exchemist

Well done! I look forward to your next enquiry. I'm having to dredge things up from the depths of my memory - which is a good process.

Presumably someone was having a laugh, as "fundament" is or was a euphemism for bottom or arse. Perhaps the "moon" business is part of the same joke. But I don't see why multiple moons can't align at some point and presumably this would then create a combined tidal effect on the planet's surface.

OK. And what are pKa and pH, mathematically speaking?

Shome mishtake shurely? This doesn't seem to me to be about reaction rates. pKa relates to the equilibrium constant for dissociation of an acid. I would think -RTlnK = ΔG = ΔH - TΔS would be where the first equation comes from, wouldn't it? Regarding "f", seeing pH and pKa subtracted from each other reminds me of the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation. Perhaps our friend can take things from there......... (On past form this may be some kind of homework, so I'm not going to get enmeshed in the algebra myself.)

Do you have any particular elements in mind that you want to extract from seawater, by electrolysis? As @chenbeier indicates, there is a general issue with electrolysis from aqueous solutions, in that cations of elements with -ve reduction potential relative to H (which is set at zero by convention), won't be reduced at the cathode, because H+ from the water will be preferentially reduced instead. So what you get is evolution of H2 gas - and a corresponding gradual accumulation of OH-. This applies for example to lithium, which is of current interest as it is present at low concentrations in seawater and is in high demand for batteries. There is a paper here about a technique for extraction of Li from seawater via electrolysis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118302927 You will see that a key feature of this concept is getting Li+ ions alone to pass through a selective membrane from the seawater into a different electrolyte that contains no H+, thereby avoiding the problem of competition at the cathode from H+ which is more easily reduced than Li+. This is quite clever, as it has to leave Na+, H+ and other species behind and only allow Li+ to be transported across. I imagine this will be to do with the state of hydration of the ions (you never have "naked" cations in aqueous solution) and how to break the hydration shell around Li+, only, to get "naked" Li+ through the membrane. But I'm speculating.

I should imagine it will be the same as any electric motor. In the stall condition all the power goes into ohmic loss, but as the motor picks up speed a back e.m.f. develops and it becomes more complicated. So I think the answer is that VI = I²R no longer describes the situation. But I'm very rusty on this: the last time I really studied it was for A Level in 1971. I seem to recall that the power of the motor is actually given by the back e.m. f multiplied by the current, so in total you end up with: VI = EI + I²R. But no doubt someone will correct me if this is wrong.

Agreed. Not being a professional in mental illness, I see little to be gained from engaging someone who seems to be suffering from it.

This appears to be gibberish, unconnected with the passage from my post that you are quoting.

I have just told you why the legal definition of death may differ between countries, in spite of the science being the same. I will spell it out even more explicitly for you: Law is drafted by legislators, not by scientists. A legislator may understand the science or may not. He or she may also listen to the medical profession, the police, religious leaders, pressure groups of various kinds, and also be aware of the prevailing culture of the society he or she is legislating for. A legal definition has to be something that can be established reasonably easily by the medical profession and the police and for which documentary evidence can be produced in court. In the UK, a doctor has to sign a death certificate, which pushes the responsibility for the decision onto the doctor - a sensible thing to do, given that medical practice and techniques do not stand still. There is a description of how this works out in practice, for the UK, in this article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)61064-9/fulltext As for your anecdotes, they ( a ) do not meet the criteria for scientific evidence and ( b ) they conflict with the current understanding of the relevant science, viz. the rapid and irreversible deterioration of the brain in the absence of oxygen and the significance of the cessation of measurable electrical activity in the brain. That being so, someone who claims the science is wrong needs to produce new, properly monitored and documented evidence of that. You haven't.

This is elementary short trading, surely. You have information that the price of sheep is about to fall dramatically. So you arrange to sell 2 sheep you don't have, borrowing them from someone else, then, when the price of sheep drops, you may be able to buy back 6 sheep with the money you got from selling the 2 you borrowed. You then give 2 back to the owner........... and you have a profit of 4 sheep. 😁

Determining death has considerable legal consequences so it is inevitable that death must in practice have a definition in law. This legal definition, drafted by legislators as it will be, may differ somewhat from one country to another. But you cannot use that to draw any scientific conclusions. The law is not science. The law sets up rules that society agrees to be bound by. As such it may have to take account of a range of human, social, religious and political factors as well as science. For science, you need reproducible evidence. Arguing about law is utterly irrelevant. You've been told several times how death is established scientifically, but you seem to want to cling on to the notion that a person can be revived after circulation has stopped and brain activity has ceased for an extended period. This is contrary to current understanding. It is you that needs to substantiate that claim, by producing well-attested evidence of people whose brain activity has definitively been established to have ceased for a period of time, but who nonetheless have been revived. So far you have not done so. All I have seen from you is a collection of anecdotes, not involving any proper scientific monitoring, taken from newspapers etc. and a lot of argument. That is nowhere near good enough. You have not made your case. Where is the data?

This is in fact untrue. I quote from one commentator in 2006, after the Kitzmiller trial which basically destroyed ID: "We all remember a few years ago as Dembski spoke breathlessly about how Behe and Snoke's upcoming 2004 paper "may well be the nail in the coffin [and] the crumbling of the Berlin wall of Darwinian evolution." In fact, that paper ended up as one of the nails in the ID coffin in the Kitzmiller trial, as Behe was forced to admit under oath that their computer simulation had in fact concluded that an irreducibly complex protein binding site could evolve in only 20,000 years even when the parameters of the experiment were purposely rigged to make it as unlikely as possible." I think that's rather funny. Hahaha.

So all that stuff you wrote about entropy and about design didn't make any points, then?

This is very tedious. You do not understand entropy for a start. There is no reason why nature cannot spontaneously produce a lower entropy system from a higher entropy one, provided more entropy is created in the process elsewhere. This is what happens every time a crystal forms, for instance. Secondly, the whole notion of "design" in nature is a useless concept from a scientific point of view, because there is no way to define it objectively. There is thus no way to determine whether or not anything is designed. Thirdly, the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design was blown out out of the water years ago and its founder (a lawyer of course, not a scientist) is now dead.

You mean ε as in the formula for refractive index n=√(εᵣμᵣ) ? What happens is that the bonding electrons couple to the radiation, which can be thought of as a sort of forced resonance oscillation, in which the forcing is due to the oscillating electric vector of the radiation. This has the effect of changing the phase velocity of the light. It is a result of the material being polarisable by the light. The degree to which this occurs depends on the frequency of the light, making the refractive index different for different frequencies of radiation. This is what is called "dispersion" and is why a prism (or a raindrop) can split white light into the colours of the rainbow. What is interesting to me, from the point of view of physical chemistry, is that the polarisability and the change in phase velocity become greater and greater, as the frequency gets closer and closer to an absorption frequency for the material. At the absorption frequency itself, you have the limiting case, in which the material becomes effectively infinitely polarisable, the phase velocity becomes zero - and the material is then opaque and absorbs the light. In the case of silica (glass) there is an absorption band is in the UV, which occurs where the electrons in the Si-O bonds jump to a different, higher energy, molecular orbital. (There is another absorption band in the IR, which is due to excitation of a collective mode of vibration of the bonds in the crystal structure.) So what is happening with refraction is that the light undergoes a kind of temporary pseudo-absorption and re-emission process as it passes through. It is not a real absorption however. It's more as if the light finds itself walking on a spongy, bouncy trampoline, which slows it down. (The real model for this process requires a lot of QM maths involving perturbation theory, which I once knew at university but have long since forgotten.)

Yes. In the case of the polarisation in glass induced by EM radiation, we have to be talking about induced dipoles, i.e. in the electron distribution. One would not want to give the impression that light is able to alter the arrangement of the Si (δ+) and O (δ-) atoms in the crystal structure. But I do feel it would help to know what the context is for the poster's question. It could be to do with reflection, or with refractive index, or perhaps something else.

You are not providing much context to your enquiry, and this response of yours is similarly not one to which an informative response can be made. If you could explain in more detail what phenomenon you are trying to understand, we can help you further. As it is, all I can usefully say is that glass is polarisable, due to the electrons in its chemical bonds (the valence electrons).

It's like a compass needle. The configuration it spontaneously takes up is the one aligned with the Earth's magnetic field because that is the state of lowest energy. The opposite orientation is the one with the highest energy. The lowest energy is when the N pole of the needle is facing the S pole from the surrounding field, i.e. you have N-(S-N)-S rather than N-(N-S)-S. That's what the animated diagram in the link is illustrating. However in the case of the electron or nucleus, the quantum-allowed orientations are only partially aligned with or against the prevailing field, hence the 2 diagonal orientations shown in the animation.

I must say I find that argument disingenuous bullshit. I and several others have given good reasons why it makes sense for the make-up of the highest court to have representation from a variety of the social groups whose laws they have to interpret. There is no suggestion by anybody serious that a professionally inadequate candidate has been selected, because of skin colour. Not even Petersen alleges that this candidate is not fully competent to do the job. And the US Senate has agreed she is competent. So it is pure hysteria to suggest anyone is being "stripped of their dignity" by this process. What rot.

Oh dear. I'm not a doctor but your last two posts look to me very much like "word salad", in its medical sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad I suggest you seek psychiatric help, if you are not already getting it. And I'm now out of this discussion.

It is recognised in a number of jurisdictions, including the UK, that senior judges, because they are appointed towards the end of distinguished legal careers, tend to reflect the social makeup of the legal profession 30 years before. Judges are famous for being a bit out of touch. Yet these people make the law, today, for the whole of society. It can make sense, therefore, to prefer a candidate - if, as in this case, a sufficiently able one is available - that widens the range of social representation on the bench. (You can look up tosser if you like - it is impolite and chosen for that reason.)

You need justices that represent the range of people they are judging. And by any standards this candidate seems better qualified than some of the recent appointees. If she were no good she would not have been confirmed. (Peterson is a bit of a tosser, in my opinion.)

Haha. It won't work. Of that, there is no doubt whatsoever.

I think I may now have understood why you think that this device could work. I notice you said in your opening post that:- "The trick is that the weight that rotates upwards does not move further away from its fulcrum at the top right of the disc. So technically no work is performed moving the weight closer to the axle of the wheel. The work performed is the wheel rotating." It looks as if you think that because the torque exerted by the descending weight, which is at full extension along its arm, exceeds the torque due to the rising weight, which is progressively being wound in along its arm, there is a torque imbalance in favour of accelerating the wheel. This would of course be in conflict with the energy analysis, which would be that as the rising weight is returned to the same height as the descending weight, no net work is done and thus the wheel will not accelerate. But I think you will find there is an additional source of torque, exerted on the arm of the rising weight, due to the mechanism used to pull it in. This will exactly counteract the torque imbalance arising from the difference in leverage from the weights themselves. So no free lunch.

Then what the hell are you talking about Nietzsche for, you berk? This is pointless. I've had enough.