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Gilded

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Posts posted by Gilded

  1. Back in high school I felt that biology to be really tedious (didn't take more than the obligatory courses), got something like 8/10. I was very interested in physics at the start (got a 10 for the first course) but then I got a bit bored, ending up skipping electromagnetics and most of relativity/theoretical physics, I think in the end I got a 8/10 too. In chemistry everything just fell into place, even though I didn't get a very good grade in the high school final exam I still had a course average of 9.8 or something which was rounded up to 10. (Too bad the course average doesn't really matter at all, the final exam, Abitur, is more important.)

  2. In the rare case that Finnish people talk to each other, sarcasm is in most cases expressed in exaggerated tones too. Something people like to do is add a long "yeah right" sort of thing in the beginning of a sentence which reduces the need for exaggerated tones somewhat. Sometimes words comparable to "indeed" are used, especially if speaking in a "mockingly praising" tone. The same words are sometimes used in a humorous tone to acknowledge sarcasm. Overall I don't think it differs too much from English.

  3. Recently (on 04-28-2008) we discussed a newly found element: element 118, atomic weight 292. It was reported that it's found in small quantities in nature, and that it's stable.

     

    http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=32555

     

    In the discussion more links and info are given (so click the link :D )

     

    That's not 118 though, but 122. Element 118 (ununoctium) is very unstable, and was detected a few years back. And there hasn't been any confirmation on 122 (or any elements above 118) as of yet.

  4. Hate to make things even more complicated, but would not the bubble expand significantly as it rises if the glass was very tall?

     

    Yeah it sounds logical that it would happen. What also worries me is the possibility that the bubbles would act as nucleation sites themselves which would expand them even more. Although I'm not sure if this happens to a significant extent with small bubbles in an idealized mixture of just water and CO2.

  5. As I was watching CO2 bubbles accelerating upwards in my glass of coke and wondered how fast they'll eventually go in a very tall glass, in other words what would be a bubble's terminal velocity, I realized that although it would be interesting to calculate an estimate I needed hydrodynamics, which is something I hate. :D

     

    I've been brushing up my rather non-existant previous hydrodynamics knowledge but I'm still a bit confused. Are small bubbles (let's say 0.001m in diameter) practically rigid spheres? That would certainly make things easier, as I could just use the "normal" terminal velocity formula, right?

  6. Doesn't spin also have something to do with it?

     

    Oh noes, don't pull QM into this context. :D But yeah it has something to do with it, IIRC it's what gives electrically charged particles a magnetic moment.

  7. thanks.

     

    (and it didn't happen to make any difference that it was an ionized phosphate group, right? Not just phosphate by itself?)

     

    Hmm. A nitrogen atom attached to three other atoms (with single bonds) can obviously capture a H+ to form an ammonium ion, but it won't make it a very strong base; even ammonia is a weak base. I'm not sure about phosphate groups in this respect though. They are slightly polar but I've forgotten how this H+ capturing business goes with double bonded oxygen. :doh:

  8. Multiple choice questions are quite annoying if they have more than one technically correct answer, which seems like what has happened here. When this happens, you're better off with the "most correct" one, which in this case is NH2- since it's an incredibly strong base compared to phosphate ions.

     

    Also, if this is a homework assignment from a chemistry book you should also call the people who made it. Inform them of this in a polite manner, such as exclaiming "WTF IS THIS S***???"

  9. To start with, electrical charge is a fundamental property of some particles. As to what makes electrons and protons have the charges they do, electrons are fundamental particles with charge of -e (e being the "fundamental charge"), where as protons are composite particles containing one down quark which has a charge of -1/3e, and two up quarks that have charges of +2/3e (therefore giving a proton the charge of +e). An electric field is a vector field, and two opposing fields create an attraction between the particles, like this:

     

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:EfieldTwoOppositePointCharges.svg

     

    Some of the physics expert here can explain it more thoroughly if you want to know more.

  10. Uranium ore or even pure UO2 which is much "hotter" won`t activate zinc sulphide to the extent you`r looking for, I`v tried it ;)

    it will expose film Much faster than the just the isotope alone however.

     

    Hmm, this might be a bit problematic then. I suppose americium from smoke detectors could work, if I had thousands of smoke detectors to dismantle.

  11. Since this probably requires knowledge from someone who knows more about radiation I decided to post this here, feel free to move this to a more suitable category.

     

    Anyway, I've been thinking about doing something with radioluminescence. The question is whether one can do something like this with just zinc sulfide and (reasonably "hot") powdered uranium ore or do you need something uncomfortably active like radium in those infamous radium paint clocks? Of course, a reasonably safe choice would be tritium encased in a phosphor-coated capsule but I can't see myself getting tritium any time soon (except by buying tritium keychains which would kinda defeat the point of what I'm going to do). I'll settle for pretty much anything you can see in a dark room, and which doesn't require some sort of magnifying lens.

  12. Friction is not an issue with this design. It will either move and work as a perpetual motion device or it wont move at all.

     

    There will be friction, thus there will be conversion of mechanical work into thermal energy. That seems like an issue to me.

  13. Ah iNow got here ahead of me...in the case of friction, that is.

    I didn't really think that entropy mattered all that much,

    can you explain why entropy would work against perpetual motion? I don't think that I understand what you're trying to say...

     

    Perpetual motion relies on 100% energy conservation, which isn't possible if there is any friction. As more and more energy becomes unavailable the motion will gradually slow down. In this case, some of the mechanical work is converted into thermal energy due to friction. In this process, available energy for mechanical work is lost (entropy increases), as it is impossible to convert thermal energy to mechanical work in a 1:1 ratio as described by the second law of thermodynamics.

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