exchemist

The enlightened man certainly turns away from meaningless ballocks dressed up as profundity.

What conference was this and what was the charge?

It is not, I say again, not a bulb fault. I know this because putting in a new one has no effect on the issue.

Hmm, but it does the identical thing if I change the bulb. So it's not a bulb fault.

Yes. From a purely energetic viewpoint one could imagine that a fall of 2kg of water through 0.5m would be enough to lift 0.5kg of water through 2m. But the problem seems to me to be that the "suction" , i.e. pressure drop, generated in their setup is determined by the head of water in the container, which, being less than the head needed to draw the water up from the well, cannot possibly achieve that. I think they would need to put all the water in their container into a tall pipe, taller than the depth of the well, and let the suction from that, as it empties from the bottom, draw water up. Anyway the whole exercise is pointless as it relies on refilling a container with water to keep the thing going, as they have no running water source to sustain any of these ideas. So just typical YouTube crap.

Thanks all, some good suggestions for me to follow up. On a couple of points, yes the system used to have halogen bulbs, but the ones in the supermarket these days are LED, as a result of the drive to cut energy consumption, which I bought without imagining they might cause a problem. I have been replacing the halogen ones one by one as they fail. I will now need to check how many of the old halogen ones remain and which ones are LED. I am dubious about the idea of corrosion causing a poor contact, due to the metronomic regularity of the flashing, at approx 1 to 1.5 sec intervals. It is not the random flashing or flickering one would expect from a faulty connection. It is some electronic phenomenon. As one other bulb, always the same one, sometimes also goes out or flashes during these flashing episodes I suspect there may be 2 wired in parallel to a transformer. Unless it just happens that these two are the only LED ones. Annoyingly, all the wiring and the transformers are hidden up in the false ceiling, which has no inspection panel! I may have to cut a hole in the ceiling to get at them. I may see if I can still source more halogen bulbs online, and try reverting to those to see if that fixes it. But I suspect that sooner or later these will become unavailable, so that is not a long term solution.

There is no dimmer in the kitchen. Could the transformer behave like a dimmer for some reason? I had naïvely assumed it would just be coils wound on a magnetic core, as of old, but from the behaviour I suspect there is some kind of solid state step-down gizmo which plays up under some circumstances.

Don't think it's that as the flashing is too regular. Looks more like the sort of thing a solid state device might do under conditions it doesn't like. But certainly it's curious that it eventually seems to settle down. I wonder if I can still get halogen bulbs somewhere and see if that fixes it.

I have 6 spotlights in the ceiling of my kitchen and one of them has started flashing a short while after they are switched on. The flashing is at a rate of once every second or so, and after a while it stops and stays on continuously, though sometimes one of the others then flashes or even cuts off. I’ve tried changing the bulb but that makes no difference. Must be something to do with the transformer I think. Web search suggests it could be replacement of halogen bulbs by LED, causing too little current to be drawn for the transformer to work properly. Does this seem plausible, why should that happen, and what can I do about it?

Well I don't think Einstein believed in a personal god, so this would presumably not arise in his conception of it. But a conventional Christian might see the order in nature (I mean the "laws", not the products of their operation) as something set up - and even maintained? - by a creator god of the type described by the Abrahamic religions One Catholic priest I've spoken to (an educated man and not a creationist) seemed to see it that way. After all, the laws of nature "just are", according to science - there is no reason why they are as they are (conservation laws excepted, I suppose).

This is very unclear indeed. The voiceover talks of Bernoulli, suggesting the principle is the suction from a partial vacuum created by a flow of water through a venturi. This is how the laboratory water aspirator, commonly used in suction filtration, works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_ejector But that does not seem to be what is going on the YouTube video linked by @Externet, nor does this video of yours show any venturi, or indeed any source of the constant flow of water needed to sustain a water aspirator. The maths is not shown. There is just one little formula flashed up for a couple of seconds, with no explanation. The design of the system is not shown either, so far as I can see. It's all hidden inside the barrel. One gets the impression this bunch in the video have no idea what they are doing, and indeed, mirabile dictu, it doesn't work! This is all crap, by the look of it.

No, just thinking of the Genesis creation accounts and thinking of Einstein’s suggestion that the laws of nature may be, in effect, god.

OK yes certainly, the religious “man in the street” may still cling to some kind of argument from design, without having thought much about it, especially if he has little familiarity with science I suppose. I’ve always been struck by the way in which the “laws of nature” bring order out of the randomness at the molecular level, e.g. in kinetic theory and statistical thermodynamics. Seems almost biblical 😉

OK. Must admit I have not come across this being used in religion recently - except perhaps in the widest sense that the order in the universe (i.e. what we sometimes call the "laws" of nature) may be seen by religiously inclined people as due to a creator (or in Einstein and Spinoza's case, as actually being the creator).

YouTube is full of shit. I suspect most of us have better things to do than trawl through it, looking for something that may or not be what you are talking about. I had a quick look at the link you provided, but as ever there is no adequate description of what is being done. As I am not going to indulge in guesswork, that's the end of it for me.

Aren’t you flogging a dead horse? ID was blown out of the water years ago and its inventor, the lawyer Philip E Johnson, has been dead for some years. The Argument from Design was taken apart by numerous people when ID was still a thing. Does anyone still use it now?

OK thanks.

Are you referring to chromium trioxide?

It may be worth keeping in mind what science is. Methodological naturalism is at the heart of the scientific method. It you want to call that a mechanistic worldview, then I'm afraid there is no getting away from that. Consideration of supernatural influences lies outside the scope of science, by definition. And so does any evidence that is purely individual and subjective, i.e. is not objectively reproducible. Your "spiritually enlightening experiences", if reported by different people, may be taken as evidence of something that happens in the minds of people, but won't be taken by science as evidence of anything supernatural.

Quite. It was a jury trial so pretty hard to see how the decision can have been "rigged". The tragedy of this is that Trump has succeeded in making it normal now in the US to regard its justice system as politically motivated. That indicates a potentially catastrophic loss of trust in one of the fundamental pillars of a democratic state. This may have huge and deeply malign consequences for the country.

It was not obvious to ancient people that the ground we stand on is the surface of just another object with mass, like an apple except bigger. You need that insight before you can construct a theory like Newton’s. Astronomy, in particular the predictable motion of the planets and the heliocentric perspective to account for it, would have been a necessary precursor to thinking in such a way. There is a long line of development in thought about the world, which has progressively seen it, and us, less and less as unique and more and more as just one case of a general principle. This can be seen in the move from geocentrism to heliocentrism and then to seeing our solar system as one of many and our galaxy as one of many. Or in seeing Man as unique and later as just one animal among many produced by evolution. Hardest of all, historically speaking, was probably the start of chemistry. The modern idea of elements required considerable leaps of imagination, considering that substances around us tend to be complex mixtures of compounds with no obvious connection or pattern among them. At least with astronomy you have a “clean” system, simple enough for accurate calculations and predictions, which strongly suggests some unifying principles and order must be at work.

What word are you talking about that has these multiple pronunciations?

Which is what I said.

Adblock plus seems still to suppress them for me, on iPad with Safari.

I see capocolla = coppa, so we should be OK with that at least. I would be less confident about Carrefour (French hypermarket chain) rosette beng nitrate free though. Saltpetre has been a traditional preservative for centuries, after all, though not nitrites.