John Cuthber

Wrong in every major aspect. The black stuff in the OP might be copper oxide or just copper. It's hard to tell without rather more information. Adding sulphur to water won't get you anything but wet sulphur. If you search this site for sulphuric acid I suspect you will find out how it can be made.

Somewhere hidden away in the source code for VB there already is a routine that "understands" things like 4*x^7 that's how you can put that formula into a line of code and get the program to calculate it. Writing your own software to do that woold be redundant and frankly rather hard. The trick with the pet was to force the machine to stop, write the equation into a line of the code that was already running; then restart itself. (That was cheating- but it worked). In effect the program rewrote itself yo include the new code. God knows if that's possible in VB but if there is some similar trick to use the stuff that's already written, it's almost certain to be easier than trying to write your own interpreter.

If you are stuck looking at some bit of science with nothing to do it's often worth wondering "What happens if I change the temperature or pressure?". Of course, if you have better things to do than wonder that then please feel free.

I could tell you how to do this with a commodore pet (and it was difficult then) but I don't think it will help.

I have to say that, personally, I'm not so much concerned with the level of spending as such; I'm concerned that they are spending it on the wrong things. The clearest example is the UK government trying to bring in ID cards "to reduce the terrorist threat" which is nonsense. All the terrorists that usually get a mention (9/11 and 7/7) had perfectly valid ID

There are lots of counterions. Chloride and bicarbonate probably top the list but the amino acids in poroteins will also figure.

So, no proof then. Do you have any experience in maintainig high vacuum systems?

Also most essential oils would react quickly with ozone and destroy both the oil and the ozone. Some of the degradation products are likely to be toxic too.

Would you get more marks or fewer for pointing out that, while it's perfectly possible to measure the mass of the ruler this way, it gives you no information about its weight. The balance point would be the same on the moon, but the ruler would weigh about 6 times less.

True, but we don't have that data.

You are indeed connected to a rock. So are the other rocks; in exactly the same way and to the same extent. The difference is you can worry about it- but that doesn't mean you have to.

Well, I think the answer is right there in that report. "But as the Wall Street Journal reported in February, the demand is out there: In a recent U.S. survey of 999 people who sought genetic counseling, a majority said they supported prenatal genetic tests for the elimination of certain serious diseases. The survey found that 56% supported using them to counter blindness and 75% for mental retardation. More provocatively, about 10% of respondents said they would want genetic testing for athletic ability, while another 10% voted for improved height. Nearly 13% backed the approach to select for superior intelligence, according to the survey conducted by researchers at the New York University School of Medicine." Roughly 90% of the people think this is a bad idea. Things that are that unpopular tend to get made illegal. Also, if 10% think it's a good idea and (made up number alert) only 1% can afford it then it's 99.9% irrelevant.

Webster's calls itself a dictionary of the English language- but it's a dictionary of the American language. Since it got its own title wrong I'm not suprised that it doesn't know what analyze means.

Can you prove this statement "increacing the flux even many orders of magnitude is almost mechanical development."?

That's easy. The word analyse comes from the same route as electrolyse and hydrolyse and it should be spelt with an s. For words like deputise or deputize both spellings are acceptable. The word "analyze" means to make something anal.

The calutrons worked; this is different.

If you replace solder by words like smoke or tobacco in that quote you get exactly what lots of people used to say about smoking- till they got cancer. There are legal limits to the amount of solder flux fumes permitted in workplaces in the UK and US (and I guess elsewhere too). http://www.hse.gov.uk/coshh/table1.pdf (listed under "rosin") http://www.osha.gov/dts/chemicalsampling/data/CH_266137.html It's not good for you and you ought to minimise the amount of fume you breathe in. BTW, unless the soldering iron is really hot, the amount of lead in the fume is minimal.

"Why not to try and increase the flux? " because, if you manage the remarkable increase from 10^9 to 10 ^15/sec, you still only make tiny quantities of stuff. It's not as if it's easy to raise the flux. "Why USEC cancelled it's program? " It didn't work. "Excavation of uranium is already energy negative." is an interesting point, but is it true? Do you have any evidence for it? "Reason for failure in hyperfine level excitation separation of used nuclear fuel was that isotopes subjected to reactor conditions have charge in their nucleus, enough to mix binding energies. " No it's not. This separation technology is applied to raw uranium that has never been in a reactor. Why ressurect a dead thread to get things dead wrong?

What would your second guess be? Acids (particularly H2SO4) are used in cooling mixtures just like salt or CaCl2. IIRC the Merck index lists a few. What I can't explain is why snow works better than shaved ice.

I can make a reasonable guess about the concentration of the acid and the number of litres in a gallon. What I can't do is estimate the buffering capacity of the pond. There is't enough information to answer the question. The best advice I can give is to take 2 gallons of water out of the pond. Take some of the acid and dilute it 1000 fold with water then titrate the bucket of water with the dilute acid. However much dilute acid it takes to bring the pH of the 2 gallons up to pH 9 should be the same as the volume of undiluted acid it would take to drop the pH of the whole pond to pH9. However this probaly won't work. The strongly alkaline water suggests to me that there is something in it, perhaps limestone, keeping it alkaline (is it a newly made cement/ concrete lined pond?) Until you add enough acid to react with all the alkaline stuff you are not going to make much difference to the pH.

Who says it should?

I doubt that anyone has done this for decades but the "traditional" way to produce pure nitrogen in the lab was to heat sodium azide- it decomposes smoothly at about 300C. That's close enough to the melting point of KNO3 that I suspect that the reactions are not the same as you get if you heat the materials separately. I think you would get some sort of solution reaction. What I'd really like to know is how anyone can be sure exactly what happens. After all there's the straightforward decomposition of KNO3 at about that temperature to give KNO2 and "O". How does the KNO3 know not to decompose, but to wait for a party of 5 sodium atoms to arrive to reduce it to nitrogen?

I thought that this was an old joke Q Why do farts smell A for the benefit of the deaf. But I guess that's not very PC

Define "very hard". I have done this on my kitchen gas cooker, in an old tin can, with ground up charcoal as a reducing agent and (here's the tricky bit) molten sodium hydroxide as a flux. Do you know just how nasty NaOH is and how much less pleasant it is if you melt it? If not then I'd not really reccomend this experiment. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I'd reccomend it anyway; YT2095's idea is a whole lot safer. Electrolytic reduction would probably work too.

Would you care to find out what the equilibrium constant for this reaction is? NaN3 + H2O ---> HN3 + NaOH. Because my money is on it going very definitely the other way. However NaN3, water and CO2 will generate HN3 so it's not an important distinction. The electrical power that would be required to heat the hundred grams or so of NaN3 to a high enough temperature to decompose it all in the millisecond or so before the passenger hits the steering wheel would be huge. I suspect that it would be rather higher than the battery could deliver. The only way to get enough heat there fast enough is to set of a pyrotechnic charge. The reaction is, roughly speaking NaN3 +KNO3 -> N2 +K2O + Na2O (I'm not bothering to balance that) The oxides react with the silica to form a glass. The battery heats a thin wire and that sets the reaction going but once it's started it carries on and produces the gas because the mixture is damn near explosive. If the oxidant were not there to add to the vigour of the reaction, these things wouldn't work properly. A friend of mine did some research on these things. They are quite hazardous because they have a considerable amount of stored energy. This can cause problems when cars are scrapped and taken apart- the mechanics get special training to deal with this potential problem.