John Cuthber

You can buy alcoholic drinks with up to about 80% ABV without much difficulty (as long as you are over 18 of course)

There's a difference between enough water to upset an NMR and "lot of water", in particular, enough water to upset the boiling point markedly. Unless you add a lot of base the amount of the enol form will be too small to matter. If you do add a lot of base then the formation of the hemiketal will bugger things up. BTW, do you realise that a data book like the CRC handbook is much more likely to help than a textbook like Atkins'?

For a given length and tension the weight of the string makes a big difference- that's why bass guitar strings are thick. They are thickened by winding wire round a string because if they were solid the stiffness of the string would make it difficult to play and also affect the frequency.

Then why bother to post anything?

You don't recall correctly.

Wrong in every major respect.

Why and why? Anyway the CRC handbook lists acetone/ethanol as zeotropic. Unless you use a good fractionating column what will distill over will be a mixture and will have a boiling point somewhere between the boiling points of the two components. That seems to be what you have found.

"From what I understand Electrons orbit a nucleus, and the only way to stop it is for it to be at absolute zero." No, even at absolute zero it keeps moving- if it stopped then the uncertainty of its momentum would be zero and therefore the uncertainty of its position would be infinite. It wouldn't be there any more for any meaningful deffinition of "there". This is, in effect, a variation of zero point energy.

Do you have any initial guesses that we might comment on?

Now with added CuCl + FeCl3 --> FeCl2 +CuCl2

Some of the big problems with space travel are the provision of energy to give you a meaningful speed through the cosmos protection from cosmic radiation provision of gravity (or its equivalent) because our bodies don't do well in zero g. taking enough people with you to ensure that you can maintain some sort of balanced society. My plan to achieve those goals is to get a really big rock, put it in orbit round a star that's already moving, give it a breathable atmosphere and populate it with a few billion people. Any takers?

Quite a lot of elements- hydrogen is one example, are metals in one allotrope, but not in another. There is no definitive answer to the question "is tin a metal?" because you need to know which form it's in. I don't see why that's different from the idea that mercury (for example) may, or may not be a metal depending on what form it is in. It's a metal in the solid and liquid states- but not when it's a gas.

"Crossing the street at random points puts people in danger from passing cars, whose drivers may not be paying sufficient attention. " Driving without due care and attention is also an offence. Cars are dangerous- we don't let children and drunks etc drive them. The people who opt to do something dangerous- like drive a car- have the responsibillity for any adverse effects of that choice. In crossing the street other than at a crossing I accept that, while I may be legally in the right if I get hit, this won't help. I may be mistaken, but I think that prostitution is perfectly legal in the UK. Pimping isn't, nore are soliciting or running a brothel. Incidentally, it seems to have been a while since anyone mentioned guns. My 2 cents' worth is that the observation that "if you ban guns then only criminals will have themn" misses a vital point. To a good approximation anyone in the UK with a gun is a criminal or a police officer (a crass simplification but it makes the point). This makes it nice ans simple for the police- if they see someone with a gun they shoot them and ask questions later (agian a gross oversimplification). Apart from coppers who can't tell a shotgun from a chairleg, where's the problem?

Ferric chloride will attack most metals. Most things will attack steel more readilly than copper. The only stupid questions are the ones you don't ask and thereby leave yourself ignorant.

Reaction with a metal tin and a trace of water might produce PH3 but I'm only guessing.

I read this bit "Prohibition of alcohol, drugs, and sex is far different as they're addictive substances. " and wondered if I had missed something. Last I heard, sex was not adictive, a substance or prohibited. Also, I wondered about "Trust me, it's best to just use the one argument that's strongest and enjoys a higher moral ground: it's in the Consitution. " The constitution has been changed before. BTW, in many countries- I suspect most- jaywalking isn't an offence. Many of us realise that people are more important than, and take precedence over, cars.

What I said was "I predict that I will be well and trully pissed off with the olympics because, while I understand that some people like to prove that they are, for example, the fastest runner in the world, I don't understand why they think I should care." There's neither a statement nor an implication that others don't care.

"If you hold them above your head and drop them simultaneously" They will land on your head. (for a give definition of "above".) Anyway, Galileo already knew that the rate of fall couldn't be proportional to the mass. He conmsidered two balls tied together with a thin string then dropped. The combined object "ought" to fall twice as fast as one of the balls on its own, but the thin string couldn't make any difference. The idea that they "ought" to fall twice as fast didn't make sense anyway.

I doubt that this statement is true, "For most people a metal is simply any element to the left of the staircase line." I think most people recognise metals as the shiny stuff. Agricola didn't have any difficulty writing de re metallica even though the periodic table had yet to be thought of. Only a chemist would characterise the metals by their position in the periodic table. If you are not sure about this check with an astrophysicist.

What do you propose to do for the other week? Not to mention the "excitement" of the run-up to it? Have enough respect for my point of view to check the basic facts before deriding it.

Do you really not see how cluttering up the 5 terestrial TV chennels with pictures of people running round in circles impacts on me, or did you just not think very hard before you posted that? Anyway I predict that in 2012 Christmass and New year will fall in the same year.

Any metal at any temperature above absolute zero will have a vapour pressure. For some metals like mercury the vapour pressure is quite high and, at a few hundred degrees, mercuty boils. That doesn't address the question of whether or not the mercury vapour is a metal. Metals conduct electricity well, are shiny and so on. Mercury vapour doesn't and isn't. One of the defining properties of a gas is that the interactions between the atoms or molecules are small. One of the defining properties of a metal is that those interactions are large. No metal is a gas.

Lead acetate is a lot more soluble in water than lead chloride is. If you are cleaning the tarnish off copper then adding salt seems to help- I guess it's some sort of complex formation. I don't think it would help with lead.

Here's the details of what I think is one of the biggest ever built. http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/21/65/94/PDF/ajp-jphyscol197637C514.pdf

I predict that a group of people who, in the circumstances ought to say "Oh Shucks! I was wrong" will say "The scriptures have been misunderstood ; the world is meant to end on..." and will set a date at some point between, say, 2012 and 2030. I predict that I will be well and trully pissed off with the olympics because, while I understand that some people like to prove that they are, for example, the fastest runner in the world, I don't understand why they think I should care.