John Cuthber

Can I just check on something? Bush is saying he will veto a decision, made by the representatives of the US population, to withdraw the troops who are meant to be there to bring democracy.

My word! Do you lot really not know that a pint is 20 ounces (568ml)? For the record a gallon is 8 pints or 10 pounds of water (about 4.54 Litres). The stone (14Lbs) makes perfect sense- it's half a quarter. A quarter is 1/4 of a hundredweight and 20 hundredweight make a ton (2240 pounds). BTW, what's the typical strength of American beer (I realise there will be a huge range; whats the mode?)

Money is a medium of exchange. It can stand for hours worked but, since my hourly rate of pay is more than some peoples and less than others it can't be that simple. I'm not much good with animals but I like eating meat. The farmer doesn't have much tallent as a chemist but, ocasionally he wants the benefit of knowing chemistry. If those were the only two jobs in the world it would be fairly simple for us to simply get together and agree an exchange rate; they feed me and I check the concentration of stuff in their sheepdip and the vitamin levels in the feed (or whatever). Once you have many jobs going on- a potter or baker would probably have been a fairly early profession (and we needn't worry what profession was first) things get complicated. It makes it much easier to have an accepted mechanism for agreeing how to get the chemistry, farming, pottery and bakery done by those who have talents for those jobs. There may be other ways to achieve this but money seems to work quite well.

If you are planning to replace it you might want to look at heat pumps.

Respect can go any way it likes. If your country, even in a single instance, decides to suspend the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial then anyone else from any other country is able to judge your country on the basis of that decision. GWB and co decided to go that way and at that point I decided that they ought not to be in government. I doubt I'm the only one. For what it's worth, current opinion poles here are running about 2:1 that we should not have invaded Iraq. I'm not certain, but I think more people have been killed by terrorist and related acts since the "War on terror" started than were being killed before; perhaps having it stalled by the lawyers might be an improvement. You say "There is no question that he is an enemy combatant." I say no, he's just a terrorist and there's no need to make up new names for it. More importantly of course is the fact that, while there is clear evidence to arrest him and bring him to trial (and there was, as you say, before anyone tortured anyone, that video footage) that's a poor argument for detaining all the others without trial. "No country has yet come to grips with how age old precedents should be applied in an asymetrical war where the combatant would take out one of our cities given a chance." Which side is which here? As far as I'm aware, the ony comabatant involved who has the miliitary strength to take out a city is the USA. What the other side would do if it could isn't important since they simply don't have the power.

Just a thought, quite a lot of this topic seems to debate the effect of temperature on steel and says that jet fuel doesn't burn hotter than about 1000C. Here's a quote from the Wiki article about jet engines. "Cooling systems All jet engines require high temperature gas for good efficiency, typically achieved by combusting hydrocarbon or hydrogen fuel. Combustion temperatures can be as high as 3500K (5000F), above the melting point of most materials. Cooling systems are employed to keep the temperature of the solid parts below the failure temperature." You can melt copper (at 1083C) in a candle flame so the idea that a straightforward saturated hydrocarbon fuel like jet fuel won't get that hot is strange. Blacksmithing is done with red hot steel. The flames in the WTC are clearly glowing at least that hot.

I'm not sure but I think R-Q = the set of irrational numbers.

Dismissing "Quote: You've thrown out due process. You've allowed torture. You've destroyed the presumption of innocence. You've alowed secret prison camps. Exactly how is your legal system now any different from that of Stalinist Russia? " As "Hyperbole." doen't actually answer the question. Why should I (living in England) have any respect for a government that does those things? Similarly deriding the idea that some Austrailians might be waiting for the Gitmo detainees to "confess" under torture to things they simply didn't do as "kind of silly" avoids facing up to the real possibillity that they will do so. That's why civilised countries do not condone torture (except possibly during wartime, and I remind you that this is not a war).

The answer to the original question seems to be yes. http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/seo-news/topic-5417.htm Also, there are 2 things to note about the return radar signal reflected by an object, how big is it and how much is it Doppler shifted. Birds and moths don't travel at the speed of sound so they can be discriminated from planes that do. This is complicated by the use of "chirped" radar pulses.

The temperature is related to the average speed; when it's cold there are a few fast movers which have enough energy to react and a lot of slow ones that don't. When you heat things you get a bigger proportion of the molecules moving fast enough to react so the rate of the reaction increases. If you want to know about the maths you need to find out about Boltzmann distributions .

Actually, to be a bit more specific, silver nitrate reacts with chloride rather than chlorine. Since Cl2 dissociates in water to give chloride it is true to say that silver nitrate will give a ppt with a solution of chlorine. On the other hand, if you wait a while for the chlorine to difuse out of the water (or better yet, bubble air through it) then test with silver nitrate you will still get a ppt. It won't tell you if the chlorine has gone. It would, for example give a really strong positive test with seawater but that has essentially no free chlorine. Measuring free chlorine is a bit more tricky I think there are kits to do this; sold to aquarium owners. If I wanted to dechlorinate water for an aquarium I'd probably just put pondweed of some sort in it and wait for a day or so. The plants might take a bit of a hammering but it would save the fish.

There are techniques using RF to identify chemicals- NMR is a case in point and the 21cm line from hydrogen is much used in astronomy. On the other hand it's rather difficult to get decent sensitivity because the energy level differences are small so thermal effects tend to wash out the spectra.

I have to aagree with bignose; "Statistics isn't science." is one of the best jokes I have seen in a while. Not only is it clearly out of place in this topic where the temperature of the earth is being discussed (Temperature in the arctic or the tropics; Perhaps the London weather centre- OK Summer or Winter?- best take some sort of average) but the fundamental role of statistics in modern physice makes it a staggeringly ill thought out comment. Stats can only be used to lie to people who don't understand it; OK that's quite a big part of the general population but most of us are big girls and boys; quite grown up and quite clever. I can't see it working here; anyone posting bad maths on this site will just get laughed at.

All this talk of war puzzles me. What countries have declared war? Who's soldiers are we talking about? Terrorist is just a label for someone doing something criminal; mass murder to make a political point is still mass murder and should be treated as such. Since there isn't a war these people should be treated as civilian criminal suspects and given a fair trial. Since the US government has already made up its mind about them it's difficult to see them getting a fair trial under US jurisdiction so they ought to be tried elsewhere; ironically China might be as good as anywhere.

The statement "they also know that people who are circumcised are easier to use mind control over " would make sense if people thought with their foreskins. While a very similar assertion has been made many times about men in general, it has never been remotely close to true. There's also the glitch concerning banking families among the elite. It may sound anti semitic to say that a lot of banking families are Jewish (and therefore circumcised); actually there's nothing prejudiced about simply making that observation. It probably stems from a Christian belief that any form of money lending was usury and hence banned. That's just one bit of evidence. That's all I need to falsify a theory. Here's a second bit of evidence. If all the glue failed today we would notice- the postal system would grind to a messy halt. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but your own "predictions", by failing to come true, are sufficient to prove that you are simply wrong. Much earlier in the thread you asked why this should not be counted as speculation. Well now we have an answer; this is a scientific website and, as such, we only have to consider speculation of a broadly scientific nature. Science makes theories; from those it makes predictions; if they don't turn out to be true then it's time to ditch the theory..

According to the wiki article on albinism about 1 in 70 of us has at least one gene for albinism. That means that over 98% of us don't. That's totally incompatible with the idea that all white people descended from albinos. The idea simply doesn't stand up.

In order to sense the outside world the sense organs have to be on the outside of the body (at least, they can't be stuck in the middle). All cells produce waste so they have to get rid of it somehow. For those cells near the surface they might as well just dump it. However; earwax, saliva, snot and tears are not waste products. They are deliberately produced to help keep the sense organs clean. Sweat too has a real function as well as dumping some waste.

Yes, bleach, strong acids or bases, phenol or just plain heat will all kill bacteria through mechanisms that are difficult to "evolve around". Unfortunately they also kill human cells so they cannot be used in the same way as antibiotics. The problem is that human cells and bacteria are rather similar so there aren't many ways to get selective toxicity. To get that selectivity you need to exploit relatively subtle aspects of the bacteria and those are the subtle things the bacteria can find ways to work round. (BTW, there's a big difference between antibodies and antibiotics.)

If the temperature change is big then you certainly can't use the ideal gas laws. You might find tables of this sort of data somewhere on the net, but I wouldn't really know what to search for.

I don't think the temperature change will be big. While I initially thought that the stored energy was a good way to look at it (and there's a lot to be said for starting any problem with "can I apply the conservation of energy to this question") I'm no so sure any more. Practically speaking, PV is a constant The force on the projectile is its area A (the area of the barrel) times the pressure P. From that you can get an acceleration of the projectile. From that, in turn, you can get a distance traveled (x) in some small time interval The initial volume is V1. The volume after that short time interval is V2 =V1 + Ax With that new volume you can calculate the pressure P2 and start again OK, if you like calculus you can take the limit for a time interval tending to zero and get an exact formula, but I'd just do this by itteration.

Let's face it, if he had white phosphorus he'd probably be dead by now. Come to think of it, burning red P in a sealed tube with sugar might make enough white P to be a problem. You would need to be unlucky but...

There are not many safe (even in relative terms) mixtures containing chlorates and even fewer "safe" mixtures containing red phosphorus. If you know little enough about this to ask the original question you need to do a lot of research before playing with these materials. I have only had occasion to work with red phosphorus once. I wasn't altogether happy working with it. I couldn't turn the job down because it was part of a fatal accident enquiry. I analyse explosives (among other things) for a living. Really, if you have some red P take it outside, put it on something you don't care about and set fire to it before you hurt yourself.

The very first motor, (Mr Faraday's) used DC and a permanent magnet. It also used a pool of mercury as the "sliding" contact so I don't really advise copying it. Here's a comparison. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/252c8c09c166d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

"why even bother to post that in here John????" As a joke-OK, I'm a chemist not a comic. BTW, new developments in science often start as contrary opinions- don't be too rough on them.

I think PV = 1/2 MV^2 is the best start but it will not really answer the question. You won't drive a projectile to faster than the speed of sound no matter what pressure and volume you use (unless you do some really complicated things). The speed of sound is roughly the same as the speed as the molecules; if the molecules of the gas are only doing 300 m/s they cannot push a projectile that is moving faster than that because they cannot catch up with it.