exchemist

You had better ask a current chemistry teacher, I think, rather than us old fogies.🙂 But for what it is worth, I would expect most UK exam boards would specify that IUPAC naming and labelling conventions should be taught and those would be used in examinations, the aim being to avoid confusing students and to rear them on the modern system. I see. Seems to be from the early 1960s, so a few years before my time. I can see the logic. It's interesting to group silicon with both germanium and titanium.

The fourth one is curious. I have never seen that before. Where does it come from?

Oh sure there are always things like that going on round the edges. Chemistry is complex and messy. There are elements for which there is no agreement as to what the ground state electronic configuration really is, when valence subshells are very close in energy. And you can have a (slightly sterile) debate about whether Zn should be counted as a transition metal or not. And so on. But in chemistry I have always felt it is the rule-breakers that provide a lot of the fun. A good rule has to account for say 90% of cases, but then the exceptions become more interesting in contrast - and thus easier to remember.

Yes it can be confusing, as it has changed over the years. I still think of B and Al as group III and N and P as group V. But IUPAC has spoken, so it is all different now. Personally I think the most rational system would be to number the columns within each block, so C would become gp 2 of the p-block.That’s because it seems to me the 4 blocks, s, p, d, f, are the most important primary classification for the elements, reflecting the last valence shell being filled according to the Aufbauprinzip. But the periodic table is so old and so fundamental to chemistry that it is impossible to scrape off all the barnacles of history. One just has to learn to live with the different versions. (And don’t get me started on why we name the blocks s, p, d and f. That’s another long story, to do with early spectroscopy.)

So, to be clear, when you said you were quoting Einstein as reported in Britannica, that was untrue and you had made it up. I see. This does not augur well for the discussion. It is not "a common myth" that Einstein didn't understand quantum mechanics, so far as I am aware. It looks to me as if you have made that up, too. I suggest you read up some of the history, look at things Einstein really said, and clearly separate what he actually said from your own musings.

This quote sounds a bit odd. Can you provide a link to where you got it from, to help us understand the context?

Yeats expressed the danger of this tendency in human affairs with: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” (And we have our present day rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, but that’s another subject.)

And bears shit in the woods............ This has always been obvious to any independent-minded person working in a corporation. In my >30 years at Shell I was repeatedly struck by the ability of members of the Committee of Managing Directors to speak in clear and simple language, quite unlike many of the senior managers beneath them. I was also struck by the tendency of those managers with a burning ambition but rather modest intellect to tend to hide behind buzzwords and management-speak, sometimes to a quite baffling degree. But they used to egg one another on, as if it was some mysterious language to which only they had the key. It got worse over the years. Eventually there was a whole cottage industry of this crap, speaking in generalities, none of it actionable. I recall one particular incident in which I had a meeting with a recently promoted senior manager in the Research division. She spoke at length in answer to one of my questions and I simply could not follow what she was saying at all. So I asked if she could clarify, whereupon I got another equally baffling cloud of buzzwords. So I just said "Thank you very much" and left. There was nothing else to do. (Her research centre was shut down a few years later.) So my conclusion was the CMD were the real deal, whereas a significant number of their subordinates were faking it.

Some kind of bagel, perhaps? I see, having looked it up, that bagels may have originated in Poland.

So similar to English doughnuts then, or Dutch oliebollen or French beignets. Apple can sometimes be used as the filling too. Though the Dutch ones often have raisins in the dough and no separate filling.

You're right, I think. They had to use a different actor for the later scenes, which is why those scenes depict him with his cloak covering his face. They also used a recent Swedish immigrant with no English, Tor Johansson, to play the part of a police detective who gets taken over as a zombie (if I remember correctly): He delivered lines such as "Melikele examiner been here yet?"

Except for the judges, at least in Britain.

I don't believe this is really about regime change at all. All these calls for the people to rise up and overthrow the regime are just smoke. Trump doesn't give a toss about them. This is about further weakening Iran as a regional power, regardless of the consequences for the Iranian people even if they end up with a protracted civil war or dismemberment of the country at vast cost in human lives, to the benefit of Israel. (And Jared Kushner's real estate plans for Gaza, naturally.) Collapsing Iran into chaos and thereby eliminating the sponsorship of Hamas and Hezbollah will remove the last practical obstacle to the annexation of Gaza. I suspect that is the real agenda here.

The latest The Rest Is Politics podcast on the new Iranian war. Like most podcasts it’s far too long because it hasn’t been edited, but the main points come across in the first half. I was struck by Stewart’s comments that several of the coups, wars and instabilities in Africa in recent years are the consequence of the destabilising of Libya brought about by decapitating the Gaddafi regime without doing anything to control the aftermath. I was also struck by what he says is the total lack of any idea what happens next, on the part of the American officials he has contacts with. Nobody he has spoken to could comment on any of the possible scenarios he put forward, all of them apparently just hoping someone clever in the Pentagon has thought it all through. The question is whether there is anyone clever in the Pentagon these days, headed as it is by a Fox TV presenter with no defence or foreign experience, and no tolerance for people with independent ideas.

Well SNAP!, then. Er, or something. The following summer was the summer of Lou Reed Walk on the Wild Side and Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, heard through open windows everywhere.🙂

Yes I remember that too. In the UK they were superseded by SI, by the time I got to uni in 1972.

1g = 10⁻³kg. c = 3 x 10⁸m/sec So E = 10⁻³ x (3 x 10⁸)² = 9 x 10¹³ J. So quite a lot! You may be aware of the "mass defect" in nuclear physics, by which the mass of a nucleus with several protons and neutrons is less than the mass of the equivalent number of free protons and neutrons that make it up. This is because of the extra stability (i.e. lower total energy) they have when bound together than they have separately. So when protons and neutrons fuse together to form a larger nucleus, this energy difference is released, powering the sun - and H bombs.

I have seen, on another forum, people making use of something called "GPT Zero". This I understand is an AI tool that returns a % likelihood that a given piece of text has been generated by an LLM. It was part of the evidence used in banning a recent tiresome contributor on that forum. I have no idea about videos or images, though.

If cassava is better for your digestion I recommend pāo de queijo. Any Brazilian community will have access to these. There are ready made varieties.

I got mine last year. Now I’m even more glad that I did.

Hmm citric acid eh? I'll need to look at the ingredients list, next time I buy a tin, and check. There's none in the house at the moment. All this talk makes me think it could be time to make cheese scones again. Or even have another stab at pāo de queijo, as I still have some cassava (a.k.a. tapioca, a.k.a. polvilho) flour from the last time I tried it. (It worked, sort of, but was very oily for some reason.)

The Parkin recipe reminds me of a curious feature of golden syrup. It corrodes the tin and can even leak through the joints if stored for many months, in spite of being so viscous. ( I often have some in the house for porridge in the winter months but the tin can sit untouched for 6 months over the summer.)

Can you not buy an oven thermometer? If your flapjacks don’t burn I expect you could make a cake or scones in it. 180C is good for most things.

Yes my son used to make those for munro expeditions. At my instigation he used to include chopped dried apricots, which add some balancing acidity and a bit more flavour.

I don't have a regular emergency stand-by, but occasionally I will bake a Victoria Sandwich cake and have a slice of that with my afternoon tea every day until it's gone. I normally bake a half cake and get 8 slices out of it. Alternatively I sometimes make cheese scones. These can be frozen and microwaved up at tea time, one at a time, so probably better for the waistline as one doesn't feel one has to use them up before they go stale. But I find if I eat too much at tea time I am not hungry at supper time so I try not to overdo it.