exchemist

What's the betting the response starts: "Thank you for your excellent challenge" or something similar? 🙄

Yet nowhere in this lengthy response do you state why you think FMT might cure or alleviate CFS/ME. Is there a theory for this, e.g. a proposed mechanism of action? Or are there results of trials showing significant improvement in CFS/ME sufferers following FMT? Can we please get down to a concrete discussion of the science: the observational evidence and/or hypotheses for mode of action, specific to the treatment of CFS/ME by faecal transplants? If you believe so strongly in its efficacy you must be able to at least give us a paragraph explaining your rationale. You evidently have some detailed thoughts on the subject, since for example you speak of the importance of “high quality” donors. What does that mean? What defines high quality in this context? And so on.

Thanks. I've had this joker on Ignore for a while so did not see the post in question.😃.

And then there’s Euler’s identity.

Ooh, that sounds fun, I don't think I've come across one of those.

What are A2 and S3?

That would mean the units of measure for the circumference of a circle ( πd) are not length, but kg.m²/ A2. S3. Does that make sense to you?

I repeat, it is a mathematical ratio. It is abstract and does not depend on physics. Just as 2 + 2 =4, whatever the shape or construction of the universe. You might just as well say the universe could not exist without the number 4. You have asked AI to dress up a nonsensical idea in sciency terms, and thereby bamboozled yourself into thinking you have a scientific theory. AI is good at putting lipstick on a pig. But it's still a pig. But let's see where this notion gets us. What are you saying the dimensions of π are? And then let's work out what the dimensions of the circumference of a circle must be, on that basis. Over to you.

π is a ratio of 2 lengths to one another: circumference divided by diameter. As such it has to be dimensionless. That is just maths, not physics. Also I see your document is written by AI. That makes it fairly worthless, as it is no surprise to find an LLM arguing anything, whether reasonable or absurd. They are programmed to tell the person instructing them that their ideas are great.

A good principle to bear in mind in exams and tests is to use them to show your understanding of the subject. If you stop and think for a minute, any fool could answer “combustion”, but only someone who understands chemistry could answer “oxidation”.

No, your teacher is right. What the question was getting at is the kind of chemical process involved, which is oxidation. Combustion is merely, as you say, a description of one particularly violent kind of oxidation reaction that involves oxygen gas and produces both heat and light. If you answer “combustion”, which after all is just a fancy way of saying “burning”, you are just stating the obvious, without demonstrating that you understand the chemistry involved, viz. that it is in fact an oxidation reaction.

38% is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Mars

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a.k.a. ME? I have a niece who suffers from that, as does the daughter of a friend. But this is the first time I've heard that a faecal transplant is something that can help that. The only applications I was aware of are things like long term gut infections e.g. with clostridium difficile, in which a one-off reset of the gut microflora can often help the patient get out of the cycle they got into as a result of antibiotics killing everything off. Is there research showing this can work for CFS? I'd have thought it would be something really newsworthy if there were. This is what I found on the subject in response to a query to the British ME association: QUOTE There is limited research evidence indicating that changes to the gut microbiome (i.e., the bacteria and viruses that normally live quite happily inside our intestines) might have occurred in people with ME/CFS. However, this has to be regarded as no more than interesting research findings at the present time. We need more reliable and significant research in this area before we can deterime the extent of the microbiome's involvement. It is too early to conclude that any of these gut microbiota abnormalities could be diagnostic biomarkers, be involved in the causation or maintenance of symptoms, or that people with ME/CFS can effectively be treated with probiotics or faecal microbiota transplants. The theory behind faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is that it can be used to restore gut bacteria back to their normal composition and diversity and so improve gut function. The process involves implanting normal or beneficial intestinal bacteria and yeasts from a healthy donor into the colon of a person where there has been evidence of harmful changes to the gut microbiota. FMT is a highly speculative form of treatment in our current state of knowledge and there have not been any proper clinical trials to establish that FMT is a safe and effective form of treatment in ME/CFS. It is not available on the NHS and to go privately will cost quite a lot of money – in the region of £3000 according to the fees on one clinic website that I looked at – and will carry no guarantee of improvement. This is not an approach that I would want to endorse or recommend. And on a website for another such clinic, I could not find any medically qualified gastroenterologists – which was rather worrying. UNQUOTE From: https://meassociation.org.uk/medical-matters/items/microbiota-faecal-microbiota-transplantation-me-cfs/ It seems to me one has to be careful this doesn't turn out to be scammy, like ivermectin for covid. When people have debilitating long term conditions they can understandably be tempted to try unproven or even quack remedies.

While I have some sympathy for your friend's predicament (though limited by a lack of information in the thread about what the medical condition is and why FMT might be thought to help) I must say I would sincerely hope this place is and remains a "crappy" place for marketing. That is not what it is for. It's for discussing science, in which scepticism plays an important role.

And where is nuclear physics explained in the bible? It is idiotic to suggest that any science that is not in the bible is therefore incompatible with Christianity. But I’m close to giving up with you. The allegorical reading of the two Genesis creation stories has been perfectly respectable, orthodox theology since 200 AD. I have already pointed this out. As for the concept of a soul, others on this thread have pointed out this is not a scientific idea, as there is no observational evidence, of the kind science requires, to support it. Nor indeed is the concept of God. Science simply does not deal with such ideas. And that is fine. Such metaphysical or religious concepts are outside the remit of science, that’s all. Science is about the natural, physical world.

A nice architectural example, but the explanation the article gives of the venturi effect makes no sense. It says the air is compressed as it passes through small holes in the jaali screen and cools when it expands on the other side. That is not a venturi effect, it's just adiabatic compression and expansion and I am not convinced it is either significant or would have the effect described. The towers on the other hand would provide cooling by the stack effect and possibly some venturi suction with a breeze blowing across the top.

OK but as I understand it that is not the problem. The problem is with circles of finite radius you have a maximum packing density <100% due to the area of the interstitial gaps. The problem is what happens to the proportion of the area filled by the circles, as the radius reduces, and in the limit r->0. I had expected that proportion to be independent of the radius.

I remember decomposing the wave function into radial and angular parts, certainly. But tell me, if the packing density of spheres is independent of radius, how can the packing of circles not be? Or have I perhaps misunderstood your earlier response?

I recall from chemistry that the packing density of close-packed spheres is a fixed proportion, irrespective of the radius of the spheres. On that basis I think I would expect the same to apply to your 2D problem. Though I agree if one reduces the radius so that it ->0, one would seem to have a conundrum, since spheres of infinitesimal radius would, at least intuitively, seem to fill the space completely. Perhaps a mathematician can help.

In principle yes, especially if painted matt black. This is known at the Stack Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_effect You can also get help from any ambient breeze by mean of the venturi effect, with a suitably shaped cowl on top, to create a slight pressure drop at the top when the breeze blows. And then there are these rotating cowls that spin in the wind and create suction by means of the design of their blades. My neighbour has those at the top of his 3 storey house.

Well exactly..........

No, you are way off. Have a look at this table of ages in the Levant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_periods_(Levant) The Book of Samuel, in which the story of David and the Palestinians (=Philistines - the Arabic for Palestinian is "Filistin", there being no "p" sound in Arabic.) occurs, is through to have been written about 600BC. So late Iron Age, bordering on the historical periods (i.e. when people started to write history down). The Israelites would have fought the Philistines with spears with iron tips and with swords. A sling would have typically been used by shepherds, who could not afford expensive weapons, to keep wolves etc off their flocks.

Aha, thanks. I see these started to be released towards the end of last year, perhaps in response to the "stochastic parrot" criticism of LLMs. Evidently they are expected to be less crap at maths and other problems requiring reasoning, presumably including scientific problems. So far so good. But I see, according to the Wiki article, they use even more computing resources, between 10 and 100 x what a "simple" LLM uses. So even more disastrous for the energy economy and the climate.

What makes them slow down?

The point, in this case, is that the up-front investment is gigantic.