exchemist

It is not only irrational but a transcendental number, like e. And there is a famous and mysterious connection between the two of them known as Euler's identity: This is connected with the polar form of complex numbers, i.e. r(Cos𝜽 +iSin𝜽).

But coal mining was in truth an awful job, much though it is glamorised in hindsight now, Hovis ad style. Not to mention the terrible effect of coal burning on the climate. It's a good thing the pits are closed. Shell Haven refinery, where working conditions were pretty good, lasted quite a while. (In the early 80s it boasted the first women refinery technologists in the company. I was lucky enough to go out with the prettiest of them for a while - memories.) Not many people will be aware that the refinery, though owned by Shell, was actually named after a location on the Thames called Shell Haven, an inlet in which there were a lot of shells. Nothing to do with the company name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Haven Anyway now it's a container port - and no longer called Shell Haven. But refineries are obviously going to die out and that too is no bad thing. The world moves on. No I have enough souvenirs already, including one of a N African guy sitting on a bench in some village, strumming a home-made guitar constructed out of a 5 litre can of Shell Rimula (an old brand of diesel engine oil) and a neck of wood. Sometimes I used to feel like that guy.

Yes, I remember flying over the refinery site on a trip back from Amsterdam and looking down to see...grass.... I think probably my most enduring contribution actually was the quality assurance manuals I arranged and largely wrote, based on my experience as a QA auditor, for lubricants production and distribution. That back-breaking work was so unglamorous that nobody was keen to do it again, once they were there! But I console myself they were important, even if not the sort of thing that launches brilliant careers.

Well amen to that!

I simply don't trust chatbots.

I am not reading this. And the way you speak about these chatbots, even though I realise it is partly in jest, disturbs me.

Well, yes a long journey. I visited 47 countries in the course of my work, lived in the UAE (Dubai), Houston (USA) and The Hague (Netherlands), met several girlfriends at work - and eventually my (late) wife at the company rowing club. As for "great work", well one thing one has to be resigned to as one gets older is seeing what one has done get overtaken by later events. For instance the then state of the art, robot-operated oil plant I where I was once production manager and chief chemist got knocked down, leaving the site covered with just grass. Now it is part of a container terminal! Sic transit gloria mundi, as the popes used to be reminded, during their coronation ceremony.

No I just applied them, working in the lubricants industry for Shell for over 30 years. I'm coming up to 71 now and long retired. Though come to think of it I suppose I did resurrect and extend a model for the condition of the oil in large marine and power diesel engines, as a function of top-up rate and oil consumption.

There is this is today's Indie: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-psychosis-nhs-doctors-ai-b2797174.html This indicates there is concern that chatbots can fuel psychosis in people with a shaky mental state, due to their propensity to reinforce what the user suggests to them. Link to the paper here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cmy7n_v5 I'm not sure how much of a surprise this is, but anyway it is one more thing that needs to be thought about before we all rush headlong to make them available for everything and everyone. I think I detect a distinct dotcom bubble feeling about AI. Hyped like crazy, but not nearly as good as they say, with numerous hidden snags and side effects. There could be a reaction, in a year or two.

Why have you posted a video on how to copy and paste on Android? Nobody here asked for that or needed it. Only you, so you said. So why tell us? Are you confused as to who is you and who is us?

Well that’s the thing. In my experience, mostly in Hamburg it’s true, Germans speak softly and with deliberation, are not afraid of silences, and when they say something they have generally thought it through. I put it down to constructing sentences with the verb at the end.

Ha, silly mistakes is what my son struggled with in maths, too. He seemed to panic a bit when faced with an unfamiliar problem and rush at it. I used to tell him to pretend to be German, stay calm, take his time and not panic. It helped a bit. It was lack of confidence I think. Anyway, you are not alone and it can be fixed.

It's not me who has had his thread closed down, after 11 months of posting stuff that the resident experts here can't make any sense of.

Reported, for reinserting a hijack sent to Trash.

I don't think that's true. My son hated history at his first school but at secondary school there was a charismatic teacher that brought it alive. He ended up studying Ancient History and Archaeology at university - he graduated this summer. So much depends on how a subject is taught. I had a chemistry teacher who inspired me in the 6th form - and there were some beautiful girls I think I was trying to impress. And on the issue of maths, I didn't much enjoy it until the 6th form, at which point it started to get interesting. I suppose calculus was the first breakthrough. It seemed both quite easy and tremendously powerful. And then complex numbers suddenly struck me as cool: I loved the idea that you can just invent a square root of -1, even though there isn't a real one, and build a whole extra dimension (literally) of "imaginary" maths on that invention. And conic sections were also cool: the connection between a circle, an ellipse, a parabola and a hyperbola, all in rather beautiful curves. So in fact, from doubtful beginnings I really quite liked maths by the time I got to uni - at least, enough to get by in physical science. But you are right that seeing where to apply it helps. I was delighted that complex numbers suddenly cropped up in physics, in AC theory. So there was an immediate application in the science block for what I was learning over in the maths dept. My strong advice would be to hang in there with maths. There is a theory that the human brain only gets comfortable with such abstractions in the mid-late teens for a lot of people. Part of the problem may be trying to force it before the brain is ready.

It can, in principle, but it's tough going. Generally you need someone to check your understanding is good at intervals and ways to test your knowledge. It also requires great commitment to do it all without the chance to discuss issues with other students. That's a big part of the learning process for most people: having to re-explain something to another person is the best way to check you understand it yourself. Also the excitement of discussion and argument helps a lot with motivating you to continue. And with mathematical science you need to work through a lot of problems to make sure you can manipulate the maths confidently without screwing it up. Hard to do that all on your own. In chemistry at uni those of us doing the quantum chemistry option had a maths tutor throughout the 3 years, in addition to tutors in the 3 branches of chemistry themselves.

Almost invariably what we get with these guys is a lot of fancy talk about "Christoffel symbols", "Riemann geometry" and all the other sexy buzzwords, but with without an understanding of even 1st yr undergrad physics. (That hogwash about Planck's constant and virtual particles is one example.) What they miss, with their grandiose ideas about pushing forward the frontiers, is that the real innovators in science first master the current science, before embarking on new thinking. Trying to criticise or replace something you yourself don't properly understand is an idiot's approach, doomed to failure. The unpalatable fact is there are no short cuts. You have to learn the stuff and be good enough at the associated maths used in the modelling before you can contribute. (I'm not, by the way. I can just about hack the maths of quantum chemistry but that's my limit. In fact, one of the insights I got from quantum chemistry was to start thinking in maths rather than in pictures. That gave me a glimpse of how people at that level of physics have to operate.) My great fear today is that, with the advent of chatbots that are programmed to tell the user how brilliant they are in order to keep the chat going, a new generation of cranks will be spawned, implacably convinced they are all geniuses and thus impervious to reality. Ballocks will reign supreme, if we are not careful.

His thread got closed, after running for 11 months and 8 pages.

Ah yes but first you have to share knowledge. Not ballocks. There is a distinction. These science forums (I've been a member of several for some years now) attract posts by cranks and nutters, writing ballocks while thinking they are the next Einstein. Some of these can be quite instructive: I have learnt quite a lot from reading some of them - usually where the writer has got wrong some piece of science I did not previously know about. But in the end moderation has to close them, once it has become clear they are going nowhere, otherwise the forum becomes full of angry people arguing repetitively against nonsense. You've been given a very good run for your money, it seems to me. There is a relevant aphorism attributed to Carl Sagan: "Sure, they laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown". Everyone putting forward a new theory should ask himself at intervals which of the two he is, just as a reality check. (I say "he" because women are generally not so egocentric as to fool themselves they are more brilliant than they actually are.🙂)

You are not paying attention to the earlier responses in this thread. Who is going to arrest Trump? The judge himself? No, it is the marshals. And they are controlled by……the Dept of Justice, which is headed by……a Trump appointee. Now do you understand the problem?

Just guessing but something to do with undeclared use of AI text, perhaps? It's not me though, as I don't read your posts.

You need neither photos nor videos to comply with moderation’s request.

It’s not rocket science, Professor. You can just copy a link and paste it into your text. If your source is not available on line, all you need do is provide details of it in normal text.

Yes, I note the sugary, ingratiating style of the chatbot, designed to lure you and me into further conversation by giving us compliments. I'm reminded of the absurd "excellent choice" that comes up when I order a pair of underpants from Marks and Spencer online.😆

OK, sorry for the rant, but it is a subject that worries me quite a lot at the moment. These things are being hyped to the skies and they look impressive, even seductive, but the content they produce....not so much. he other aspect that is worrying is the appallingly high electricity consumption of the damned things. People are now using them for what could be simple search queries but the power consumption is thousands of times higher than for a simple search. They are putting under strain the electricity grids of entire nations and risking the use of more fossil fuel to satisfy the extra demand.