exchemist

That’s interesting. Seems the story of him being on death row is untrue. Also I was wrong about the number who died: 30,000 not 20, 000. Lacroix, who was among the first on the scene, took dramatic pictures of the aftermath which Holmes reproduced in the book, including the sinister “spine”, turdlike, of almost solid lava, which was extruded up to a height of I think ~ 100m afterwards, though it soon crumbled. It even glowed in the dark, creepily, for a bit, I think. You can visit Sylbaris’s cell among the ruins. I found Martinique, being part of France, orderly and good to visit. I tried my first ti’ punch there - something I often make at home now in the summer. Needs rhum agricole, which I buy in France - Bacardi no good at all for it. We also tried sugar cane juice, on the beach. Very good and with far more flavour than I was expecting. (But you will know all this, being in the Caribbean yourself.🙂)

Holmes also contained a dramatic account of the 1902 eruption of la montagne Pelée which destroyed st. Pierre in Martinique, which made a great impression on me. At that time, the term he used for what we now call a pyroclastic flow was une nuée ardente. I think it may have originated with that eruption. Some years ago I climbed the mountain with my wife and son, as far as the 1st crater rim. Bizarrely, she was rung up by her uncle in Paris, just as we reached the ridge. He had no idea where we were. The ruins of St. Pierre are a sombre reminder of the tragedy. 20,000 people perished. I think only three survived, one of them, ironically, a condemned convict in a deep cell in the prison, who subsequently earned a living by showing off the scars on his back from the burns. They never had the heart to rebuild, establishing a new capital at Fort de France.

Yes! That was why my mother, then teaching geography at the local girls' grammar school, bought the book. Plate tectonics was the new thing. She was quite excited by it and so, having a scientifically-minded boy's interest in volcanoes, I read parts of the book myself. Of course the detailed understanding of how volcanoes arise behind subduction zones has progressed hugely since then, but the principle was already there.

I remember reading an account of this in Arthur Holmes's Principles of Physical Geology, as a teenager in the 1960s. At that time Anak Krakatau was quite small, still. Now, I gather, it has grown to adulthood and has even suffered a collapse rather like that of its parent, though not as dramatic.

The question tells you A and B are pure liquids, not mixtures. Why are you asking about the composition of liquid A, then?

I've only just read this. Would it be a silly idea to run a couple of vast flywheels, just to add "ballast" to the system? One could even simply retain a couple of these big turbo-alternator sets, unpowered, and spun up and maintained to 50Hz off the grid.

Yes exactly. So there is a greater mole fraction of B in the vapour phase than there is in the liquid phase, because it has a greater vapour pressure than A. In other words, B is the more volatile component. And you can work out the mole fractions in the vapour phase by multiplying the vapour pressure of each component by its mole fraction in the liquid phase. So I don't see why you think there is a problem. For a physical picture of what is happening, you can consider the molecules on the liquid surface, as it is from this layer that molecules escape to create the vapour phase. 40% of them on the surface are A and 60% of them are B. But in pure liquid form, molecules of A have less of a tendency to escape than the molceules of B. That is what a lower vapour pressure of A than B implies. So in the mixture, not only are there only 40% of A molecules in the surface layer but also, they have less of an intrinsic tendency to escape. Hence we get 30% A and 70% B in the vapour phase. This is the principle behind fractional distillation. In the fractionating column, the mixture is made to evaporate and condense repeatedly as it rises up the column, each time creating a mixture with a higher proportion of the more volatile component. So that at the top of the column you get the more volatile component in almost pure form. (I once worked at an oil refinery🙂)

Just do what I asked you, and make a new post showing your reasoning. I’m going to get up and have my breakfast now (it is 0730 in the UK) and then I can come back to this for you. Let’s take it step by step without the distraction of AI and get the logic clear.

If you want to learn, you need to forget AI and work the problem out yourself. It sounds to me as if you have not done that. If you had, you would not be asking this question. Look up Raoult’s Law - then calculate for yourself the first part of the problem and show me how you did that. Then we can talk about the second part.

What liquid composition did you get?

I am not interested in debating AI output. How do you work it out?

I am having to guess at your meaning but what I think you may be trying to ask is which substituent is allocated position number one in the numbering convention. It is normally done by choosing position 1 to give the lowest numbers for the other groups. So in the first example the left hand NO2 group is a poor choice since you then get 1, 3 nitro , 4 chloro, total 8. Similarly if you choose the right hand NO2 as position 1 you get 1, 5 nitro 2 chloro = 8 or (going round the other way) 1,3 nitro 5 chloro = 9, even worse. By choosing Cl as position 1 you get 1 chloro, 2,4 nitro = 7, which minimises the numbers.

I specifically asked you about the democracies in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands and by what mechanism this "elite" of yours controls candidate selection. You have not answered that, preferring instead to continue to give examples from the USA. If you make a criticism of "western" democracies, you cannot just base it on cherry-picked examples from the USA.

These statements need support. Whom do you think constitutes your "financial elite"? And by what mechanism do they - whoever they are - prevent "smart and honest people" from becoming elected representatives in the UK, Germany or the Netherlands, for example?

If you like Minnie Driver, this is quite funny. I'm coming to the conclusion she is rather a good sport and would be fun to meet:

Ah yes, another "framework".

Yes you could get one at the town hall or something, with anti-counterfeit markings like a passport.

I presume that even with a digital ID system you could always print out documents confirming your identity and keep a copy somewhere safe in case of problems. Estonia adopted digital ID some year ago. There is a review of how this went here: https://www.publictechnology.net/2025/11/13/society-and-welfare/how-estonia-made-digital-id-work-through-choice-transparency-and-trust/ There is a discussion in the UK about introducing digital ID, partly to combat crime and illegal immigration. But it would also replace the various tiresome requests from different sorts of proof of ID required by banks, the legal system and government departments. I don't really see the problem.

What has your question, about the choices made in a single US presidential election, got to do with your general assertion about "hidden authoritarianism" in Western democracies?

Lotti Messa del Primo Tuono, which I will be singing a month from now and an excerpt from "Who Do You Think You Are" about the actress Minnie Driver's parents and grandparents. She was illegitimate, her father being having had a family with someone else. He was an RAF gunner in WW2, aboard a bomber in the failed Battle of Heligoland Bight. Seems the plane was damaged and only just made it back he rescued the pilot from the wreckage after crash landing - and ended up being invalided out of the RAF into a psychiatric hospital, after being proclaimed a hero of the action. He must have recovered as he ended up director of a city financial company later on. Quite an interesting story, which Minnie didn't know at all until she researched it. She seems a nice woman, actually.

Not a chance, mate. This is the same idiotic"pothu" rubbish you've been hawking round the internet for the last 6 months. Forget it.

In that case your definition of "elite" has to encompass the political parties themselves, as it is they - usually at local level - who decide who the candidate for their party should be in their constituency. This is not - at all - the same "elite" as the financial "elite" you were talking about earlier. I think you need to clarify who is in your "elite" and who is not, because at the moment it looks like a woolly concept you can use flexibly to object to any system for selecting representatives.

Those examples, if true, do not indicate democracy is an illusion. Government is always imperfect, like anything else. But in a democracy the people can throw out and replace those that make decisions that are sufficiently bad for a sufficiently large portion of society. Most government policies will make at least some people unhappy, but that's just the reality of life. Under any system of government. If you claim Western government are ruled by a financial aristocracy you need to say what you mean by that. After all, government finances have to managed if the country is not to go bankrupt. So yeah, governments have pay attention to central bankers, the bond markets and so on. That, again, is just reality in the adult world.

I’m not sure the law is quite dead yet. There have been plenty of judgements against Trump’s administration, e.g. most recently the termination of that absurd plastic bimbo Lindsay Halligan. A lot will hang on this forthcoming Supreme Chicken judgement on tariffs. If they do not uphold the constitutional rights of Congress on that, then the US will be well on the way to despotism.

Brilliant. 😆