John Cuthber

Dig a little (a few grams) of the clay from the lake and weigh it. Shake it with distilled water + let it settle. Pour off that water and add some more distilled water and shake it up again and let it settle. Add a pH indicator and see what the pH is. Add acid until the pH indicator just changes, making a note of how much acid you add. Shake it again and let it settle. See if the pH has returned to the alkaline value. If it has then repeat this until you find out how much acid you need to add in order to neutralise the available alkalinity in the clay. From that you will be able to work out how much acid you will need to add to the lake. An alternative would be to do a "back titration". Take a known mass of clay and add a known excess of acid, then measure (by titration) how much acid is left. The difference is how much gets used up by the clay. It's worth remembering that rocks are not very soluble. Neutralising the alkalinity in the water will require neutralising the tiny fraction of the rock which is in solution but keeping the water neutral will require adding enough acid to react with all the alkali that is available from the sediments . That might be a lot.

Why?

I live far enough above sea level that the boiling point of pure water would be somewhere near 99.6C But the things that I microwave are not pure water. I gather sea water containing about 3.5 % salt has a (standard, sea level) boiling point of about 102 C because of the salt present in it. To a good approximation, the boiling point of sea water here would be about 101.6C And I suspect that the salinity of "water" in much of my food is about 0.9% To a fair approximation, the effect of altitude on boiling point will be cancelled our by the presence of dissolved material.

As far as I can tell from looking at spectra on-line, water vapour does not absorb the 2.4 GHz EM radiation typically used in µwave ovens. I don't think liquid water has any resonances there either- the heating is dielectric heating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_heating Once the food in an oven gets heated to about 100C any additional energy is used to produce steam (and a vanishingly small amount to drive chemical reactions which we call cooking). Absorption spectra in the vapour phase consist of fairly fine lines. The crude power supplies etc of a microwave oven will mean that the emission is relatively broad. Only a small part of the emission could overlap. So the coupling to the gas would be very poor. At least some dielectric heating of fats will happen (penetration depths are of the order of 100 mm) and their higher boiling point means that they could (locally) be heated well above 100C. Steam in contact with them may become superheated.

Yes, but in the wrong direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier's_principle

From https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.221601 (with my emphasis) "The distinct plateau indicates ∂𝜆𝑀T≈0, as we would expect since the full amplitude is independent of 𝜆."

The heat capacity of oil (engine oil) is about half that of water, so you need to pump roughly twice the flow rate. To a first approximation I don't think it would need a different size radiator, but you would need much more pressure to pump a more viscous material at a higher flow rate. I think you would need to redesign the engine block with bigger cooling passages and either run a bigger pump (which would also need cooling) or use a bigger radiator with bigger "holes". Good luck convincing anyone it's worth trying.

What does that even mean? (Mine is about 25 kg/m2)

How? What's the difference between oleic acid from lamb and oleic acid from an olive?

Plant cell walls are thin and partly made of sterols.

Get on eBay and buy a second hand sun dial from the other hemisphere. https://www.alamy.com/sundial-at-noon-in-southern-hemisphere-hobart-royal-botanical-gardens-image4533735.html Try to make it work in your location.

Quite possibly. But we might be able to convince the "undecided" and I don't want the nutters to have the last word.

This is interesting; it's a step by step guide to triangulating the Moon, and the source might help to convince some people. https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space-astronomy/knowing-the-moons-distance/

For many people, and many fires, "shelter in place" is a much better idea than learning to abseil on a 1300 foot rope.

Please provide your basis for a cost estimate. Have you heard of secuity?

I don't need to. I need a fire escape. One costs a thousand pounds; one costs ten thousand. Both work. Why would I buy the expensive one (which depends on having an electricity supply and may fail) As you say, it would be better to have more exit routes. Isn't it better to install 2 ordinary fire escape ladders and have enough money left over for a sprinkler system too?

That happened because someone cut corners on a relatively cheap simple thing (insulating cladding) to save money. How would you prevent that happening with your very expensive idea? In what way is your idea better than having a simple fire escape (of the sort I see in American films)? https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/fire-escapes/

"Are all kinds of vinegar more or less the same?". Yes, but I checked once and discovered that my local supermarket was selling Balsamic vinegar at a higher price pre litre than the champagne. Fruit flies are typically attracted to alcohol which is released by decaying fruit, but also present in vinegar. It would be interesting to compare it with "non brewed condiment" in that regard.

Incidentally, (I guess I'm late to the party but) I recently learned there's a name for this sort of question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem "The XY problem is a communication problem encountered in help desk, technical support, software engineering, or customer service situations where the question is about an end user's attempted solution (X) rather than the root problem itself (Y or Why?)." What problem are you trying to solve?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herschel#Discovery_of_infrared_radiation_in_sunlight Or we may be talking bolometers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolometer

https://mft.nhs.uk/wythenshawe/services/respiratory-and-allergy/national-aspergillosis-centre/ The fungus really isn't that rare in the UK. And you really did say, absolutely, that it wouldn't happen. It could, and there's nothing the food standards authorities can do about that. On the other hand they can test for aflatoxin in peanut butter (and insist on good storage etc.) There are two factors. The toxin already being present in food and the mould infecting food later. Your post muddled them. I was trying to sort them out.

We need to clarify something. Wiki tells us that: Aspergillus flavus is a saprotrophic and pathogenic[1] fungus with a cosmopolitan distribution. So, its spores can get into a jar no matter where you open it. The rich countries have resources to test peanuts for aflatoxins before they get into the human food chain. But, once the jar is open, the only thing preventing this "aflatoxin won't get in there from spores in your house.", is luck. I am pretty sure that the manufacturing process (and certainly the canning process) will kill the fungi that produce mycotoxins (thought they may not destroy toxins which are already present). The lack of water (because it was lost during roasting) makes it unlikely that microorganisms will thrive in peanut butter. (Salt and sugar may also act as antimicrobials.) That will not prevent spoilage completely. Oxidation will happen once the product is exposed to air. There may well be antioxidants in commercial peanut butter. Those are not typically thought of as "preservatives".

You can't. Or, at least, you can't make a good buffer at pH 10.5 with Tris. " Buffering features[edit] The conjugate acid of tris has a pKa of 8.07 at 25 °C, which implies that the buffer has an effective pH range between 7.1 and 9.1 (pKa ± 1) at room temperature." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tris

It will if you are unlucky.

Heinz used to advertise that "The only preservative we use is the one you open".