Kaeroll

And... why, exactly, is this news source taking the "alien contactee" seriously? O_O Related note: I love the term extraterrestrial. Such a cute attempt to sound credible when discussing LGM.

Well... ghosts are real. There's no two ways about it. I'm being misleading, of course; what I mean is the term ghost refers to a phenomenon which is commonly explained as the spirits of the dead wandering around (where's Bill Murray when you need him?) (I hate quoting from Wikipedia... but... "A ghost is popularly held to be the disembodied spirit or soul of a deceased person") I've seen a ghost, so I don't believe most people who see such things are making them up. The mind is easily fooled, especially by itself. I believe the term is pareidolia, and we've all experienced it when looking at clouds, Rorschach tests, etc. For whatever reason, humans have a tendency to see patterns in meaningless data. What is "made up and a load of bs", and makes me angry, are cold-readers, who claim to be 'mediums' (surely the plural is media?) and able to speak to the dead. Types like Sylvia Brown, who take money from grieving families and give them nothing in return. On a ghost-hunting show here in the UK, a 'medium' named Derek Acorah was for a long time the resident medium. On the side, he toured the country giving so-called spiritualist performances. My girlfriend at the time attended one, and was utterly taken in by him. He was ultimately caught out when a skeptic on the show fed him a few fake names of people who had died in that week's location. (He was not meant to know where he was or anything about the place in advance). Shockingly enough he was later possessed by the spirit of Kreed Kafer (an anagram of Derek Faker) and subsequently dropped from the show. (I realise much of that is tangential at best)

I imagine its role is as catalyst. By analogy, in the nitration of benzene - which also proceeds using nitric/sulphuric acids - the sulphuric acid acts as an acid upon the nitric acid. It protonates the OH group on the nitric acid (the group that usually acts as an acid itself!), allowing it to leave as water, forming the nitronium ion [math]NO^{+}_{2}[/math]. In this reaction I imagine something similar happens. As the sulphuric acid is so concentrated as to be the solvent, you could expect a great deal of nitronium ion to be formed. It is possible that the sulphuric acid also acts as a dehydrating agent and is involved in attack on the glycerol but I honestly couldn't say.

http://www.organic-chemistry.org/ is quite useful, albeit more specialised.

I believe the synthesis of nitroglycerin requires fuming nitric and sulphuric acids, and comes with an enormous "do not try at home" sticker.

I don't think either of those are the case, though hermanntrude's suggestion is more likely. I remember being told that a few are alphabetical, after a fashion; e.g. Asp is D; Glu, which is one carbon longer, is E. Honestly not sure though.

I think Dr Heisenberg has a thing or two to say about recording electron positions.

Your answer seems good to me. Though it makes me want to sing 'do your balls hang low'...

This strikes me as a homework question, so I'm not going to explicitly answer it. But here's a great whopping hint: What does blood carry, amongst other things? Kaeroll

My course (undergraduate chemistry) is around 50/50, perhaps slightly more women than men. The academics in the department, conversely, are almost all men - most of the women are either technicians or have only just obtained their doctorate. I know a lass on an electronic engineering course who is one of maybe two, three girls on her course. As others have said, it does seem highly variable. Kaeroll

Unrelated to the acid/base issue: how are you going to preserve the smoothie? I'm assuming you're not going to change it daily in every poster you have up. If your smoothies are wonderfully fresh they won't keep too long, surely?

I'm not sure there's actually any reason for the choices. Some are evident, such as A for Alanine or C for Cysteine; others slightly less so, but still you can see why, such as F for Phenylalanine. I'm guessing when they got to lettering Aspartate, Glutamate, Glutamine, and the others with seemingly random letters they just used those remaining.

Amen! The number of equations I have to learn on my course is ridiculous. When am I ever going to need to know off the top of my head the derivation of the Eyring equation?! Some equations are worth knowing - but through practice, not rote learning. (Off topic I know, but I thought I'd add my two pennies)

Question/problem: looking at your basic premise - electron/observer interaction as the basis of, well, everything - it seems somewhat anthropocentric. The only observer we know of is ourselves; we are made up in part of electrons. If these electrons don't exist until observed, how can they 'observe' the rest of the universe to make that spring into being? I don't buy the notion that everything vanishes when you close your eyes,which is what your speculation suggests. If an electron only exists when you measure it with some scientific method, which is what the term observe means in this context, what's to stop my body turning to steam and dust? Kaeroll

If I'm going to live in a computer simulation, I at least want kung fu downloaded into my brain Matrix-style. Spent far too long learning it the hard way and getting nowhere... On-topic... short answer "no", long answer "no and read a biology textbook"?

Bloody entertaining though!

Qualitatively for many compounds, IM forces can be guessed by considering the polarity of, and groups present in, the compound. Compounds with amine, hydroxyl or carboxyl groups tend to hydrogen bond, whereas entirely non-polar compounds may have only dispersion forces. Quantifying it is, as the Cap'n said, is a more complicated issue but well worth pursuing.

What an ass. His beliefs on contraception aside - to claim abstinance programs are successful is an outright lie (I don't have figures to hand, but I do recall reading studies showing that they have little to no effect). Is the agenda of pushing Catholicism so important that people must die for it? The issue of AIDS' method of transmission is controversial enough in some parts of the world without Darth Sidious weighing into things.

Hr, that one doesn't work for me.. gives me 6 million.

www gives 25,270,000,000-ish.

Heh, or that. Off-topic for a moment: heard an interesting anecdote the other day from a lecturer. Apparently he used to work with ultracentrifuges which were known to break, sending a hunk of metal (previous spinning at 100krpm in a vacuum) hurtling across the room. Thankfully it never happened to him. I'm guessing an engineer had a hand in that design then.

Well, if both of you have recommended it I've no reason not to get a copy. Hopefully the university library has it. Cheers to both of you. As I said, I naturally approach this from a chemist's perspective, and at my level of study it's very much a black-box. Polarity and charge drive ridiculous amounts of chemistry, but how they're carried ('transmitted' seemed the apt term to me, ah well) remains behind the veil as it were. Again- cheers.

When engineers build things, they work. I think that's the main difference...

This is something that's been bugging me for a while, though from a chemist's perspective. swansont- your post, while insightful, perhaps doesn't answer the question.The field may be a theoretical construct or the like, but knowing that doesn't bring us much closer to the answer of how charge is transmitted. It might not be 'made of' anything.. but why should, for example, two electrons repel? The answer being 'they have like charges'. But what is charge? How is it felt through space? etc... (Those are mostly rhetorical questions... I obviously don't expect you to produce a treatise on QED.)

I'm with Paralith on this one... I don't think Moore expects us to simply disregard Rorschach as a nutjob. Each character in the novel has a different view on the world (even the fella selling the New Frontiersman... though his seems rather fluid) and I'm not sure he actually intends to comment on who is "right" - part of the challenge of the book is to decide that for yourself (hence this discussion). I do suspect that part of the reason Rorschach is portrayed as, for lack of a better word, badass is to make him sympathetic, so we do leave the book feeling some liking for him despite many of his views being abhorrent to many readers. By making him 'cool' (c'mon - who honestly doesn't think he's a kick-ass anti-hero during the prison sequence?) we're forced to consider his views rather than write them off, and not all of them are repulsive; his dedication to the truth, which defines his last moments, is admirable (though perhaps misguided). I think the book is intended to ask the question that you've termed the 'Watchmen dilemma'. If we were intended to simply disregard Rorschach - the strongest (and perhaps only) representative of option A (expose the truth no matter the cost), the book would not be asking the question but answering it. I don't think great literature intends to answer questions but pose them.