exchemist

Oh I like them. The scallop is the traditional symbol of St James the Greater in Christian iconography, hence the French name. The statue of Sint Jacobus de Meerdere in the parish church inThe Hague had a scallop, I remember.

Samuel Johnson: “I refute it [Berkeley’s philosophy] thus.” [kicks stone]

What film was that? Seems odd for Hoyle to be annoyed about a paper he had written, and presumably published, being brought to Hawking''s attention. (The only Hoyle paper I know about is the famous B²FH, on cosmic abundance of the elements, which came up in Inorganic Chemistry lectures. I don't know any of his steady state stuff.)

On the other hand the US has been kept free from military attack throughout that time. As has just about every nuclear-armed power, I think? But yeah the problem is commercialisation of food: industrialisation of the food itself, and marketing of the experience via soulless corporate chains. I wonder if there is a synergy with TV - and now IT - you don’t eat at table en famille any more but in front of a screen, so you eat with your hands and don’t care what you shove into your face. And on the screen….they advertise fast food to you.

…..until they were brought together and harmonised in quantum theory. I see Hoyle was his PhD supervisor at Cambridge. Must admit I had not heard of him.

I'm on this forum to learn and, when the occasion arises, to teach. I've learned a lot, sometimes from unexpected sources. There was a crank who thought he had overturned the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, from whom I learned a lot about Sadi Carnot and the role of the c.19th theory of "caloric" in developing modern thermodynamics. And another who introduced me to Tyndall's c.19th experiments with what was in effect a most ingenious forerunner of the infra red spectrometer. But both these individuals at least had concrete ideas that could be evaluated.

Really. Swan mussels? From what read I thought they were commonplace.

Israel always gets off extremely lightly in my opinion, especially with media coverage in the USA. There is no justification for collective punishment of the civilian population, which has been going on now for months. Gaza has been reduced to rubble. 2 million people are being made homeless, quite deliberately. And now they are being starved. And it is noteworthy that Israel has opposed all efforts by the UN to mitigate the conditions and has refused entry to journalists to report what is going on: https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/jewish-journalists-letter-access-gaza-ctlsjbhv. It has escalated from ethnic cleaning to genocide.

My comments about there being no thought experiment and about your post being word salad are comments on the material you posted, not on you personally. You came here for comment on your ideas and you got it.

Too bloody right! What is also disgusting is the way Trump is providing cover for this policy of genocide by devaluing the term pre-emptively, by falsely applying it to a few white farmers in S. Africa.

These things apparently smell pretty awful and are used as bait by fishermen. Not edible.

This seems almost too obvious to be worth saying, but timber can be grown if future policy encourages it, making it a renewable resource. I refer you to the famous self-own of a UK TV interviewer a few years ago: A graph of historical decline in UK forestation, going back to the Medieval era and then covering the later period when demand for agricultural land and timber for the navy resulted in a loss of forests, would seem to have limited relevance to a future policy of growing timber sustainably as a building material. As for 3D printing, here's the opening paragraph of Wiki's description: 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model.[1][2][3] It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer control,[4]with the material being added together (such as plastics, liquids or powder grains being fused), typically layer by layer. Are you telling me this is not an IT-driven process?

Heh heh. It may be just the scepticism of age (I remind myself Bach thought the piano would never catch on), but I do feel there is a disconnect between some of these IT ideas and other values and goals, notably control of climate change and liberal democracy. The march of IT seems to threaten both. I was reading a piece in yesterday's FT about the appalling energy consumption of LLMs. When some mug uses Chat GPT to look up a simple piece of information, it can take up to 62,000 times as much energy to provide the answer as it would using a simple Google search. That's because of all the stuff it does behind the scenes to synthesis an answer in its own fully formed sentences, dressed up with all the ingratiating guff and buzzwords it thinks help it sound authoritative and friendly.

I agree with @pzkpfw on this. Consciousness is an emergent property, like many others. An individual molecule has no temperature, can't be said to be solid, liquid or gas, has no colour, and so on. All these properties only emerge once you have a large aggregate of molecules. In the case of consciousness, there is also the danger, it seems to me, of what philosophers call a "category mistake". Our culture in Europe and the Americas inherits a disposition towards Cartesian dualism: the idea that the body and are mind are separate, complementary entities. Thus consciousness is thought of as a thing, an entity. But surely it is better to think of it as an activity, the (electrical and chemical) activity of the brain?

Yeah, so all that has to be counted towards the construction time for the walls, since a bricklayer, say, would make the gaps and fit the frames as he went. It's interesting, but I have real doubts that 3D printing is the future for house construction. I think we will make more use of renewable materials such as wood. Bricks are not great, as they have to be fired in a kiln and bonded with mortar (whether lime or cement-based), but not as bad as concrete. People are trying to work IT into everything these days and half the time I feel it's a solution in search of a problem.

Hoho, In the UK too! The police keep running campaigns - you get fined and get points on your licence that can accumulate enough to ban you from driving - but it is hard to stamp out. Yes I worked for Shell for 33 years. Now that I'm retired my rule is never to answer or look at texts while the engine is on, but I confess I don't any longer actually turn the phone off. So I do hear the beep or the ringtone and if I'm waiting for a message or a call I will at some point pull over, turn the engine off and look at it. But then, being retired, I don't get anything like the volume of calls and messages that someone working would get. I remember being shown the digital display trick but it meant less to us in Europe as "Shell Oil" was the name of the US subsidiary. We were in Shell UK Ltd or Shell France SA or whatever, or else, as I later was, in Shell International Petroleum. I remember a number of our guys in Eastern Europe who got sacked for using their phones in the car - they couldn't believe the company was serious. But it was. In fact, now I'm getting old I find I need to concentrate more and more on the road when driving. When I was younger I liked to play classical music. Now however I find I tend to pay too much attention to the music and not enough to the road conditions. So I drive in silence.

But how do they do the window and door openings? And what about the foundations? I assume the 140hr figure relates just to erecting the walls, i.e. the bit done by the 3D printer. So that would be 6 days, if done on 24hr operation, or 18 days if done on single day shift basis for daytime human supervision. I'd like to know how long it takes to build brick walls for a similar house. Also, concrete is about the worst imaginable construction material from a CO2 emission point of view. I presume any substitute would have to be a pourable substance with similar consistency and setting time.

Lulu.

It's chiefly "slips, trips and falls", apparently. My wife and I did do a sort of informal safety audit of the house (we all took it in turns to do these at the company, as a matter of safety policy) and the fire blanket and extinguisher were a couple of things that came out of that. I also got her to get rid of a lethal pair of wide-bottomed trousers she had, with turn-ups that could catch her high heels as she was coming down stairs. Falling down stairs is a classic: humdrum and absurd, but true. Ladders are another one. But yeah, with these Li-ion batteries, though the chance of fire is very low, if it does happen it's pretty serious and potentially could lose you your house if you have big ones indoors! Another interesting finding from the company stats was that in spite of all the huge quantities of dangerous hydrocarbons and chemicals Shell handled on a daily basis, by far the commonest cause of lost time injuries on the company's time was.....road accidents. It was the sales guys who were most at risk, not refinery or oil rig operatives, as you might think. Hence the "engine on: mobile phone off" rule for driving. You would be automatically sacked for breaking that rule. Something of a culture shock in some countries, but that was partly the idea.

Yes, I sympathise. I hope that in a similar situation, having now explored the issues, I might have sufficient presence of mind to react with some of these factors in mind. I did get hands-on training in how to, and how not to, put out oil fires, when I worked on the refinery at Shell. My late wife and I both worked for the company and at one stage they had a big push on domestic safety, as the home is where most accidents occur. As a result, I keep a fire blanket in my kitchen and have a water mist type extinguisher (which can be used on electrical fires) just outside my kitchen door. But I have never yet had to use them in anger. I’m sure a lot of how one reacts is to do with the shock of the unexpected and whether one has some idea of what to do. At least now, thanks to @StringJunky ’s anecdote, we know the kind of effect that can be produced, so maybe we might stay a bit calmer if it happened to us!

I’d think that reasonable so long as you did not throw or drop the thing suddenly. It seems to me one has to think in terms of something like a chip pan fire.

I've read through it and I repeat there is no thought experiment anywhere in it. It's a rambling muddle of sciency words, thrown together at random, for instance: - "The natural tendency for a hydrogen C-atom is to make a perfect sphere. As a single cavitation (C) on a single singularity its inherent tendencies to make it's photon and corresponding electron-shell at the different times of the bounding wave are very simple." Or "If that wasn't hard enough to waddle through.. lets call the hydrogen C-atom's want of a perfect sphere it's 'true' shape and the effect the affect of the warpage has on it as it's 'apparent' shape. Why? Because there is a difference when it comes to buoyancy only existing in gravity. Harmonic bonds that perpetually reshape the energy forms bonded between local elements and molecules, aka anti-gravity in a solid aether." WTF? I'm sorry but this is a waste of everyone's time.

I'd have thought anything that breaches containment of the electrolyte might well cause a very rapid flare-up, even if not technically an explosion.

My limited understanding is that at high temperatures some of the components actually evolve oxygen, so the thing cannot be smothered. The only way to stop it seems to be either to let it burn out somewhere where it can't damage anything else, or to use copious amounts of water, sufficient to cool it enough to stop the further evolution of oxygen. At least, that is what I have read somewhere the fire brigade tries to do.

No it is not a thought experiment. A thought experiment lays out a particular physical scenario in detail, to illustrate how a hypothesis or theory can be applied to a real situation, or else to derive a hypothesis from it. There is nothing remotely resembling that in what you have posted.