John Cuthber

There's nothing to stop me giving up my job as a scientist and retraining as an accountant. Except that I value an interesting job more than I value the extra money I might earn.

Perhaps that's the reason why academia doesn't pay as well as might be expected. People are prepared to do it for the money on offer; if they were not then the salaries would have to go up in order to recruit academic staff.

Of course the best way to gain success is to make sure you have rich parents.

Well, if I was paying them by the hour I'd prefer Dcowboys' method to Dttom's and If I was stuck in an exam with only however many hours to finish the paper I know which method I'd use.

"Apparently, Arnold has embarked on his own campaign to do universal health coverage, giving the rest of the world another reason to move to California besides the year-round 70 degree weather."

The weather might be a reason for me to move but I already have cradle to grave state-funded healthcare. I think most of Europe does too, so I don't see the rest of the world being very impressed.

Where do you get the 60% figure from?

I might look after the elderly because I want society to be in the habit of doing so when I am elderly. A sort of ongoing social contract.

Straightforward self-interest makes it a rational plan.

Now, why does anyone need a God or an elephant to tell them to do something that is in their best interest anyway?

What's hypocritical about it?

If you have a society that looks for evidence then it will discount the elephant believer's views and come to a rational point of view about old people. It will do this whatever muddled ideas are dreamed up by mystics. Surely it's better to look after the elderly because it's the right thing to do rather than because someone says that a fairy told him to tell you to do it?

Do you know how little heavy water there is inn ordinary water?

Also, letting the water evaporate does concentrate the heavy water, but not very well. A lot of the heavy water evaporates along with the light water.

How will you tell if you have increased the heavy water concentration?

selenate,

biselenide or (probably better) hydrogenselenide

biselenite or hydrogenselenite

(with the oxidation states in roman numerals in brackets if you want to be fussy.)

Or you could do it the easy way like the original poster did.

This was BS before

http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=7869&highlight=ormus

and it's still BS now.

I haven't measured it, but it seems less strongly atracted to a magnet than a typical bit of steel when it's at room temperature. On the other hand I can pick it up with a magnet.

I just wonder; if she does claim that she didn't hear the question properly, would anyone care to tell me; if that was meant to be the answer, what on earth was the question?

You can always distill the stuff to leave the caramel and sugars behind but I'd look on ebay for sodium acetate.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sodium-Acetate-Anhydrous-FCC-Food-Grade-Powder-1LB_W0QQitemZ130146100710QQihZ003QQcategoryZ104233QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

(I am not afilliated with the vendor, not can I offer any evidence of their quality- when it coemes down to it I can type "acetate" into an ebay search)

In my unashamedly biased opinion based on no study whatsoever, I believe that witches' spells are every bit as effective as Christian's prayers.

A couple more things to think about. Sodium acetate is very soluble in water. It only takes 60 ml of boiling water to dissove 100 g of the salt.

Vinegar is only a few percent acetic acid typically 4 or 5%; the rest is mainly water.

You are going to need a lot of vinegar and a lot of patience boiling off water to do this experiment on the scale in that video.

A couple of thoughts. First Does it matter whether Dawkins was a good scientist or not. He came up with or developed or publicised a few ideas. The meme is probably the best known of them.

Is it a real concept that can be shown to exist? Well, I think it is and I guess Dawkins does too. Not only that I could propbably find you a few.

Second, I note that only 26% of American students believe in witches. What do the others think?

I know there are witches, I have met a few, and a warlock too.

I don't think they are correct but to me they don't seem any different from the other religios types I have met.

It makes as much sense to say "I don't believe in witches" as it does to say "I don't believe in Christians"

Interesting article (wiki's often are). It also shows that unless you can get hold of exotic isotopes you are not going to get anything happening in something small.

The quote I posted was the second use of the word. Your use was the first. Anyway, since you hadn't used it before post 17 it seemed odd that you expected me to have read it.

"Gadolinium is paramagnetic above the Curie temperature."

Very paramagnetic, and I still think you could use it for screening a field which was the essence of the original question.

I didn't put the word in your mouth; you used it in post number 17

In that post you asked me to read what you had said about it. You hadn't said anything.

What words?

"the terrorist thing is at best an Extremely pathetic Strawman, and easily dissembled by the statement violation of "live and let live" if they Complied with this, it wouldn`t be an issue now would it?"

If they did then it would be a strawman. You seem to overlook the fact that they don't comply with it. Should I just let them get on with it?

The whole point is that we are talking about groups with different outlooks-those who trust what they are told by priests of some sort and those who don't.

If the other side won't let you live, then you cannot live and let live.

"and it`s Also counter to what I said about the instincts (if you`ve forgotten or neglected to read) :

"They only attack when either Threatened or Hungry.

Humans being a Little (but not too much) more complex, have different ideas of Hunger (including Greed) and threat (perceived or otherwise)."

That quote is the second use of the word instincts on this page. It's tricky to read what you said about instincts when you didn't actually write about it.

If you are refering to the idea that I might be perceived to be a threat by someone because their preacher tells them so, then that's another good reason to prefer the evidence (ie that I'm not a threat) rather than the fairy tale. It's also a reason why I shouldn't tollerate that preacher. He might well persuade that person to attack me in the belief that it's a pre-emptive strike against an enemy. If the guy were in the habit of thinking for himself and gathering evidence he would spot that I'm not a threat.

I don't plan to test Pu but my lump of gadolinium is clearly magnetic- you can pick it up with a magnet. It's quite a nice warm day here, definitely over 293K. It would be ridiculously expensive compared to steel, but you could use it to screen a magnetic field.

"Different chiral centers will rotate the plane of polarize light in different directions."

Correct

"This is what characterizes left and right handed molecules"

Not really, they are different and that's what characterises them as different.

They sometimes have different crystal structures- in fact that's how Pasteur did the first experment to separate a pair of chiral molecules.

If this "What is interesting, it doesn't matter whether these molecules are right side up, up-side down or on their side, they still cause the same affect." were true then the effect on polarised light of a crystal would be independent of the crystal's orientation. It isn't.

The reason that it deosn't seem to matter for a bulk sample is that there are so many molecules at all sorts of angles and the effect you see is the average rotation.

I think it's probably fair to say that the explanation or optical activity given here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_activity

is more widely accepted than the rest of Pioneer's post.

Rutherford was able to get hold of radioactive sources tat would be practically banned today.

Also, he didn't prepare enough barium to make a precipitate. He irradiated some uranium and got a tiny quantity of baruin (among lots of other things). The then added ordinary barium nitrate then a sulphate to precipitate nearly all the barium in the solution (of course some would have stayed in solution.)

The clever bit is that the barium he produced this way was a mixture of isotopes, some of them were radioactive. So the BaSO4 he precipitated was radioactive.

Because the radioactivity from traces of radioisotopes of barium is easy to detect he didn't need to get all that much radioactive Ba in order to prove that it existed.

All he needed to do was get a chemist (Soddy I think) to separate the radioactivity from any other possible elements in the periodic table and show that it was still radioactive.

He got barium, but never anything like enough to see a ppt.