exchemist

Today, I learned there is a thing in British lakes and slow-moving rivers called the swan mussel: I was walking yesterday on Wimbledon Common, where there is large lake that has for some months been drained for improvement works. I noticed quite a number of large, elliptical shells in the dry mud bed of the lake and picked one up to examine. The shells are quite thin and light, but large. (The picture is from the internet but is very similar to the one I picked up.) I looked it up on line this morning and was able to identify it. I had no idea there were fresh water molluscs like this in the UK. They are not rare, apparently, but being generally buried in the mud at the bottom, they escape attention. Swan mussel.pages

Loose leaf is indisputably far better tasting. Teabags are commonly filled with what tea packers refer to as "dust", i.e. the bits that break off during the packing leaf tea, e.g. Dust Number 1 and Dust Number 2. Among the leaf teas you can get BOP (broken orange pekoe - smaller) or FOP (flowery orange pekoe-larger). I buy Assam and Darjeeling FOP from these people: https://www.shopdrury.com/drury-leaf-teas/?features_hash= , Assam for body and colour, Darjeeling for aroma, and blend them 50:50, in the teapot. It takes about 3-5minutes to brew. You do have to get the leaves out afterwards into the food waste of course, which takes you a minute or so. One tip: do not try to put tealeaves down the waste disposal unit. We briefly tried that in Houston but the leaves were too small to get chopped up by the unit, yet large and mechanically strong enough to block the pipe!

Really? By now, you should not need to ask. There has been a procession of the most egregiously unqualified people appointed by Trump to every position of importance in government. The reasons have been discussed at length in the media. It is partly that he wants meritless people in these positions who are well aware they owe the position to Trump’s patronage alone. So he can demand personal favours and the departments these apparatchiks control will swing into action: to harass a judge, to investigate the tax status of a university, to question the licence of a broadcaster, to drop a prosecution, or start one, etc. And it is partly delight at trolling the establishment, to rub their noses in the fact that he is in sole charge and there is nothing they can do about it - a display of dominance. Stalin was just the same.

Isn't microplastics from degradation a potential issue - though no idea how serious?

Yes, I suppose with a court challenge pending the lawyers will want to control carefully any messages from staff that might be seen as evidence of political attitudes at the instiution.

While I have little interest in the videos, the title of your thread expresses a profound truth abut the physical world, I think. When I was studying at university I was very much impressed with statistical thermodynamics. That subject is concerned with showing how "random" behaviour at the level of atoms and molecules (random in inverted commas because the atoms and molecules of course remain subject to the laws of physics) quite naturally leads to all manner of highly ordered bulk properties and behaviour of matter, from temperature, physical changes of state and heat capacity through to chemical equilibria and rates of reaction. Stat TD was described by Peter Atkins as one of the two great pillars of physical chemistry, the other being quantum theory. I found both extraordinarily mind-expanding.

Thanks. I presume what this means is he is too occupied with the issue of how to fight to retain academic independence to have the time to write his blog. Fair enough. What is especially sinister about this is that he has found it necessary to take down this explanatory text after posting it, presumably for fear of retribution, either against him personally or against his department. That alone speaks volumes.

I went to his blog to try to find something about QFT that I don’t understand and found this alarming entry: https://profmattstrassler.com/2025/04/17/blog-on-indefinite-pause/ The original message seems to have been deleted and all that remains are the replies, which suggest Strassler has been got at by Trump’s gauleiters. Does anyone know what’s going on here? Has he lost his position?

Today I learned that Gadolinium is put in your veins when you have an MRI scan (i.e. NMR, but they don't call it that because anything "nookular" puts the fear of God into patients), to provide contrast, as it is paramagnetic. In fact the Gd 3+ ion, which is what they use, chelated suitably as it would otherwise be toxic, has 7 unpaired electrons - a half filled 4f subshell. So loads of both spin and orbital angular momentum. This was one of many things that I focused on while lying supine on the table. It's a bloody boring - and noisy - procedure. But the Irish radiographer was rather cute.

Yes, I agree the Jewish OT God seems a lot less loving than the Christian one. The Jewish God is more of a military protector of the tribes of Israel, mostly.

That is judgement rather than beneficence, surely?

Glasshopper! 😊

There seems to be some inconsistency in the Basic Directions. If you are to add powder directly to the water source and not premix in smaller volumes, is there a missing "not" in the statement "Do add water to powder", i.e. should it read "Do not add water to powder"? The statement that you are not to mix in smaller volumes of water implies you should not do what you are proposing. But I must admit I am not sure why this would be. I can't see how you are supposed to achieve uniform dispersal throughout a large volume of water by adding powder directly. One other point is I think you need something to activate the sodium chlorite to release ClO2. This can be done by chlorine or acid, including any natural acidity of the water, if present. are there no directions about this?

This seems to have nothing to do with Newton or the Royal Mint.

Well if Y is not counted as a vowel there are words of Greek origin, since English tends to transliterate the Greek υ as y. So we've made a vowel into a consonant. Things like rhythm, sylph and so on.

Do you count Y as a vowel for this purpose?

I suggest you produce a new list of your steps 1-10 but this time you show the energy input or output for each step. But at least this time you seem to be achieving a net conversion of methanol + atmospheric oxygen to water and CO2, which will give you a net energy release. So that's a step in the right diirection. 🙂

Yes I’m sure it is possible in principle to synthesise smells by suitable nerve stimulation. You say this has been done. Can you provide a link to a report of this work, so that we can read about it?

The last sentence is gibberish. Can you rephrase so it means something, or are you just another nutcase?

Exactly. The pope picture was another distraction stunt, too. “Hey, look over there!”……… It all makes it harder for opposition, whether political, media, the courts or the public, to focus and identify what is urgent or most important to resist. Trump has been about disorientation from the beginning, gaslighting the public so they can’t tell fact from fiction. Now the technique is being expanded to confuse damage to vital mechanisms of democracy with a load of other, eye-catching stuff.

If E means energy, p means momentum, m means mass and c means the speed of light, then your formula is dimensionally incorrect, so it must be wrong.

Why don’t you contact Tyson then? He is not a contributor here.

Don’t be silly. There has been centrally issued coinage since at least Roman times. Newton was merely one holder of the office of Master of the Mint in the reign of William III (Mary having died by then). The Royal Mint itself has existed in England from the c.12th.

From your recent posts I think you might speak to a doctor. You do not seem to me to be in a healthy frame of mind. But it is normal practice when walking in the countryside to greet people you encounter, just a simple bonjour and a smile, which you do not do in the city because there are people everywhere.

The problem is there is no net energy release generated by the process. You have to put in energy to electrolyse water into oxygen and hydrogen. And you have to put in more energy to ionise hydrogen into a proton and an electron. The energy released by recombining these into water only recovers the energy you had to provide to split them, and no more. So this device achieves nothing.