exchemist

50 minutes ago, popcornfrenzy said:

 

 

I actually thought that the 1 g = 1 mL is a universal thing for all solvents, glad that you guys made me realize this

 

So basically, the activity was only for making different concentrations of NaCl, nothing more than that?

In any mass <-> volume conversion you always need to take into account density. The density of water happens to be 1g/ml, strictly speaking at 4C but close enough for most purposes at most temperatures.

I spent my career in the oil industry, where we handled a variety of oils all with different densities. This made it very important to use the correct figure when using volumetric meters, drum filling scales etc. and also to correct for the way density changes with temperature. Liquids tend to expand with rising temperature, so the density decreases. 

Many organic solvents have densities considerably below 1g/ml. For instance n-hexane has a density of 0.66g/ml at 25C. Others are considerably denser than water, e.g. carbon tetrachloride has a density of about 1.5g/ml.  

32 minutes ago, geordief said:

Sure it enters into the equation.I tend to agree that value judgments are learned and relate to the  context.

But some of the context  can be an appreciation of the work involved in making a product and a respect for the lives lived  making and developing it.

Not everyone will share the final assessment but ,in @exchemist 'a example most did  ,presumably  because the product was close to what was aimed for  and passed enough criteria  for all or most  (in his opinion)  to agree that it had distinguishing features.

Distinguishing features often equates to an increase in monetary value and if people have spare cash it is not unreasonable to expect they will use it.

I have (my partner ,not I) 3 bottles of wine that have sat in a room in our house  for the past 40 years and are now  apparently worth around 1000 each  at auction.

I keep them flat and out of the light  and have no idea or real  interest  if they would taste good or not.

You can't taste them without ruining them unless you know what you are doing and so they just sit there as it is too much trouble to ferry them to an auction house in London.

 

We had a wine grower who stayed with us some 15 years ago and he told us that if you have a bottle of "good" wine that has spoiled  it is possible to recover the quality of the  wine by using it in cooking.

The lost flavour returns.No idea if it is true but he sounded like a professional.

I've heard that one can use a corked wine for cooking, as the cooking allegedly gets rid of the cork taint, but this seems to be disputed.

1 hour ago, andromedanut said:

Let's say I say to you.. bumbilrorg.. I could say this to you a million times but you'd never know what it means.. so how in tarnation did we end up knowing our first languages words meanings?? Does this prove that we were made to know our language and possibly other things? Someone explain this to me please! 

Ask your parents. 

11 minutes ago, geordief said:

I did a couple of seasons of the vendanges many  years ago .

Maybe that is when I heard it said that the best wines tended to be sold abroad.

Could that be why I found it easy to get Merlot wine over here or was it perhaps just a case of a lazy description?

I only really drink wine when someone stays and leaves a half  bottle behind and I cannot bring myself (or even conceive of) throwing it out.

 

My partner doesn't drink it at all and just holds the same glass until the end of the evening or until she can spirit it away.

You got a wine based 100% on merlot from France? I wonder where that came from. 

But don't believe the best wine is sold abroad. That might be true of the most exclusive "trophy" wines that millionaires buy: that market is fully international of course. But for ordinary mortals, wine from much the same selection of producers is available in France and the UK. I normally stock up with a bit from the local Carrefours when we go to Brittany each summer. The rest I get chiefly from the Wine Soc., that pillar of the bourgeois professional classes in the UK. 😄  

4 hours ago, geordief said:

A few years now since I bought any ,but I don't recall it being difficult to get then

 

I know very little about choosing wine and was just following a recommendation  from another cook(I try  to keep things simple and repeatable)

I don't think I've ever drunk wine from 100% merlot. My wife was very French and had been brought up chiefly on Bx, mainly left bank, so usually blends: Cab Sauv/Merlot/Cab Fr/P Verdot. Right bank (St. Emilion, Pomerol) usually doesn't have Cab Sauv and for that reason is thought to  mature earlier.

Merlot ripens more easily I think and is less tannic, hence easier on some palates that find a lot of tannin too astringent.   

I have to confess the wines I really enjoy best these days are based on Nebbiolo: Barolo, Barbaresco, Langhe Nebbiolo, Valtellina, Gattinara etc. But I'm very slowly working my way through all the Bx. that was bought when my wife was alive and before I had a dicky ticker. Definitely a 1st world problem. 

3 minutes ago, geordief said:

Completely ignorant of that film.I seem to have been providing a faux plonk over the years.

I did find this resumé of the situation, though

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/oct/04/merlot-comeback-wine-grape-surviving-sideways-effect

Merlot is blended with Cabernet Franc in St. Emilion. I don’t think you find it on its own much in Europe.

5 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

What's your excuse?

OK, I've had enough of you now. You are going on the Ignore list. 

11 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

But if it's all I can afford, rather that than vegan cheese, but your journey may vary...

Whut?

20 minutes ago, Genady said:

Thank you. Feels better to know that I don't miss much  

It is rather a social thing, when everyone around me has this but I have to have something else...

Bonaire, Caribbean Netherlands.

No breweries here, but a distillery. They make liquors from Kadushi cactus, aka Peruvian apple, which is plentiful here.

Otherwise, most everything is imported, from Europe, US, and South America.

So an overseas part of the Netherlands then. This is what the French do. I've been to Martinique and to la Reunion, both of which are France d'outre-mer.

And I've been once on business to Surinam, which is independent but fairly Dutch. I remember I flew back (KLM to Schiphol, of course) on the Queen's birthday and all the stewardesses wore orange ribbons.   

3 hours ago, Genady said:

Not because of quantity. As much as half a glass or even less give me headache.

I don't know if it is related, I get headache from any milk product, too. Even a croissant, because of butter. BTW, none of the usual effects of lactose intolerance.

Imagine, living in a Dutch country and not drinking beer or eating cheese  

Well Dutch cheese is generally nothing special. There's a lot of it, but it's almost all just variations on one variety, so far as I can see: the Gouda type, in those huge wheels. When we lived in The Hague we did find a boerenkaas that had good flavour but even that was just similar to a good Cheddar or a Comté, so nothing very special. Everything is from cow's milk. They make one blue cheese in the whole of the Netherlands and that is a recent introduction. As for the beer, my impression was most of the good stuff came from Belgium. But I expect there are some good little breweries if one seeks them out.

 Where are you? Surinam? 

5 hours ago, MigL said:

Is that because of quantity, or quality?

I tend to like full bodied reds, but ones aged in oak barrels, like Cab Sauv, tend to give me headaches, if I drink more than half a bottle.
I find Amarone, made from partially dried Valpolicella grapes, to be good, without the headaches when I over indulge.

Amarone is powerful stuff. I used to find it a bit dehydrating. I've never been bothered headaches from wine, but I have always had a large glass of water to hand when there is wine on the table. Nowadays my intake is restricted, especially in the evening, due to a tendency for  getting A Fib at night.   

3 hours ago, Externet said:

Once in ~2005, I bought a dozen bottles of wine imported from Argentina at a $0.99 store in San Leandro, California.  Without being a connoisseur, found nothing wrong with it. I wish those would be still available.

Would enjoy the most, to see fancy experts tasting wines with labels removed.

Blind tastings are very common in the wine world, and often reveal surprises that put previously little known producers on the map.They can also expose lazy winemaking by those who trade on previous reputation.

17 minutes ago, geordief said:

I don't think the wine was intrinsically better (if you were saying that) but that it met the general expectation of how it might taste.

 

If that bottle had given everyone a  headache and a deli belly  maybe their taste judgement would have changed down the road.

 

I never drink (or eat) except in combinations and have no understanding why anyone drinks wine or similar  on its own (obv  they do)

Oh yes I agree it's better to drink wine with food generally speaking.

My story is simply to show that a wide group of people, with different  experience and tastes, can come to a common judgement about the relative merits of different wines, and that that judgement correlates with the judgement of those who get to determine the price.

This ought not to be surprising, as there are centuries of experience and expertise devoted to making good wine. These French and Italian vignerons have been doing it for generations. It's not just for fun or to bullshit the public. 

21 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Thanks for the neg from, whoever; but what's the argument?

It wasn't from me but your point, whatever it was supposed to be, was unclear to say the least.  

Just now, dimreepr said:

How can you tell how much of that experience was due to the price of the bottle?

Are you stupid? I've just told you we did not know what the wine was until after we had commented on it. 

54 minutes ago, joigus said:

This made me think of Feynman's comment on "unworldliness" and the 'beautiful' equation U=0,

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_25.html#Ch25-S6

 

By the way, I think the OP is using a word, "complexity" --that has a very specific meaning in physics and other sciences very intimately connected to it-- to mean something better captured by "difficult", "cumbersome", "steep learning curve", etc.

..or even "that which I don't understand".

2 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

How do you prove that this wine tastes better than this one?

Proof? Proof is for logicians. But  evidence? That I can give you. 

OK, when I was at Shell a group of us got invited to a wine tasting evening at Berry Bros. We were a complete mixture, some with some knowledge of wine, others not.  We had a lot of fun learning the difference in taste between Beaujolais (Gamay) , Pinot Noir from different places etc. At the end they gave us one more to taste, without telling us what it was. Everyone - and I mean everyone - went quiet and said it this something really special, way ahead of anything else. They then revealed it was a £100/bbl mature Bordeaux.

People can tell. It's not just bullshit. 

It's a bit like my late wife, who expressed no interest in cars. However once in a while she'd comment: "Ooh , that's a nice car", to which my reply would be: "That's a Rolls-Royce" or "That's a Jaguar". 

14 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

There are many things that affect our perception of taste, even music can be designed to enhance taste.

Money, or price, has it's part to play, but that depends on how much we trust the informer.

For instance, if you can't afford a chateau lafite and someone on the TV says "this Chilean <insert name>" is just as good, then it tastes just as good; even though you've never tasted a château lafite.

But if you can't afford "this Chilean <insert name>", then I'll have a "mothers ruin" and learn to like it...

Speak for yourself. 

23 hours ago, Genady said:

The previous comment brought to mind another linguistic example of subjectivity of a judgement regarding simplicity vs complexity, namely vowels in Hebrew, or rather a lack of them. Is writing without vowels simpler or more complex than otherwise? It certainly makes texts shorter and leaves fewer possibilities to make mistakes. In fact, the vowels are not used because it turned out that they are not needed, in Hebrew. The way the language works, they can be determined by the context.

OTOH, I had a discussion once with a new immigrant in Israel who believed that Israelis don't use vowels on purpose, i.e., to make learning the language more difficult for new immigrants in order to reduce their abilities to compete for jobs. This is not unlike the complaints in OP.

The same is true of written Arabic, at least for some vowels, presumably owing to their common root. 

22 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

Not a trick question. If the answer is 90, then the pulse pressure limitation would trump that of the diastolic.

Those are certainly good numbers you have for any age.

I've looked this up. It seems high diastolic pressure can be a problem in itself, indicating an abnormal degree of resistance to blood flow, rather than lack of elasticity in the arteries. I don't think 120/80 is particularly good. It seems nowadays to be regarded as the upper limit of normal. But at least it's not on my list of health conditions to worry about. I have others, as most people my age do.  

30 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Has he lost the support he had before then? I'm not up with US politics, but I had the impression that there's a big lump of America behind him, and the crazies with beards numbered a lot more than a handful. 

I'd be surprised if that was all that happens, but like I said, I'm not up with the current feeling in the country.

I would like to see him locked up, but I'm guessing that they would water it all down, behind the scenes. Depends on his chances of running again, I guess.

Well I admit I'm not in the US but my impression is he has lost support, at least among people who are not crazy. After last time, I doubt huge numbers would turn out to try to overthrow the forces of law and order just because he gets his collar felt for knobbing this woman and trying to cover it up.  

41 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

Sounds like he's prepping... One thing is clear. He has not changed his MO one iota. Do people think he'll try and cause another riot if his arrest occurrs?

I'm looking forward to this. If he is arrested, then I suspect no more than a handful of obvious crazies with beards and MAGA caps will show up. That will do wonders to marginalise him. 

But he probably won't be arrested. 

The BBC has a great picture of him: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65000325

He looks like just another crazy old man with dementia.

4 hours ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

For an average individual the medical community seems to suggest a healthy resting systolic blood pressure of no more than 120 and diastolic blood pressure no more than 80 and a resting pulse pressure (the difference between systolic and diastolic)be no more than 40.

So given a slightly elevated resting systolic pressure of say 130, what would they like the lower number to look like? And why? 

 

The logic of your post indicates 90. Is this a trick question? 

I presume the difference between the two is a measure of elasticity in the arteries. A difference >40 could suggest inability to stretch sufficiently, under the pressure of the pulse of the heartbeat.

But I'm not medical. 

When I was still rowing, mine used to be 100/60. Nowadays it is 120/80. I'm 68. 

2 hours ago, AlexanderSamualDunnett said:

My theory is that electrons aren't all perfectly spherical little balls of exactly the same amount of negative energy. Where do they come from? Where does positive charge come from? There is no way to observe the origin of the universe but we can work backwards with our minds. I think a single string is alot more likely than any concepts of particles.

Going backwards with your mind seems to be a personal speciality.

Look, "in science", as a schoolteacher friend of mine says, "you can't just make shit up". You need evidence from observation and you need to show that your theory can predict what sorts of further observation we should expect. Without that, it's what on this forum is known as a WAG, a Wild-Arsed Guess. That isn't science - and the moderators here won't like it.    

I'm not sure what you mean by electrons being little spherical balls, but that has not been the model we have of the electron for the last hundred years.

Just now, StringJunky said:

Yes, thanks. That sounds like it. I had a feeling it was to do with the fact that there is a detectable correlation in taste using titration but not pH. Is it likely that the H+ ion concentration does not correlate to taste differences? You have given me something  to make a start to look into. Thanks.

There are several acids: tartaric, citric, malic and maybe more. Tartaric and malic are dibasic and citric is tribasic. Each carboxylate group will have a different tendency to release H+ (different pKa). All are contributing to the overall H+ concentration. To make matters worse, you can get (as a winemaker you may indeed want) malolactic fermentation, which converts some of the malic acid into lactic acid, which is monobasic, with a fairly low pKa.

I imagine the mouth feel and perceived acidity of the wine may depend on how much of each is present. Since saliva is slightly basic, you could perhaps get a sort of buffering situation in your mouth. Quite complicated, I would think.  

35 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

A long time ago, I had a book on winemaking that delved into the chemistry more than most. It said, iirc correctly, that titrating wine was a more accurate/predictable  measure of how acidic the wine would taste than measuring pH. In those 80's days it was litmus paper tests or titrating. Titrating red wine was difficult to see the indicator result. 

Fast forward to now, I'm thinking of winemaking again and would like to use an electronic pH meter I have.

Does anybody understand the difference the author was talking about. The authors were chemists themselves.

I assume the idea of titration is to determine the amount of acid present rather than just the pH. As there are several weak acids present in wine, the pH will tell you the concentration of H+, but that won't tell you how much of the acid molecules there are, since they are only partially dissociated and if there are several you won't be able to correlate an H+ concentration with the total amount of all of them.

But I'm guessing a bit.   

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

New analysis of SARS-CoV-2 positive swabs indicated heavy presence of racoon dog DNA, suggesting that those (illegally) sold animals adds weight to the suggestion of the market as a possible spillover source.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/covid-origins-research-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-lab-leak/673390/

There is an account of what has been found here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-19-origins-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-data. which is not behind a paywall.

It seems the international team has found evidence from details of DNA sequences, uploaded by the Chinese analysts who sequenced the Covid +ve swabs in question to an international database called Gisaid. These sequences have since been taken down without explanation by the Chinese, but not before they have been copied.

So the mystery now is why the Chinese researchers originally claimed there was no animal DNA, and why they seem now to be covering the fact there was in fact animal DNA after all. One might think that the Chinese authorities would be very keen to claim the virus came from animals and not from a leak from one of their own labs. 

It is also not clear to me at least, exactly what these swabs were, i.e. from where and when they were taken. 

I start to wonder if there is a disinformation game of some kind going on.