exchemist

This is a misconception. Zero point energy does not contribute to temperature.

A lot will hang on what remains of the independence of the judiciary, to stop this shit. Some welcome signs so far, but the problem is speed of reaction. Project 2025 is trying to move too fast for the courts to keep up, and to keep everyone off balance. A blitzkrieg approach.

What cheek! The rules are there for a good reason. It is you that has to adapt here. If this is "chat" from a chatbot, it will be ballocks and not worth anybody wasting their time on.

I agree with @Phi for All. The so-called "laws of nature" are man-made models for the orderly behaviour we observe in nature. Often these "laws" are only approximate and they are all provisional, in the sense that we might one day find out something new that shows they are not a complete picture. This has often happened in the past. But we don't know if there is a reason for the orderly behaviour we observe. As far as science is concerned, It just is. If you want to speculate about that, you can but it will be metaphysics and not science, because there are no observations that we can make which could test the validity of the speculations.

This is Caine's account of it: And this is Sellers' account:

Ah, now this and the previous post have triggered (sorry!) one of my Michael Caine "Not many people know that" trivia. A Mr. Alfred Bird, a c.19th English chemist, had a wife who had a thing against eggs, being allergic to them. He developed an egg-free custard substitute for her and went into business manufacturing it. It was a great success, to the extent that I, like generations of British children before me, was brought up eating "Bird's Custard", a pinkish powder that when mixed with hot milk forms a sort of inoffensive yellow gloop that can be poured onto hot puddings etc. Bird's Custard powder has been at the back of kitchen cupboards all over the country for over a hundred years. The wife was also allergic to yeast, so he invented baking powder, as a raising agent for bread. It is of course also used for cakes, the previous, traditional method of the time having been to use whipped egg whites - which of course his wife could not eat. This gave rise to the famous "Victoria Sponge" so named because the Queen was said to like cakes made on this principle (1:1:1:1 butter:sugar:eggs:flour - with baking powder as raising agent), which is what we all make today.

🐐🎪

Kipling is underrated in my view, partly as he’s associated with the colonialist milieu of his time. He is one of the few English authors who writes about work. (Conrad is another - but he was Polish.) Kipling showed great respect for work and for the working man. Here is his poem The Glory of the Garden: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_glorygarden.htm It helps you keep in mind, when you go round some stately home, of the all the people working to keep it beautiful. And of course the metaphor is that the same applies to England itself.

Well it’s more rubbery with hard boiled eggs, certainly. But not off-puttingly so. One thing to watch with hard boiled eggs is not to cook them so long that the sulphur compounds form a grey ring around the yolk. It’s only cosmetic but worth avoiding.

Yes. My favourite was the Singsong of Old Man Kangaroo, which is basically a tour de force in blank verse.

Yes it's like yesterday. I can see it but if I try to post a reply I get the "Oops" message and it dies.

Yeah I saw this in the Guardian and thought what a load of cock it was.😁 The Nature article at least shows some interesting science behind it. Every cook knows the problem is that albumen sets at a higher temperature than yolk, so the aim is to get the heat pulse from boiling water through to set just the albumen, and take the egg out before it sets the yolk. The researchers' procedure, if taken at face value, is of course ridiculous. The value of the research is presumably in the investigation of the various mechanisms at play. I keep eggs in my fridge and find that plunging them into boiling water for 5 mins 30secs seems to be optimal, for the large sized eggs I cook. One needs to pierce the shell at the top, where the air sac is, beforehand, to avoid the shell cracking. There are proprietary pin devices for that. I imagine that, with eggs stored at room temperature, a shorter time would be needed to set the albumen. It might also make the yolk more liable to start setting faster, once the heat penetrated. But I don't eat many soft-boiled eggs so it is not something I have explored.

Yes, I @geordief sent me a PM about the domain lapse. Perhaps my ability to see the site was just a cached screen my end (is that possible?) rather than a connection to the actual site. But I think the domain once lapsed even here, due an oversight on the part of whoever had to pay the subscription. So it may be up again in a few days. On thread content issue, yes something contentious seems to be the key. That's my argument for tolerating a few cranks and nutters, provided they are civil and to some degree responsive to the reactions they receive. Incidentally, my impression on the other place is that recently moderation policy has changed, to be more tolerant, presumably in the hope of retaining more visitors.

It's not down down, but limping. You can get the site up but if you try to post you get that infuriating, smug "Oops, I just forgot [sic] how to use auxiliary verbs" message. So it looks like a glitch rather than anyone pulling the plug. Or else one of the mad Trumpies, trying to bring the evil libtard site down with some sort of IT attack, I suppose. If they have the brains. But on the thread topic, as you know, I believe you need a sprinkling of cranks and nutters to keep these forums lively. One can debunk some craziness, maybe even teach a bit - and sometimes one learns titbits one didn't know. For example I learned about Tyndall's fascinating and ingenious c.19th experiments with IR absorption, from that Doogles character we had, and about Carnot's deeply insightful work with caloric, from Tom Booth. Really interesting stuff. (Not to mention that Tesla had bonkers ideas about thermodynamics, which I had not realised.) I also agree with @OldChemE that many of us don't start many threads or, if we do, they are so uncontentious that nobody comments. For example I started one last week on the biochemical building blocks found in the sample returned from the asteroid Bennu. And got one sole reply. Presumably because while true and sort of interesting - at least I thought so - there wasn't really a lot more to say about it. So as a discussion topic it had limited potential. I guess that as scientifically minded people we don't pose questions that much. We mainly wait until there is an answer to some question.

Exactly. We had a scandal some years back in the UK Labour Party, due to opposition to Israel's actions in the West Bank morphing into generalised antisemitism. It even started to resurrect old conspiracy theories about world banking being dominated by Jews (Rothschild) etc. Starmer had to expel quite a few party members over that, including the former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Not always trivial in the popular imagination however. The failure to make this distinction leads either to antisemitism or, as I know from personal experience, to unjustified accusations of antisemitism. British, and a fortiori US politics, are both full of distortions due to confusing the two, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.

Any better? (This is a "medium" .PNG file):- I thought "State of Israel does not represent world Jewry" is a sentiment we can all get behind.

OK , I may have overdone it. When I get up I’ll have another go, using an intermediate size.

I'm doing this on a Mac, having imported the photos from the iPhone. Let's try a version "Exported" to my desktop as a .PNG file, with the "small" size option selected: Al- Hamdulillah! Mumtaz!

They could well have been. I tried to upload a photo I took of them, but the forum website said the file is too big. I have never found out how to make a smaller (lower resolution) version of these photo files , which are taken with my iPhone. It takes good pics, but the file sizes can be enormous. Do you know how to make the file size smaller? It would be nice to post the picture so you can see. But yeah the shtreimels were quite something. The first time I came across them when when I was doing the Capital Ring circular walk around London and we passed through Stamford Hill (a very Jewish, but not prosperous Jewish, district of outer London) on a Saturday. These guys were everywhere, in their huge furry hats. My friend and I stopped for a pub lunch, where we ate a selection of smoked sausages. I remember feeling a bit guilty about doing that in the circumstances.😁

In London, marching. I went on a couple of these myself last year. Here is one girl, with poppy earrings as it was Remembrance Day. I had one in my buttonhole and lots of the marchers had them. The then Tory government tried to make out it was "disrespectful" to march on that day but as Remembrance Day is all about honouring the dead killed in combat, I couldn't think of a more appropriate day to do it. On another march there was a group of orthodox Ashkenazy Jews, complete with their Sabbath day shtreimels, joining the procession. None of the predominantly muslim crowd were at all hostile to them. The marches are continuing this year.

Yeah, it's a mad and repulsive idea. Trump looks at the world as real estate. The suffering of 2 million destitute people, whom he now airily proposes to deprive of even their homeland, gives him no pause for thought at all. He's a psychopath. As with the stupid tariffs, he seems not to have through it through either. What will the Saudis, whom he is trying to get to increase oil production, have to say? This even has the potential to bring Iran and KSA together in fierce opposition, not to mention the rest of the Middle East, including Turkey. He claimed he would extract the USA from foreign entanglements. This could easily enmesh the USA in another Afghanistan. China has carefully positioned itself as opposing the idea. As with the tariff fiasco, China now poses as the responsible Great Power, upholding the rules of international behaviour, while Trump's USA increasingly looks like a Great Power in decline, highly aggressive, vicious and untrustworthy as a partner.

This source: http://www.solarelectricityhandbook.com/solar-angle-calculator.html. suggests that the optimum angle is to be perpendicular to the incident rays when the sun is at its zenith. Obviously this varies across the seasons. However, given that the user's demand for electricity will also be seasonal (as will also be the price of electricity paid by the grid), there is a preliminary question to answer, which is whether the user simply wants the max annual kWh, irrespective of when in the year it is produced, or whether it is better to optimise for the season of maximum demand (and highest electricity price). That only works if the area of the lens is greater than the area of the panels, i.e. the lens intercepts more radiation and directs it onto the panels, concentrating it. A lens does not magically increase the amount of energy in the radiation (conservation of energy). In practice, a lens that size would be very heavy, expensive to make and unwieldy. I feel sure it is more practical to simply install more panels, to intercept radiation across a bigger area.

Yes, the metaphor of a spreading area of what we understand has some appeal, I agree. However I think what the chatbot was spieling about is the idea of successive models for the same set of phenomena which may be thought to progress towards - or even reach - a description of an ultimate physical reality. Let's see if there is any follow up from the OP. I doubt there will be.

No, it's none of your business.