exchemist

You need to post material for discussion here on the forum, without requiring readers to go off to open other files. By the way, you cannot get a patent on a scientific theory.

OK agreed re satellites. RE Covid, surely the genome would be the same whether the origin was directly from the wild or via a lab leak, wouldn't it?

Re satellites, yes I understand that satellites in the same or very similar orbit can collide. But there is a vast range of altitudes available. I'd have thought that satellites can't change altitude without energy expenditure - unless, I suppose, some process occurs that alters the degree of ellipticity of their orbit. Is that possible? On the SARS-Cov-2 business, I'm not sure "Ethan" is any kind of final authority🤔. As I understand it no complete investigation was ever undertaken and no conclusive evidence has been brought to light either way. What worries me a bit is that claiming it was the fault of the Chinese was what the Trumpies jumped on, causing a reaction against that hypothesis by the anti-Trumpies. So the whole thing became a political football, involving the monstering of poor Fauci etc., and reason flew out of the window. Ethan seems to me to be attacking an Aunt Sally, dismissing the wilder notion that the virus was synthetically derived, by a Fauci-as-Frankenstein 'gain of function" process. Agreed, there are good reasons to dismiss that. But still leaves open the more reasonable possibility that poor virus security at the lab let escape a natural virus that they were studying. His argument doesn't seem to address that, so far as I can see. Dismissing a "gain of function" hypothesis does not dismiss the broader "lab leak" hypothesis.

I'm curious as to your rationale for saying the formula for binding energy of a sphere is wrong. I'm far from expert on this, but doesn't the classical derivation of the binding energy make use of Newton's Shell Theorem, thereby avoiding the need to worry about the effect of the mass inside each infinitesimal shell on that shell, when doing the integration? But no doubt I am misunderstanding.

This is a discussion forum. Nobody here is in need of a bad lecture on kinetic theory. What do you wish to discuss?

I must admit I wince rather when people write of "scientific truths". Strictly speaking the only "truths" in science are very well-corroborated observations. The theories and hypotheses that depend on these observations are models. It also seems to me some of the statements are rather tendentious. Perhaps the most obvious is the assertion that SARS-Cov-2 arose from natural zoonotic spillover. According to my understanding, we simply don't know for sure whether that is how it arose or whether there was some bad lab hygiene at the Wuhan lab, chiefly because the Chinese government has refused to cooperate in a thorough investigation. So I do not see how one of the two routes can be described as a "scientific truth". It is merely considered the more probable of the two, surely? I would also like to see some explanation of the "finite carrying capacity of Earth's orbit". What does this mean? "Earth's orbit" normally refers to the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Is that what is meant? Surely not. Is it then the orbit(s) that satellites can occupy to orbit the Earth? If the latter, surely there are innumerable orbits, at different altitudes and orientations.

No.

Yes, I think probably I do.

Ah OK thanks for clarifying. So the issues that matter most in your view include include: "wars, terrorism, violent crime, anger issues, domestic and child abuse, sexual assaults, governmental corruption". As none of the issues in your list are features of the natural world, there is no reason to expect science to provide much help in dealing with them. It's like complaining that a spanner doesn't help you clean your teeth.

One problem, I think, is that you seem to want to attribute to disciplines like science or art results that are due to the application of these disciplines by people. Another is that your statement about science not being "far reaching when it comes to what matters most" sounds like a criticism of it, but far too vague to enable a response, because you have not specified what you mean by "what matters most". As science is the study of understanding the natural world, it is obviously not going to help if what you consider "matters most" isn't something to do with natural world.

And the Jolly Roger is hoisted at last. 🏴‍☠️

What do you mean by a larger mechanical output? How is that achieved without violating energy conservation?

Ah so bigger than I thought. I used to be the product manager at Shell for the lubricants used in these engines, until I retired in 2011. It was quite a challenging application, especially when they were adapted to burn gas. What type of ship? Tanker? Bulk dry cargo?

I'm a bit out of touch now that I have been retired for over a decade. Is that a Wärtsilä Sulzer or an MAN B&W? 7 cylinders, I see. Bore size? 50cm?

I looked up the “disco colgante” spiral object depicted in the OP. The only internet references to it I can find are on “mysteries of the ancients” type crank websites, which assert it is located in the Larco Museum in Lima, a private museum of pre-Columbian art. However, when I tried to search for this item in the catalogue section of the museum’s website, I got null results. I think we are into deep crankery on this thread.🤪

Lot of geochemistry in this. I got a bit lost reading about serpentinisation in bed last night and went to sleep before I understood it properly. Seems these rocks can reduce water, releasing H2 while themselves oxidising (by acquisition of OH?) into a suite of minerals including chrysotile, a.k.a. white asbestos. I was interested in the potential role of the hydrogen as an energy source for life around hydrothermal vents. The reaction is said to be strongly exothermic, I see. The ability to take up CO2 is also interesting but I'll need to read about that separately. I recall there was a suggestion that slag from iron and/or cement kilns could do that, but this is obviously different.

Hmm, this reads like an extract from a patent application. I rather think however it may have been anticipated, in terms of novelty, by this: (You can expect a Patent Office Examiner with a sense of humour to cite this as prior art.😁) Nevertheless I look forward to your description of how the cocked device performs mechanical work, and in particular to how generation of torque is achieved. P.S. The amount of work it can do is obviously equal (ignoring any losses) to the weight of the counterweight multiplied by the vertical distance it drops when pulling the device over from vertical to horizontal.

OK you may be an engineer, but not much of a physical scientist by the look of it. What you have written in the above selected passage is completely untrue, I'm afraid. Firstly, chemical bonding is mainly electrostatic rather than magnetic in nature. Secondly, while electrons in an atom certainly have intrinsic spin, and may or may not in addition have orbital angular momentum about the nucleus, this is angular momentum, not energy. If you are an engineer you must know the difference. Thirdly, the energy that is harnessed in the atom bomb derives from reactions of atomic nuclei, not electrons. It is no good dreaming up wild notions when you lack basic understanding of physical science.

That is a rather perverse conclusion to draw, seeing that incidence of cancer is associated with increased longevity, itself the product of human medicine.

I must admit this rings alarm bells with me. Especially the “Ancient Secrets” shtick. Basically work done is force x distance moved in the direction of the force. So sure a 0.23oz force can move heavy object, but only by as much as Fxd allows. In the case you mention, you don’t say anything about how the 10.5oz sled is moved. Is it on rollers, or sliding, on what surface, is it horizontal or on an incline, and so on. Can you describe it? (Videos are not acceptable here, by the way, so you need to describe in words the setup, with the aid of a diagram if necessary.)

Well as you say the rhythm is not fixed as in modern music but is fluid, corresponding more or less to speech. However there are notes you lengthen, indicated by bars over them or dots after them, or by what I call a "resistor" in the note after the lengthened one. The pitch of each note is easier to read, I find, as it is just a 4 line stave and the intervals are normally simple, without accidentals (there can sometimes be B♭s). It's quite hard to sing really well, but being so ancient it has a soothing, timeless quality that seems to connect one with those who have gone before, through the centuries. I like it as a musical exercise, too.

Ugh, that looks like something one might see in a medical textbook on venereal disease.😆

Yes some possible solutions there. Or else use a long enough search string to identify the performance I want unambiguously. Luckily, for the carol service most of the stuff I need is already on a playlist assembled by the choir director, so I can just reload the playlist each time. So it's just the stuff for each Sunday I have to deal with. This kind of thing, which I find needs a bit of practice as my sight singing is a bit shaky (though neumes are easier than regular score, I find): On the business of a new ad stating up spontaneously if I leave the video for 30secs after it ends, my son wondered if was because I had autoplay enabled, so that it was moving on to the next step down the rabbit hole that the algorithm was trying to lead me down. But I've checked and I have autoplay disabled so it can't be that. Must be just further enshittification: greedily desperate for that last tiny bit of ad revenue, at the expense of the user's experience. Arseholes.

So the irony is that, to get back to what you watched last time, you have to deactivate the “history”? Brilliant! 🤪

Yes YouTube seems to be becoming progressively enshittified. One specially annoying new feature of the YouTube app ( as opposed to the browser version) is that the algorithm gives you different results each time you enter a given search criterion. I use it to practice singing and often can’t get back to the recording I found last time. It insists on giving you a new selection. And the bloody ads get longer and more intrusive. Now I find if you stop at the end for more than 30 secs or so, a bloody ad will automatically start playing, even though you haven’t touched anything.