exchemist

I’m not so sure. I think Vance and Musk are the ones with the ideology and sense of mission. Trump is just a self-obsessed old man with megalomania and a score of grudges. I think those two are the puppet masters and Trump their useful idiot. Vance in particular strikes me as having the ideological drive that is the missing element in Trump for a real c.21st Hitler. And Vance will take over when Trump conks out. He may be the real deal. That speech in Munich was not scripted by Trump.

This makes me want to retch. We will just have to take it on by ourselves in Europe. Europe has already provided more than half the funding for Ukraine. It's a shortage of manufacturing capacity that will be the problem, and that will take several years to rectify. Meanwhile I have no confidence that the US will even agree to sell armaments on commercial terms. I think Trump and Vance want the eastern EU to be overrun by Russia. It's fair to criticise the way Europe has not pulled its weight on defence but to pull the plug at zero notice has to be seen as a deliberately hostile act, given that it obviously leaves the countries of Europe exposed to invasion, overnight. I think we have to cease intelligence cooperation, too, now that there is yet another Russian stooge in charge of the US intelligence agencies. It's too risky. Ukraine's strategy and tactics could go straight to the Kremlin! And we no longer have any shared goals with the USA for the rest of the intelligence that is currently shared. Even on terrorism, the far right extremists may get tipped off by the USA. It really is over now. I doubt the USA will be able to get these people out of office - even if the people want to, which is far from clear. After all they did elect them. P.S. Seems my take on this fiasco is broadly shared by others with more information about what went on behind the scenes: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/jd-vance-volodymyr-zelenskyy This is disgusting.

This seems rather a waste of time and effort to me. For a start the human race is not going to be a multiplanetary species "soon", if ever. Secondly, even if we were, there is no reason to think a change to the system of units would be helpful. All units are arbitrary and the result of history. The metre, for instance was set up at the French Revolution as being one 10 millionth of the distance from the N Pole to the Equator. Does anyone today know or care about that? Of course not. We use the metre because it is a convenient size for human beings (actually very close to the yard), easy for us to visualise and able to express everyday objects and distances without a lot of decimal places or zeros. And then there is the process of changing units, which is very time-consuming and costly. So those are the reasons for not changing units. As far as I can see you have not explained what benefits you expect from a change (I have not read your long screed from ChatGPT since we all know Chat GPT produces any old crap to satisfy what the user has fed in. If there are benefits enumerated in that screed, you need to extract them and post a concise summary in your own words.)

You are choosing, bizarrely, to believe that the French authorities and all the major media organisations that have reported this nefarious activity are lying or misinformed. Obviously nobody on this forum is going to prove the truth of the allegations to your satisfaction by finding and posting examples of child pornography. If you can't see why that is, you are crazy. It is obvious there is at least a case to answer and it will now go to trial. The trial judge will see the evidence. So we'll see if the allegations are true.

If Zelensky has no, or few, cards to play that is solely because Trump has chosen to betray him and side with the aggressor in this war. So it is pretty rich for Trump to tell Zelensky he has no cards, when it is Trump who has taken them away! I actually think this dust-up in the Oval Orifice was a manufactured publicity stunt by Vance and Trump to try to weaken Zelensky personally, in the hope he will stand aside and allow a more Russia-friendly leader to replace him. That has always been Putin's desire. Putin wants Ukraine to hold an election (preposterously, in the middle of a war with parts of the country under enemy occupation) which he can interfere with and cast doubt on. This can provide a pretext for a further invasion later on if the new leader is insufficiently subservient to Russia. The row was televised and no doubt carefully selected clips will now be circulated to depict Zelensky as ungrateful and unreasonable, when he has been fighting for the life of his country for the last three years, against a massively powerful foe. Trump has furthermore overturned the entire military posture of the USA since WW2 in the European theatre. He has wrecked the deterrent value of NATO, which has been the centrepiece of military strategy ever since WW2. This leaves Europe exposed to military conquest by Putin's revanchist Russia. It is absolutely plain now that Trump and Vance are Russian stooges, wanting to carve the world up into spheres of influence without regard to borders or law. It is also plain that they hate the EU deeply and want it to fail. What better way of achieving that than to neuter NATO and thereby encourage Russia to nibble off bits its eastern frontier, sapping its energy and resources? Meanwhile Vance and Musk try to destabilise it on the political front by encouraging far-right authoritarian movements. The USA is now, suddenly, the adversary of Europe, not its ally. "The West" is now dead. What we have now is the free democracies vs. the rest. Those comprise the EU, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and a few others. The USA is not a member of this group.

Quite. Anyone who has visited Charlemagne’s octagonal chapel at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), built in 800AD, will find “Dark Ages” a suspect term.

Aha. So the resolution of the seeming paradox is actually quite subtle. To be honest, the ladder paradox almost does my head in. I'm not surprised @M S La Moreaux hadn't thought of it that way.

This isn't my field at all, but I wonder if the conceptual difficulty is that, while the electrons are in motion relative to the observer, the wire in which they travel (i.e. the array of atoms of which it is made) is not. So it seems to me the external dimensions of the wire are unchanged to the observer, even though the contents, i.e. the moving electrons, are foreshortened in the direction of travel as you have explained. I'm not sure myself how I should picture this. In terms of your analogy, the balls inside the plexiglas tube are in motion, but the tube itself is not.

On the contrary, @TheVat and I have been addressing the OP, which was asking about points of law concerning interception of correspondence by the state.

Firstly this is not the constitution and secondly there are two references in the section on Article 432 concerning the case of public officials acting “hors les cases prevus par le loi”. This implies there are other laws that may override this one in particular cases, most likely concerning public safety and security. I see little point in you trying to relitigate a case in a jurisdiction you know nothing about.

I don't see anything in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic about secrecy of correspondence: https://www.elysee.fr/en/french-presidency/constitution-of-4-october-1958 What are you referring to? As for the UK, there is, famously, no written constitution at all. In fact there are specific laws allowing the authorities to access correspondence, under certain circumstances. I don't know about other western countries but these examples indicate you are mistaken.

I made a post about, that a while back on this thread. But the idea of bonds, and thus the meaning of the diagrams @studiot showed you, should not be too hard for you to understand, I hope. Water is H-O-H. Carbon dioxide is O=C=O (double lines in the latter case denoting what are called “double” bonds. Note that in this case carbon still forms 4 bonds, even though here it is joined to only 2 other atoms.) So you can see O, oxygen, forms 2 bonds, C, carbon 4 and H, hydrogen 1.

By observing the proportions in which substances reacted. Once you have the atomic weights, if you carefully weigh the reactants and the products, you can deduce that one carbon atom reacts with 4 hydrogen atoms, or else to produce substances with the ratio nC atoms: 2n+2 H atoms. In other words, CH4, C2H6, C3H8………..etc. These are all hydrocarbons. Probably easiest to do it by burning some of a hydrocarbon and measuring the amount of water and carbon dioxide produced and looking at their ratios. And then it dawns on you that C is joining to 4 other atoms, either 4 Hydrogen or else to one or more C atoms and H for the remainder, but H is only joining to one other atom. The lines between that atoms signify that C can join to 4 atoms but H can only join to 1 . This led to the idea that the number of “bonds” an atom can form is characteristic of the element. And that is a very powerful principle in chemistry.

I'm not familiar with milk of lime. Isn't it just another word for lime water?

He will have in mind the oligarchs in Putin’s circle.

Oh that's better. I saw him on YouTube, in a video interview with a US news channel, and he looked as old as Methuselah and as if he was calling from a bed in a hospice.

Carville? He's virtually dead, though, isn't he?

I'm no biologist but it occurred to me there may be a threshold of toxicity below which the liver and other organs can manage to convert and excrete the toxic species, leaving a weight gain due to those sugars that can be metabolised successfully.

If you already have the answers to this, I’m out.

Hmm, I see what you mean. I see that L-glucose is a laxative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose Presumably this reaction produces racemic mixtures of sugars. Can that account for the diarrhoea, do you think?

Well at least I didn’t accuse you of being a paedo, which is what he does at the drop of a hat.😁

Bullshit. Malfeasance is a perfectly good word. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/malfeasance Maybe it’s you who’s the dropout😁.

If you go way, way back, I think they tasted them and they were sour. Your tongue can detect acid this way. There is a bit of the history here: https://pubsapp.acs.org/subscribe/archive/tcaw/12/i03/pdf/303chronicles.pdf

Can you provide a typical analysis of the mixture? And can you summarise what you have read in the literature about formose? That would save a lot of reinventing the wheel.

For sure. But it was the metallic sheen I was trying to account for - which I think is now clear.