exchemist

Oh dear. It doesn't look as if you are the ideal person to discuss science with, then. But thanks for the discussion topics: always fun to think about.

Yes, think of the crumple zone in a car.

Yes indeed, I too use the bike for local errands and only put <5000miles on the car annually. But even so, eventually the car needs replacing (Mine is now 13yrs old so it will be 14-15yrs old by the time I replace it.) The issue then becomes - apart from the operational footprint - whether an electric car involves more or less CO2 in its manufacture and supply than an IC one. I should have thought less, as an electric car has less machinery in it, unless the battery is particularly carbon-intensive to make. I realise there are environmental problems with mining some of the metals, notoriously Co, and maybe some of the lanthanides used in motor magnets, but these are in principle fixable and since the overriding imperative is climate change I set these to one side. I expect the next car I buy to be my last, given that I am 67 and would hope to run it until I'm 80 or so and starting to become a liability behind the wheel. But by then, with any luck, we will be able to hire driverless taxis - if Putin has not blown us all up.

Are you really an ex-physicist?

Mark 13:32 in my translation says: "But as for that day or hour, nobody knows it, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son; no one but the Father." And he prays to the father on various occasions. So there is a clear father/son relationship implied and sometimes stated explicitly. So we have the start of the idea of the Trinity. The question of whether that makes Jesus divine is slightly different, it is true, but we already see it dimly in the prologue to St. John's gospel where Christ is identified with the Word - the "logos", which , it is implied, is the means of God's action in the world, including the creation itself. Perhaps you think John the Evangelist, whoever he was, was a "Catholic"?

I suppose there may be some further compression occurring, due to the slight reduction of volume in the core as it cools and progressively solidifies. From that link you provided, it seems the latent heat of fusion released as more of the core becomes solid will slow the rate of cooling. If the solid is also denser than the liquid, then the gradual growth of the solid core at the expense of the liquid core will reduce the volume of the core and the rest of the earth will move downward to fill the space and thereby become further compressed, releasing more heat. Regarding tectonic movement, my understanding is that this does indeed release heat due to friction (e.g. in descending slabs at subduction zones, it contributes to the partial melting that takes place which is responsible for island arc volcanoes). But since the source of the motion is thermal convection in the first place, I should have thought that would be a redistribution of heat from core to crust/upper mantle, rather than an additional source of it. But this isn't my field so I speak only as an interested amateur.

I've decided my next car will definitely be electric. I'm just hoping to hang on for a year or two, while the charging network improves, the main issue being to have a charging point in Brittany where we go for summer holidays. (There are already charging points on the overnight ferry). What gives me a bit of a guilty conscience is that I've found that I can't realistically get a heat pump to replace the gas central hearing boiler. The house, which is Victorian, is too big and difficult to insulate sufficiently. I shall just have to get a new, efficient gas boiler and hope that eventually I can run it on green or blue hydrogen - or a hydrogen/methane blend. The UK government has done almost nothing to address this issue yet, which is a huge hole in its climate change strategy. That's a fairly strange statement. Climate scientists are practically unanimous. The only significant doubt seems to be among those non-experts who don't want to believe it, either for political reasons or for reasons of personal convenience.

Ah so he's pushing it round in a circle, is he? So the combined total of the force needed to push it round, plus the lifting force from his hand will equal the weight, I suppose. In other words he still has to exert a force equal to its weight, but not purely vertically, due to the reaction of the gyroscope.

There seem to be 2 sites called "askabiologist", one, which is active, being run by Arizona State University, and another, based in the UK which is defunct and was supposedly aimed at schoolchildren. You are asking about the defunct one. I wouldn't bother.

A YouTube video is a bad place to start. YouTube is full of crap. A spinning gyroscope weighs the same as a stationary one, so if your video suggests otherwise that is false. The special property of a spinning gyroscope is that if you try to change the direction of its axis of spin, it will tend to move at right angles to the change you are trying to making. For instance if it is upright in front of you and you push the top away from you it will move to the left or right, depending on the direction of spin. It's hard to visualise why, but you can make sense of it by considering the momentum of 2 bits of the spinning rotor, on opposite sides of the axis, when an attempt is made to change the direction of the axis of spin. Bit hard to explain in detail without a diagram, though.

Yes that much seems to be agreed. It is certainly more theological in style than the synoptic gospels: the "Word" in the prologue, more worked out ideas about the Trinity, etc. And it has some extra stories, I think, that are not in the others, e.g. the woman taken in adultery.

Well it is interesting that the English translation seems to come out the same in different versions of the bible, which is far from always the case. But your view that St. John's gospel was written by a theologian is intriguing. There is certainly a distinct whiff of theology-building in it, which distinguishes it from the synoptic gospels. However I was not aware that the authorship of this gospel had been established with any certainty. From where do you get this information about an Alexandrian?

Quite right! I had overlooked this.

That's anthropomorphising, though: typical for YouTube videos but not good science. It's nothing to do with whether there has been any conscious observation. The issue is whether there has been an interaction with them or not. You can't observe a system without interacting with it, as a rule.

It depends what you mean by "inexplicable". The behaviour observed in the double slit experiment is just as predicted by quantum theory, so it does not pose a problem for the theory. The problem is to envisage how to interpret what both theory and experiment say about the nature of things. So it is more of a philosophical problem than a science problem, really. If one belongs to the "shut up and calculate" school of (non-) interpretation, there is no problem at all! https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9649&cpage=1

Where did Jesus say he was not from this world? So far as I recall, he said, according to St John's gospel, "My kingdom is not of this world", (John 18:36) which is very different. More generally, almost all the information about Jesus that we have comes from religious texts (the New Testament), with very little corroboration from independent sources. That includes the accounts of miracles, which are reported events contrary to our experience and our science. So how do we know we can trust these sources?

I was not aware that radical scavengers would actually increase risk of cancer. Surely it is the reverse? Do you have a link to an example of a study showing this? My understanding of the position was more or less as explained here: https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/antioxidants-in-depth. viz. antioxidants in the diet are generally protective, but there is no evidence that further supplements add to that protection. Note this refers to what is apparently a considerable body of research, though it does not provide the specific references.

Quite.

In the same way that a tiger is bunch of forest plants, light and shade, you mean? And in the same way that you are asking these questions in good faith? 😁

You have just told us they are mantises. Now, perhaps you can work out, from this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis whether or not a mantis is a plant. Can you manage that?

Yes I've been thinking about that, and I'm sure he as as well. In the information age, and as an actor, he will I'm sure be well aware of the impact that a dramatic public confrontation with his potential executioners could have - a bit like Yeltsin with the tanks. If they gun him down in cold blood, that will put Putin and the Red Army beyond the pale permanently and will ensure a rolling resistance movement against the occupiers for years to come. If they are wise they won't do that. But he may not want to be taken alive, for fear they may torture him, to or use his captured family against him to get him to surrender. A grisly choice. Putin wants him dead, I have no doubt, more than ever now that he has thwarted the original plan. Zelensky has his place in history already, though.

Yes, it's hyperbole. One has to understand Zelensky has an agenda, which is to bind the fate of Western Europe, and the EU in particular, as tightly to Ukraine as he can. His (wholly unrealistic) request that Ukraine be allowed to join the EU on an emergency basis is part of the same thing. The guy has his back to the wall and is pressing all the buttons he can. He's been calling everyone, including the pope, to drum up support, and trying everything he can think of. I take my hat off to him for his astounding energy and bravery - he knows he's dead when the Russians get hold of him - but one has to aim off a bit when evaluating some of what he says.

Is it also the case that Li is used because of the small size of the ion, which enables it to form reversibly the intercalation compounds with graphite and CoO2 etc that are used in the Li ion cell? I don't know much about the battery chemistry but I can imagine a small ion being less disruptive to the structure of the electrodes, as it enters or leaves, than a larger one would be.

Why don't you leave, then, and we'll all be happier? Win-win.

None of this makes sense. But if you are river a.k.a current, that's not a surprise. An amber warning light to that effect has come on. 1) Metals take part in chemistry just like any other chemical substance. "A metal has nothing to do with chemistry" is an absurd statement. 2) If they did not take part in chemistry, a lead/acid battery would not work. Such batteries rely for their operation on electrochemistry, in this case the reversible reaction between Pb (metal) and PbO with H2SO4. 3) The transmission of sound waves in water is not a chemical process. If you have a source that says to the contrary, I'd like to see it. 4) Uranium is denser than lead because its atomic nuclei are more massive. The nuclei play no role in chemical reactions. Chemistry is all about the valence (outer shell) electrons. It is the therefore the number of atoms and the behaviour of their valence electrons, not their mass, that is responsible for the energy change obtainable from the chemical reaction in a battery. 5) The notion of a battery that might last "long enough to replace fossil fuels" is nonsensical. Batteries are a temporary energy store that needs to be recharged. 6) John Hutchison [sic] , i.e. not "Hutchinson", is a crank and self-publicist whose ideas don't work: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Hutchison