exchemist

Yes, your writing is atrocious - and long-winded. Can you try again, this time writing no more than a couple of short paragraphs and in complete sentences, i.e. using full stops? At the moment I find myself giving up trying to work out what you are trying to say after about 6 lines.

Don’t be an idiot.

I think you may be confusing abstract mathematics with physics. Calculus is used all the time in QM. The uncertainty principle arises from pairs of non-commuting operators for certain observable properties. This concept is quite compatible with calculus. In fact some of the operators concerned contain things like derivatives.

What would it mean if time were “made up”? If there is no way to distinguish “made up” from “real”, then the distinction is meaningless. How could one tell?

You are still missing the point I made many posts ago: the business of government requires a host of policy decisions, made all the time in response to evolving issues and events.. You cannot submit more than a tiny fraction of these to the laborious mechanics of a referendum. So you simply have to elect people, to whom you entrust the making of these decisions as they come up. And then you hold them to account periodically for their stewardship. Anyone can cherry-pick some contentious issue and claim it has been, or will be, badly handled by a particular elected politician. Pointing this out is easy but completely fails to address the practical issue of the huge number of referenda required if you were instead to subject every policy to a process like that. You are not putting forward any workable alternative process. Pointing fingers at defects is easy but not constructive.

Could be. I’m in two minds as to whether there is an undisclosed agenda or whether we are just dealing with someone whose ideas are in a bit of a muddle.

I said nothing about the outcome of the last US presidential election, as you well know. My comments were comparing representative democracy (what you call, rather tendentiously, “package voting”) with democracy by direct referendum, as that would seem to be the alternative. If all you want to do is identify flaws in the way representative democracy has been conducted, in recent presidential elections in one country in North America, that is a much narrower scope of enquiry and does not in itself call into question the principle of representative democracy. So what is it you want to explore: weaknesses in the principle of choosing representatives to govern, or defects in the current US democratic system?

You must be joking. Only idiots believe in free energy. And I’m not going anywhere near a zipfile that could be full of malware.

There’s always “lunchpack”, or “meat-and-two-veg”.

Please don’t make a statement and then stick a question mark at the end. It is unclear whether you are making a statement or asking a question. Which is it? Secondly, you have failed to engage at all with the reasons I have given you for why democracy by referendum is a stupid and unworkable idea, preferring instead to hide in cheap and lazy conspiracy thinking about “ruling politicians”. This is puerile. Do you want an adult discussion of this subject or not?

If philosophical or religious ideas refer to scientific concepts, they need to use them in a manner that makes scientific sense. Otherwise, they are talking crap. No one gets a free pass to mangle science just because they call it something else. Personally, I am not in the least bit contemptuous or dismissive of philosophical or religious ideas, but if someone treats energy as a substance, or tries to endow spiritual concepts such as the soul with physical properties like vibration frequency, I am going to call bullshit, because that is Chopra-esque woo.

Aha, so that would I suppose indicate that formation of the rochelle salt is in fact favoured thermodynamically, compared to the the two unmixed salt structures. Interesting. And of course what it is known for is its piezo-electric properties. I'll have to look up how all that arises. (I'm just old enough to have had at one time a hi-fi amplifier with 2 inputs for record player cartridge inputs, one for magnetic cartridges and one for crystal or ceramic ones. Presume rochelle salt may have been use in the latter.)

Quite right I was talking nonsense, once the acid is fully neutralised it’s just a solution with equal numbers of Na and K cations. Serves me right for trying to do chemistry with brain fog from my ‘flu’. But will crystallisation produce just Rochelle salt, or a mixture of Na/Na, K/K, and Na/K tartrates, and if just Rochelle salt why? Is it a happy accident of thermodynamics that the mixed salt is preferred? My instinct would be that either Na or K would fit the lattice better and the mixed salt might be disfavoured relative to the one with the better fit.

Hmm, not sure about this. How do you know you will get the mixed metal salt,, rather than a random mixture of sodium and potassium tartrates? According to WIKI, Rochelle salt is made by adding NaOH to potassium bitartrate, i.e. potassium hydrogen tartrate, up to a pH of 8. This suggests you need a 2 step process, first generating the K bitartrate and then treating with NaOH. Generating the bitartrate suggests to me a process of gradually adding dilute KOH solution and stopping while the mixture is still acid, to make sure you only neutralise one end of the molecule. I have not looking into what pH that would be but no doubt you can look up the pKas for tartaric acid. The usual source of K bitartrate is the crystals naturally deposited in white wine barrels. There is potassium in the grapes and the acidity of wine is appropriately mild.

Well I suppose there is the “solvated electron”, formed reversibly by dissolving an alkali metal in liquid ammonia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvated_electron But that’s definitely in the “don’t try this at home” category.😀

Neither dark matter nor dark energy provides you with any justification whatever for imagining energy is a substance, nor for some wacky notion of souls with frequencies.

In the UK we had sodium vapour lamps for street lighting until only a few years ago, though now almost entirely displaced by LED. One of the curiosities of sodium vapour lamps was because they emit just the sodium D lines, you got false colours. But they were almost universal. I also remember mercury vapour street lights, which also gave false colours. I don’t know offhand what emission lines were excited - green and blue was the general effect.

Thanks, temp down for now at least but sense of taste still screwed up and lungs congested. Might be covid, I suppose, though the cheapo over-the-counter test didn’t come out +ve. When I have more energy I might try to work out the work function, i.e. latent heat, in eV, just for fun.

Ah yes, one could express that on a per molecule basis. Thanks.

Can one, then, define a sort of “work function” for a molecule to escape the attraction of its neighbours in a condensed phase. I’ve a feeling I should know this but, being in bed with ‘flu’, I can’t think of one.

“Paradigm” does seem to be one of those faux-intellectual buzzwords beloved of Chat GPT and the like. 😉

This is inevitable in systems of representative democracy, because you are voting for a person to represent you in government. You are not even voting just for the policy positions they announce, but for their wisdom and judgement in dealing with whatever unforeseen issues arise during the tenure of the government. The alternative is to hold direct referenda on individual issues. The snags with that are you will be asking people to vote repeatedly, leading to fatigue and so to low turnout, calling into question the legitimacy of the outcome of the vote, and, more seriously, the very high risk that people vote without really understanding the issue and the consequences of each decision they vote on. The Swiss manage to do it, to a limited degree, but they have had decades of practice. There is no perfect system. Representative democracy is rough and ready but does at least prevent tyranny, so long as the limits on terms of government remain respected.

Haven’t watched the video, as the picture shows something that would be insanely dangerous - and is thus clickbaitily misleading, as it is clearly not what is done. I presume the purpose of destructive tests of this type is to ensure failures of the rotating assemblies are contained safely by the casing. Not to see if the engine can withstand the insertion of the foreign object - which obviously it cannot.

Yes I have some sympathy with your view. I do think the modern environment is dreadfully noisy, due to all the machines - and often made worse by people adding yet more noise, e.g. music in supermarkets, for no good reason. I recall reading somewhere how quiet life in the middle ages was compared to what we experience today. I suspect we are all permanently overstimulated and that it is not good for us.

Heh heh.😄 Does the RB 211 have these features, or is it one the older type? I ask because the plane in the video I posted did apparently have RB 211 engines, one of which is taken out by a fairly small bird, a crow or blackbird or similar, by the look of it.