exchemist

So the greenish colour of the nodules is Fe(II), reduced from the general red/brown Fe(III) of the sandstone by the presence of hydrocarbons, as indicated by the high carbon content of the nodules.

What’s the origin of the nodules? I note the Oklahoma ones are over 40% carbon. Since I’m aware crude oil has vanadium and other heavy metals in it , I wonder if these nodules may be derived from petroleum seepage or something, from deeper lying rocks.

The Marxists of the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, were the classic exemplars of the rigid ideologues I am talking about. It was obvious that all the countries that had embraced Marxism were autocratic police states and economic failures, yet as each example was exposed they flitted dutifully to the next, until that too was shown to be awful. Russia, China, Cuba, even Albania, all had their turn as the hoped-for Marxist paradise. The Marxist students were mainly to be found in the humanities at my university. I remember my mother, teaching English at a school with a Marxist head of department, telling me of visiting Stratford-upon-Avon. As the coach wound its way through pretty English villages, this guy gloomily remarked with a sigh:”Somehow I don’t think there ever will be a revolution in this country.”

That, again, was not always so, though I expect it may be today. There was a time when many on the Left seemed determined to fit the world into their ideology, regardless of the evidence. At that time it was the centre-Right where one found the pragmatists, interested in what worked rather than ideology.

I’d prefer Schubert’s, I think.🙂

As far as I’m aware, there are no quantum computers in existence, due to the problems of preventing decoherence. More IT hype from the tech bros, or is that too cynical of me?😉

Very interesting. I didn’t know about the Western Interior Seaway until now. Nor that the first part of the Tertiary has been renamed Palaeogene. Palaeocene I knew, but there seems to be now this umbrella term for a wider timespan within the Cenozoic. It’s hard to keep up…..

Surely, given these data, you should be able to calculate where this body should be now, and get astronomers to look for it or estimate the gravitational effect it should be having on other bodies in the solar system, shouldn’t you? This article points out that any such object should be easily detectable:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm

It’s getting very hard to detect any meaning in this thread.

But nobody here has “described” anything. Why are you starting in the middle of a non-existent conversation? Did you write this yourself? If not, you should cite the source.

I remember muscular stiffness after physical exercise (e.g. when I was rowing) was said to be due to accumulation of lactate in muscles (as a result of the back-reduction of pyruvate you get with anaerobic respiration). But that is stiffness that takes 24hrs to dissipate, whereas feeling stiff when you have just been immobile seems to be something that passes off with just a minute or two of movement. Are both due to the same thing, do you think, or are different mechanisms responsible?

Well it's a crap style and if you want people to take you seriously you should damned well change it. Write in full sentences, without putting words in capital letters, and without redundant punctuation marks all over the place, and you stand some chance people will not immediately assume you are barking mad. As things are, well, we may draw conclusions to your disadvantage.

Would you? What about the capillary blood vessels the organs that you mention would need to keep them alive?

Ah so that's what it is. Well done. I didn't recognise it. Our friend seems preoccupied by the fact that this 2D array has hexagonal symmetry, for some reason. There may be a very confused link to this kind of thing, which I found on a quick internet search: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57059-3. But what he says is so garbled and uncommunicative that it is hard to tell.

Actually there is a mechanism for development, in those branches of Christianity that claim Apostolic succession of the bishops, e.g. Catholic and Anglican/Episcopalian Christianity. These denominations maintain that the Holy Spirit continues to guide the church so that doctrine and tradition can be developed to meet evolving challenges. Now, one might well smile a bit at some of the things that have been done on this basis over the centuries, but it is not the case that all versions of Christianity are sola scriptura and thereby tied forever to just a fixed body of scripture. That was a concept that came into fashion at the Protestant Reformation, as a way of "getting back to basics" and sloughing off the doctrinal accretions that had accumulated.

I assume the dashed lines are H bonds. But it's all gobbledegook and this poster has started at least 2 previous threads on this topic over the years, none of which seem to make much sense. All of them seem to be about this notion of a triple helix, which makes little sense to me as the whole idea of the double one is to unzip it to make copies, so what would be the use of a 3rd strand?

Only in your neurological reference frame.

You can certainly argue that @swansont 's "insofar" does some fairly heavy lifting in some expressions of the Abrahamic religions. But it remains a fair statement as a general principle, I'd have thought. So long as religion avoids making claims about the processes of the natural world, there isn't a conflict - witness the large number of religious scientists. Regarding historical accuracy of the Old Testament, that's a matter for historians, whose disciple is well used to working with partial and biased accounts and does not find them shocking, because it is human nature.

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.