Kaeroll

All conditions of the puzzle should be presented openly at the outset, not hidden in code inaccessible to those without a bit of (admittedly trivial) know-how.

I've never quite grasped this sense that mystical speculation by the long-dead is somehow superior to sanity.

Nope - I've met maybe two people who say "a-my-no". Edit: whoops. You're right - one or two say "a-my-no", almost all say "a-mee-no". I misread my own post *duh*

Related: is it "ah-mee-no" acid or "ah-my-no" acid? In the UK it is near-universally pronounced the latter, but one or two lecturers irritatingly use the former. Input from a few Yanks appreciated.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I think it's more of an ideological thing than a 'cost-benefit analysis'. More about standing up and saying: Wanton violence in the name of [insert cause here] is not acceptable. It's kinda hard to send the same message to the rhinovirus. (Whether it's hypocritical or not for governments to say this is a whole other matter)

Hi Scott Your description is correct. The major products would be the ether derivative of the starting bromoalkane, along with hydrobromic acid in solution. As the bromoalkane is tertiary, it would most likely proceed via the Sn1 mechanism (or Dn + An if you prefer). Question for bonus points: can you think of a possible competing reaction? How likely is it that this will occur? Hope this helps. Kaeroll

A reversible photochemical change could do the trick (something akin to the reaction of retinal in the eye). I don't know any such compounds off the top of my head, but they do exist. There's also the option of setting up a chemical oscillator, but this changes colour with a certain frequency rather than responding to a stimulus.

Zing! Good point though. We had a lass on University Challenge recently who has been hailed as the smartest girl in the country because she has an insane grasp of general knowledge. I'm sure she must be incredibly intelligent, but it did highlight the different kinds of intelligence and the difference between being a walking encyclopaedia and a walking textbook.

Responding more to the op than the rest of the thread here... I'm not a US citizen, indeed I've never been to the US, but your two-party system does seem awfully dominant in discussion. The number of blogs, forum threads, newspaper editorials, etc. I've seen where the prime method of argument seems to be, "X is a [bleeding heart liberal Democrat/rich white male Republican], therefore Y is wrong," is staggering. As is the number of times I've been challenged on a forum to declare my allegiance to one party. This seems to happen the moment I make a point someone dislikes- rather than respond to the argument, they come out with something to the tune of, "Which party do you support? You seem like a dirty Democrat to me," presumably to be followed up with, "You're all that's wrong with the world," etc etc - without ever addressing the point. I think this kind of mentality is used very much to the advantage in US politics; forget logic, appeal to emotion - that candidate is a damned Republican who would see the rich richer and the poor poorer; she's a Commie Democrat who would see God taken off the dollar bill; etc. Painting opponents with the broad brushstrokes of US and THEM is really not a great way to go about any area of life - let alone politics affecting the whole world. Despite my distaste for UK politics, I take some comfort in the notion that our politicians use this less than the US. That being said, a (Labour-organised) debate I attended last night had the word "Thatcherism" and its derivatives thrown around every other sentence. Needless to say, I wasn't too happy.

Is it really racist to ask the question? It doesn't assume a genetic basis, and I don't find anything racist about investigating a hypothesis. It depends on the wording and intent, of course; the hypotheses "there is a correlation between race and IQ" and "white boys can't do math" are very different.

Controversial topic, and afaik one without a good answer. Early studies showed correlations, and offered a fairly racist interpretation. I believe the accepted interpretation of such studies is that cultural factors in the US at the time held back education for ethnic minorities.

I'm not really sure the scientific method is applicible to interpretation of meaning. We routinely infer meaning in the words of others - hence the existence of figures of speech, metaphor, and so on. A literal reading of 'to read between the lines' makes no sense: the meaning of 'to infer meaning beyond what is literally written' is in itself reading between the lines.

Perhaps. I still think it's a relevant article, in any case.

I assume you mean 'pseudoscience', in which case actually, it is. It's not referring to books about spirituality or religion, but books passing off (for example) ID as science, which falls quite firmly into pseudoscience.

This recent New Scientist article seems relevant, entitled 'how to spot a hidden religious agenda'.

Actually, I am an Illuminatus, and we have nothing to do with this scam. Once the NWO is in place, scammers and snake-oil salesmen will be first up against the wall (followed by anyone working in marketing).

What year was the question set? I'm pretty sure hell froze over in 1994. Either that or Don Henley's a dirty liar.

Thank you both for your replies - they're both very informative, and I really appreciate you taking the time to boil that down to idiot's (chemist's?) terms for me, Atheist. Makes much more sense now. What more can I say?

Not yet - but if I remember which topic interested me I'll be sure to give it a go. Kaeroll

Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

This may be in the wrong forum, but I'm told it's due to relativity, so this seems a decent place to put it... Occasionally as a chemist I have to deal with - eek - maths, some of which involve electron rest mass (for example). My question is, how is this measured? It seems absurd to suggest somehow isolating and 'freezing' an electron in its tracks, so I can only assume it's an extrapolation. It's something I've been curious about for some time. On a related note - why do we use 'rest' as a point of reference, if it is (as I assume above) strictly hypothetical? Why not the mass at a given energy? Math welcome in answers, though commentary would be appreciated... Kaeroll

That's a fairly bold statement. As the good Cap'n says, 'wave theory' doesn't say electrons are identical to water waves or sound waves. It simply uses wave behaviour to model certain aspects of electron behaviour - and this method works very well. Whether or not an electron can be said to be a wave or particle or something else is, imo, irrelevant - our notions of bulk matter simply do not apply at the quantum level. Whether wave theory is 'true' or not does not change the fact that it is useful and predictive (as you yourself admit). Kaeroll

Cheers for the swift replies. I understand the reason for the min post count - just surprised me when I tried to reply and found I couldn't. Thought I'd been logged out at first. Kaeroll

Usually referred to as 9/11 or September 11th round these parts (the UK, that is). Never heard anyone call it '11/9', or write it as such when referring to the WTC attack.

I think you're studying this in a slightly different context to that which I am familiar with the term 'work function', so I'm not sure I can help. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest rearranging your formula in terms of W and pump whatever numbers you have available into it? Bulk samples can be ionised without them becoming metallic, e.g. in a mass spectrometer or a particle accelerator.