studiot

You seem to make capitalism into a dirty word. I do not see it that way. Indeed the original growth of the water industry in the Uk is a shining example of how it should be done. I see nothing intrinsically wrong in capitalism, profit, enterprise, entrepreneurialism and so forth. They have many success stories to offer society in general. Greed, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter, which should be guarded against especially when it lead either state or private organisations to disadvantage individuals. Sometimes this disadvantaging has been quite gross. It is not only greed though, that poses a danger. I think you put your finger on it in your opening post. Although I would say that there has always been some faction with this idea. And it was this that led to the downfall of Rome, more than anything else. When Rome was in its full vigour of youth and early adulthood, the barbarians would never have stood a chance of defeating Rome. In fact they never did, Rome defeated them at every turn. But then how do you motivate a worker in a out of date factory screwing the wheel nuts onto a car he knows is rubbish and almost unsellable, due to penny pinching by the management ? I have never like the party system. I much prefer the pre party system they had in the original preparliamentary assembly, called the witan or wotan, depending upon how you want to spell it. In conclusion in my opinion it is not capitalism that is the problem, it is moneterism and monetisation, which are visibly failed doctrines.

The table I quoted came from the high school textbook I used in the 1960s Comparative Inorganic Chemistry. B J Moody I regard is as still the best book of its type and the history I gave was precis of chapters 2 and 3, which take the reader through from Dalton to Quantum Chemistry.

Yes all the original privatisations were at bargain basement prices, some even below the usual stock value depression that is caused by suddenly dumping all that stock on the market. So at that time the government of that day was effectively giving away public money. Nevertheless those who bought the stock still had to stump up the price of the shares - you say £7.6 bn for the water companies, some of which were public 'boards', some of which were private companies - and I see no reason to dispute that. That is what happened with all the privitisations. I also agree that later government subsidies in one form or another have been provided to most of the other privatisations, with perhaps only in a small way to the gas industry. Rail, telecom, electricity, the post office, receive large subsidies which totally mitigate any gains from selling the family silver. But to understand what is happening in the water industry you need to go a lot further back in history. And , no, the industry has not received a penny in direct or indirect subsidies since privitisation. This is because of the excessive profits have come from the captive 'regulator' allowing above inflation average price rises in almost every year since privatisation. There is no such thing as a free market in our water industry. The truly staggering increase in my annual water charges of £120 in 1987 to £1002 in 2021 gives witness to this. I understand what you say and those circumstances and subsidies certainly apply to the other utilities I mentioned. However in relation to water and sewage services, they do not. Simply because everybody who historically needs to be connected is already connected. And part of the responsibility and business of the water suppliers is to maintain the existing network. So only new developments require new connections and perhaps additional sources of supply and/or disposal. All such additions to the network is paid for by the eventual consumer (purchaser) of the new property, by way of the developer. Neither public money nor water company money is expended. I refer you to my statement to Peterkin that we need to look back over the history and note that whilst overall it has achieved a clean and pretty reliable water supply, there have been many rogues cutting corners and ducking their responsibilities, to line their own pockets, along the way. The other point I have made is that in the case of the other utilities, they were largely government owned. In the particular case of the water industry they were not. Which is why I said that the government sold off assets which were not theirs to sell. What I don't see, as an answer to the question of this thread, is any probability that the coronavirus pandemic would return us to the circumstances that generated such an effective (water) industry. This is a great shame as IMHO that social/financial/whatever model had so much to recommend it.

I don't follow the question. Yes, I offered two examples suggesing that little, if anything, will change. The fictional example is interesting because, although obviously contrived, it doe (IMHO) accurately mirror the behaviour of real people. Essentially it involved the discovery/gift to humanity of a self powered matter replicator and the subsequent temporary upheavals as manufacturing collapsed. But the punchline came about when one enterprising individual set up a business offering the service of operating a replicator for others. After all if you are rich enough you don't drive your own car do you ?

Here is a very clear demonstration of how working with infinite sets / sequences is non intuitive. The top line is just a list zero plus the positive integers. The matching line underneath is a list of the squares of the line above. You can clearly see that because every integer has a square, there is one to one correspondence between the upper and lower set / sequence. That is every number in the upper sequence corresponds to one and only one number in the lower sequence uniquely. So both sets have the same count of members. Yet the upper sequence contains every number in the lower sequence plus as many more as you choose. [math]\begin{array}{*{20}{c}} 0 \hfill & 1 \hfill & 2 \hfill & 3 \hfill & 4 \hfill \\ 0 \hfill & 1 \hfill & 4 \hfill & 9 \hfill & {16} \hfill \\ \end{array}[/math] So the upper set has numbers, not in the bottom set, yet it has the same count of numbers.

I claim precedence on answers to wild unsupported claims, as I am still waiting for even an attempt at justification of the claim that wires can be scalars.

I can't seem to see a response/discussion to my answer to your thread question. I'll take your shilling. The most unfortunate water privitisation is about the only one the Uk government does not subsidise. Perhaps it is because they stole the resources in the first place, these were not the government's to sell off.

Advice in here might help. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1198665.Tired_or_Toxic_A_Blueprint_for_Health 🙂

Has my answer offended you ?

The representative elements are those identified in Mendelev's original tables 169 to 1871 as fitting into the 'a' groups, in each column. The orginal tables did not look anything like our modern version so here is a modernised version of Mendelev showing the classification scheme. This was to use Roman numerals to show originally six columns, later increase to eight and then nine. Each column was further divided into two sub columns, labelled a and b. I have ringed the a in my attachment. Elements in the a column were called 'representative elements' (my translation has 'the typical elements'). Mendelev classified by chemical compounds and reactions. It was not until 1913 that the modern atomic number listing was established by Mosely's square root law. As exchemist says, the classification is obsolete today.

You got it exactly. +1 There is a 'process' involving time which is the difficulty Einstein realised in talking about the relativity of simultaneity. That is why he talks about a physical rod or line of them and introduces the idea of all being in the same frame. He then goes on to derive the fact that any measurement of length will depend upon the frame of measurement.

Another entertaining sciencefiction short story I remember was one about a race of space conquering monkeys who arrived on Earth. The monkeys eventually had to admit that humans were smarter than they were and their best scientists/academics wrote papers entitled "Why the lop-tails do not have space travel."

It would be helpful if you were to provide a precise reference to the particular case you are referring to. In his book Relativity, which I believe you have, Einstien 'talks about' measuring rods in several different circumstances. Are you perhaps referring to chapter XII ?

The French have a saying Le plus ca change, Le plus c'est la meme chose. I remember a science fiction short story during the 1960 whose title was a good translation into English Business as usual during alterations

I don't think gaussian(bell) curves are appropriate for the study of freak weather, for two main reasons. Firstly whilst there is a periodic aspect to the weather it is also chaotic, in particular the large sudden variations are Cchaotic. For the periodicity I would expect to see cyclic graphs of some sort. For the chaos I would expect to see large spike irregularly spaced along the cycles. Here is an example from Lorenz (see later in the post) Secondly your character would be extending known Physical Science, for which the spectrum examples I give are again not bell shaped. OK so the study is everyday weather patterns. Statistically (mathematically) because they are everyday, there will not be extreme heatwaves everyday. In fact the events you refer to are certainly not everyday. China had around 100 times the daily average rainfall, in the recent floods for instance. So statistically those models are already known to be wrong. Unfortunately the correct Mathematics is less well known and so less widely and instantly recognisable. The man who introduced chaos theory was Edward Lorenz (not the victorian scientist associated with relativity) In his book he describes a very simple three variable weather model that usually follows the 'trajctory' (in time) where all three variables combine and point in the same direction. Occasionally however they all wander off in different directions with a chaotic result. On to the physical issues. Here is the the record of a vital discovery which changed meteorological science, due to Smythe. I only wish I had that quality of handwriting. It shows the sunlight spectrum under different cloud conditions and pressures. This lead to the sidcovery that high pressure does not necessarily lead to fine weather, of great importance to the annual monsoon in Asia.

I understand what you are saying, but As I stated when I introduced the empty set into this thread, I am talking strictly mathematically. I think I implied, if not actually stated, that there are other points of view. Philosophers, Mathematicians and Logicians have long debated the meaning of nothing and the role of the empty set. So strictly mathematically, the empty set has no boundaries. (It is not the only set with no boundaries for which therefore Venn diagrams are inappropriate. The most densely packed set available - the real numbers, R, also has no boundaries) I will leave you with this bit of logic about nothings. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness.

Since the empty set has no boundary points you can't draw a Venn diagram for it. Since the empty set also has no interior points you can't position your green square, "relative to other points in the set".

I wish they did. I'd be richer than Bezos, Branson and Pinchai put together. I have already showed how to move a 'box' containing nothing so the same nothing is still inside after the move. In other words you agree there is more than one 'nothing'.

This thread is about 'nothing'. One Planck unit can't be 'nothing' since it can be measured in metres, albeit a very small number of them.

Perhaps a sketch will help. Take tow of the smallest objects available - two atoms. Two objects (atoms) separated by a small gap. The relative size of each object to the size of the proposed gap is roughly the same as the relative size of the whole universe to a one metre ruler. And you have two of them. No one really knows what goes on at the Planck scale.

No it is graduated. I have already noted that the equations run out to infinity from the nucleus of any atom. When we are talking about QM for atoms and molecules we are really talking about chemical bonding. Sub atomic QM is a whole different ball game (I always wanted to make that pun). The point is not to mix your metaphors (models). Here is Buggs Bunny on this Sorry I noticed a small error in my last post.. It should of course read So the atom is some 1025 times a big as the Planck length.

The size of the atom is of the order of 10-10 metres. The Planck length is of the order of 10-35 metres. So the distance from the centre of the atom to the edge is of the order of 1025 metres. As a comparison the distance from Earth the the observable horizon is of the order of 1026 metres, or not much further comparatively speaking. Now the surfaces of the electrodes is rough at the order of 10-7 metres, so there will be mutual interpenetratration of the 'touching' surfaces long before the atomic scale is reached, let alone the Plank scale. As an aside, you should not be talking of obits in relation to quantum theory and Plank scales. Remember also that the purpose of this part of the discussion is to establsih that the 'nothing' between touching electrodes is different from the 'nothing' between separated ones. One obvious difference is that touching electrodes supprt electrical continuity, separated ones do not.

Fair question. What does touching mean, particularly at the quantum level ? Well in one sense, from a quantum point of view, everything in the universe is touching everything else in the universe, since the quantum integrals extend over all space. But is that a useful point of view in this case ? I submit that it is not. Instead, I offer the notion that includes the ability to exert a direct force on the object being touched, or to exchange momentum with it. That is how gas molecules exert a pressure on their container, tables support objects placed on them and so on. Back to the spark plug and its gap. Say there is 25thou between the bendy electrode and the fixed central pin one. That is 25thou of space. Can the bendy electrode exert any force on the pin electrode ? No there is space between them. Now slowly tap the gap closed. As the gap closes can the bendy electrode exert (transmit) any force to the pin electrode ? No, there is still space between them. Finally the gap closes and the bendy electrode touches the pin electrode. Can it now transmit the force of the tapping to the pin electrode ? Yes. Yet there is nothing between them.

Instead of being so contemptuous of the thoughts of others, perhaps you might like to discuss the Physics of how this might or might not happen. That is consider mechanisms of transmission.

So why would you want to 'clone' it ? I hope you realise that clone is the wrong word. It is a biological term involving the use of biological processes. The chemical term is synthesise, which involve chemical processes.