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exchemist

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Everything posted by exchemist

  1. Exactly. But the marionettes weren’t electronic. Sometimes you could see the strings. Lady Penelope was apparently based on Sylvia Anderson, the then wife of the series’ creator. Fireball XL5 is one I remember, from when we first got a black and white TV set. Pretty appalling, though the take-off sequence, with the ski jump rail system, was cool.
  2. I recommend buying a teapot and a tea strainer. You'll get less tannin scum in the cups and no leaves in your tea. And it's just classier all round - think Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. 🙂 Loose leaf tea tastes better in any case, though it take a few minutes to brew. I must say I did not realise there were microplastics in teabags.
  3. My thoughts exactly. He’s trying to frogmarch Congress into accepting his technofeudalism. I don’t think they will take kindly to being told what to do by an unelected South African, not even the Republicans. And Trump will hate being upstaged.
  4. Yes, Putin has indeed made threats. My contention is that none of them has had any influence on how the war is being fought. They seem to have been chest-beating stuff, aimed at his domestic audience, with no effect, so far as I can see, on the posture of Ukraine or its supporters in the West. The refusal of NATO members to get into direct confrontation with Russian forces is long-standing NATO policy, not the result of any threats by Putin.
  5. Surely that is because Russia is a nuclear power, rather than because of any nuclear threats it has made, isn’t it?
  6. Nobody is winning anything due to “nuclear threats”. What gives you that idea? The war in Ukraine is conventional ( save for some alleged use of chemical weapons by Russia, which was the justification given by Ukraine for assassinating the general they held responsible, a couple of days ago) all the signs are that it will remain so. Furthermore it is quite idiotic to suggest anybody would start a nuclear war unless certain countries bought their oil.
  7. Well hello and Happy Christmas! Yes, I was one of those who predicted the finger or tab would resist being extracted from between the magnets and that this was the phase of the cycle in which there would need to be a work input to overcome the resistance, which would balance the work output in the other phases. Emmy Noether still rules! 🙂 I tracked you down to the over unity machines forum, but there too the trail had gone cold in mid-September. For some years on these forums it seemed to be a seasonal event for an over-unity (1st Law violation) claim, or a heat-sink-less heat engine(2nd Law violation) claim to pop up around Christmas or New Year. They were often quite fun to disentangle. So as the season approaches I thought I would give your cage a gentle rattle. By the way I haven’t been to Chatham yet, but I’m currently reading the Pickwick Papers, in which much of the early action takes place in the surrounding area. What’s this about olives? Are you somewhere in the Mediterranean, then?
  8. And…the thread has gone very quiet, as predicted…..
  9. Have you successfully heated your kitchen that way, then?
  10. If you can’t do maths, you won’t even understand the laws , or the physical principles, you are trying to talk about. So what hope is there? It will be a case of galloping Dunning-Kruger, won’t it?
  11. If you can’t do maths it will be crap. You can get away without much maths in a number of sciences, but in physics it is indispensable. Sorry. But I see you and I discussed this 3 years ago, in a thread now in the Trash Can, and that moderation told you not to bring it up again. So this one is probably heading the same way, I would think.
  12. Yes that explanation makes no sense. I did find this, which does seem to make sense: https://www.canopyclimate.com/post/the-best-portable-heat-pump-and-one-type-to-avoid According to this, the mode of operation is to draw ambient air from the room, rejecting the captured heat back into the room and exhausting the cold air thereby created to the exterior. As the writer says, the problem is the expelled air has to be replaced by air from within the house, so you must draw outside air in somewhere, which will be cold, if not as cold as the air the pump exhausts. And in the process it will create a cold draught, which subjectively may make the occupants of the room feel cold, too. Sounds pretty crappy to me, if not actually a scam. 2 hose job must be far better, I feel sure. But no doubt it will dehumidify the air, which may make it feel less chilly, I suppose.
  13. This is not new. Lala (someone of Parsee descent whose parents anglicised the family name to Laland) is a prof at St. Andrews and a prominent exponent of the “extended evolutionary synthesis”. Details here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_evolutionary_synthesis Nothing about this implies “control” by populations of organisms over how they evolve, in any conscious sense. However it does propose that environmental factors can affect evolution through means other than simple natural selection. For example, I was fascinated to read some years go of research suggesting that at times of environmental stress, organisms may reduce the normal corrective mechanisms that correct the errors in genetic material that lead to mutations. It’s as if they go off to the casino and spin the wheel, to see what novelties they can create, some of which might be helpful. Not everyone buys into the extended synthesis, but it has been for some time a live hypothesis in conventional evolutionary theory.
  14. I don’t think so. To me, resonance implies it is the natural frequency of the pipe, not a forced oscillation. I might do a bit more reading about it tomorrow (right nowI’m suffering from a bad cold and have little mental energy in the evenings🙂).
  15. Hmm, I see. But it must be hard to tune them so they have identical resonant frequency. Or do they have some ingenious way round that?
  16. Yes I think that’s right. What I don’t follow yet, not having read it up, is how this phase shift thingie gets detected and converted to a mass flow readout. Some explanations show a pair of tubes in parallel. Not sure what that does.
  17. You’re not the only one: the diagram in the OP refers to a “twist angel” [sic]. 😁
  18. This is interesting. I had vaguely heard of Coriolis flow meters from my time in the oil industry, but never looked into the principle of operation. So thanks for posting this query. I have learnt something. I think I've got it. It's the inertia of the flowing fluid inside the tube. The arrows show what takes place during the "upward" phase of oscillation of the tube. Fluid entering from the left resists being made to flow slightly upward due to its inertia, creating a downward force on that part of the tube. Conversely, the fluid leaving, back to the left again, has by now been made to flow slightly upward and therefore resists being made to flow horizontally once more, creating an upward force on that part of the tube. So, seen end-on from the right, the tube will have a slight twist as shown. When the tube is in the "downward" phase of its oscillation, the converse happens. When it is in the centre, there is no twist. So, again as seen end-on from the right, there will be a rocking or twisting motion superimposed on the up-down oscillation. In effect, on the side the fluid leaves, the phase is slightly advanced relative to the oscillation with no flow, while on the side the fluid enters the phase is slightly retarded. The downstream side leads the upstream side. The magnitude of the force will depend on the rate of flow of mass, because when it flows faster more mass has to be made to change direction in unit time, i.e. the rate of change of momentum, d(mv)/dt is greater. d(mv)/dt = ma = F. And then of course there a load of fancy stuff about detecting this distortion of the resonant frequency via phase shift etc.
  19. According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_US_air_base_drone_incursions_in_the_United_Kingdom the UK incidents took place over 4 days in late November. I’m not aware it is still going on, at least, I don’t see anything in the news.
  20. Ah, racemases. I didn’t know about those. So there are biological ways to convert one stereoisomer into another. That answers my question.
  21. That was certainly how it seemed to me. We are nowhere close to creating organisms from scratch. But my real interest is in whether a hypothetical bacterium or virus employing molecules of opposite chirality to that present in terrestrial life could interact effectively with it. My understanding is that the wrong chirality in, say, sugars renders them useless because they can't be metabolised by organisms.
  22. How would this work? Surely these bacteria would be unable to utilise biochemical molecules from normal organisms, because they would have the wrong handedness?
  23. Where do you get this balls? Odeon comes from the Greek word for roofed theatre, while nickelodeon was originally the name given to small local cinemas in the US where one could gain admission cheaply, e.g. for a nickel. What evidence do you have of George Bush, of all people, doing rituals in the woods?
  24. Fair enough, but this guy is at GCSE level. No point in blowing up his brain with all that 😄

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