Second, what happens when you place the ring on a surface with no metal objects nearby?

From your description all I see is a circuit with a resistance and an inductance, with a high frequency AC current flowing in it. As you have not described the physical arrangement of the components, it is impossible to comment on whether any motion of any part would be expected.

A leak of the virus from the Wuhan lab is certainly plausible. I don't believe I have read anything that rules that out. However this was not the "line of questioning" of Rand Paul. His "line of questioning" was a grandstanding attempt to "get" Fauci, for his own political gain, by means of a false claim that Fauci was implicated in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Leaving that aside, yes, it would be valuable to get an impartial external body to conduct a thorough audit of the Wuhan lab and its records at the time, to see if any evidence of a leak can be found. But what do you think are the chances of the Chinese authorities agreeing to that?

If you can explain your concept in words, with a diagram, we can have a look and see where your analysis is faulty. But videos are a waste of time for that sort of thing, as it is impossible to tell exactly what one is looking at, how it is powered and so forth. They also have the great disadvantage of being a linear medium, so you have to keep rewinding to see again anything you need to revisit. So give us a summary in words, please, if you want help with this.

For any readers with a sense of humour, this is how the link starts: "I hope you will take the time to read this article carefully. You already know that the current events that are happening around the world are bringing so much distress to many people around the world. And that’s because we are living in this so-called last hour. However, what you didn’t know is that the last hour is a well-planned holocaust by a group of people who owns UFOs, to reset the world. A WARNING TO PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD (Some major events that would affect your life could materialize on May 20/21 or June 1st/2nd or before this September 21. They can’t delay these wars. If we can stop these wars from materializing till 2028/30, we will be able to scientifically prove this crime. Gog Magog War (The Ultimate Goal of the people who own UFOs): The ultimate goal of this war between Hamas and Israel is to spark the Gog Magog war. This is where president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will come into the scene. Turkey can be identified as Magog. And Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will convince few other Muslim nations to participate in the war. If this happens it will give you the proof that you need to identify president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as an anti-Christ. A warning to Muslim nations: Please don’t allow your leaders to participate in this war, cause if so, the lives of millions and millions of innocent people will be destroyed. At least I hope you would think about your children before you let these leaders participate in wars with other countries. This is not a war that any of us need. It’s a trap." Batshit crazy and zero connection to the thread topic , or indeed to any science - other than perhaps psychiatry, at a stretch. But I quite like Erdogan as the Antichrist. It makes a welcome change from the pope, or the Secretary General of the UN.

Yes I think it will. Hypochlorite solution reacts in much the same way as chlorine itself and gives off chlorine gas as well. P.S. More about how it works here: http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/bleach/bleachh.htm

Since Oganesson has a half life measured in milliseconds, there can't be any such planet.

That's the most famous example of a currency that failed to do its job as a currency, certainly.

Agreed. They don’t really behave like currencies - or not like good ones.

That suggests maybe I should try the bike shed - at least while the cool weather persists. Or maybe try a different supplier: possibly Sainsbury's keeps them too long in the supply chain, so they are already about to germinate by the time I buy them.

At this time of year they start to sprout after only a week. Do you think if I kept them somewhere warmer and drier, i.e. in the kitchen, that would stop them sprouting? Or should I keep them somewhere even cooler, e.g. the bike shed?

Probably.

There are plenty of houses left with solid fuel fires that rely on the chimney draught principle. I remember my mother used to hold a sheet of newspaper across the fireplace when starting the fire, to help it draw at the bottom. Once the suction was so great the newspaper slipped from her palms and went up the chimney, alight, where it started a chimney fire. That was in Edinburgh in the 1950s, before the Clean Air Act put a stop to such things.

I don't believe Sainsbury's coats its raw Maris Piper spuds in pyrophosphate. And if they did, this would not lead to a batch to batch variation, which is the issue here.

Joking apart, those don't change in value by 50% in a matter of days. I have had some hundreds of thousands of pounds in Sterling savings for over 20 years now and I am not concerned that they may suddenly halve in value. Ditto USD and € savings.

That will be the second item in the table. So 1 g of that hypochlorite (the solid substance) is equivalent in bleaching power to 0.593g of chlorine. If you had a different hypochlorite, the figure would be different. Chlorine is a gas, whereas these materials are solid salts. So they are all different substances, but all of them release "active" chlorine atoms in the same way so they bleach things in the same way as chlorine does.