exchemist

That article is poorly written. The term “orbital” was devised precisely because electrons in an atom do not have definite orbits. This is due to their wavelike nature or, to put it another way, to the uncertainty principle. On the more general issue of this modelling attempt of yours, I have difficulty seeing what it is for. You initially referred to gravity, but this seems to be some kind of attempt to reproduce the effect of electromagnetic interactions between atoms. Which is it?

You can't get round the solubility of a substance in a given solvent in this way. It is what it is. If this substance is water-soluble, it is likely it has some degree of solubility in an ethanol/propylene glycol mixture, as both are also polar solvents. But the solubility may be a great deal lower- as you have evidently discovered. As for additives, surfactants can sometimes be used to create emulsions, i.e. to suspend rather than dissolve the insoluble material. This is how detergents work to remove grease and oil, for instance, which are not water-soluble. Maybe if you can explain what you are trying to do in more detail, somebody may be able to advise you further.

It seems you are unaware of the principle of induction furnaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_furnace

Yes. And warm water is even better. Warm water can help unfreeze freeze water in your pipes. Because it's warm, you see. 🤪

I should think it must be. I would expect this layout, with the oesophagus behind the lungs, to be common to all tetrapods. But I'm not a biologist.

I feel sure the extra sugar in the US is in large part due to the decades-long inculcation of the "coca cola culture" which has, through incessant lifestyle marketing, habituated the US palate to sweetness. Drinking sweet beverages with a meal seems to be normal. In France that would be thought barbaric - and ultimately of course it can be bariatric 😄. I recall a US colleague, on a visit to our Hamburg office, expressing astonishment, almost to the point of panic, that there was no soft drink dispenser. Coffee there was of course, but he seemed to need his coca cola.

Yes it can be confusing. Notice these groups are described as Main Groups, and also that the block in between (often called the d-block) is described as being for the Transition Metals. The "transition" metals were historically viewed as being in the transition from the simpler rules of chemical behaviour of the light elements of the 1st 3 rows to the more complex behaviour of the heavier ones from the 4th row onward. (As with so many things in science, history has a lot to do with how things end up being named.) Nowadays, it is really better to speak of the s-block, for the 1st 2 main groups, the p-block for groups 3-7 and 0, the d-block for the transition metals (and the f-block for the so-called lanthanides and actinides that are usually represented below the d-block.) But over the years there have been many different ways to display the table and also a variety of different numbering systems and naming conventions. So inevitably you will come across a few different ones in your reading. Just keep the shape in your mind: 2 columns of s-block metals on the left, 6 columns of p-block elements on the right, with the metal/non-metal diagonal running obliquely through them like a staircase, and the d- and f- block metals in the middle. The reason for the rather ungainly shape of the table is to do with the order in which electrons build up* in layers within the atom, as one moves through the table from lighter elements to heavier ones. Remember that It is the outer electrons (called the "valence" electrons) that are responsible for the chemical behaviour of the elements. The shape of the outermost layer, and how strongly or weakly bound the electrons in it are, is what determines how the element will behave in chemical reactions. * from the German Aufbauprinzip or building up principle, which explains how the behaviour of the outermost electrons is determined by quantum theory. You will get to that in due course. It's rather cool.

Yes, your writing is atrocious - and long-winded. Can you try again, this time writing no more than a couple of short paragraphs and in complete sentences, i.e. using full stops? At the moment I find myself giving up trying to work out what you are trying to say after about 6 lines.

Don’t be an idiot.

I think you may be confusing abstract mathematics with physics. Calculus is used all the time in QM. The uncertainty principle arises from pairs of non-commuting operators for certain observable properties. This concept is quite compatible with calculus. In fact some of the operators concerned contain things like derivatives.

What would it mean if time were “made up”? If there is no way to distinguish “made up” from “real”, then the distinction is meaningless. How could one tell?

You are still missing the point I made many posts ago: the business of government requires a host of policy decisions, made all the time in response to evolving issues and events.. You cannot submit more than a tiny fraction of these to the laborious mechanics of a referendum. So you simply have to elect people, to whom you entrust the making of these decisions as they come up. And then you hold them to account periodically for their stewardship. Anyone can cherry-pick some contentious issue and claim it has been, or will be, badly handled by a particular elected politician. Pointing this out is easy but completely fails to address the practical issue of the huge number of referenda required if you were instead to subject every policy to a process like that. You are not putting forward any workable alternative process. Pointing fingers at defects is easy but not constructive.

Could be. I’m in two minds as to whether there is an undisclosed agenda or whether we are just dealing with someone whose ideas are in a bit of a muddle.

I said nothing about the outcome of the last US presidential election, as you well know. My comments were comparing representative democracy (what you call, rather tendentiously, “package voting”) with democracy by direct referendum, as that would seem to be the alternative. If all you want to do is identify flaws in the way representative democracy has been conducted, in recent presidential elections in one country in North America, that is a much narrower scope of enquiry and does not in itself call into question the principle of representative democracy. So what is it you want to explore: weaknesses in the principle of choosing representatives to govern, or defects in the current US democratic system?

You must be joking. Only idiots believe in free energy. And I’m not going anywhere near a zipfile that could be full of malware.

There’s always “lunchpack”, or “meat-and-two-veg”.

Please don’t make a statement and then stick a question mark at the end. It is unclear whether you are making a statement or asking a question. Which is it? Secondly, you have failed to engage at all with the reasons I have given you for why democracy by referendum is a stupid and unworkable idea, preferring instead to hide in cheap and lazy conspiracy thinking about “ruling politicians”. This is puerile. Do you want an adult discussion of this subject or not?

If philosophical or religious ideas refer to scientific concepts, they need to use them in a manner that makes scientific sense. Otherwise, they are talking crap. No one gets a free pass to mangle science just because they call it something else. Personally, I am not in the least bit contemptuous or dismissive of philosophical or religious ideas, but if someone treats energy as a substance, or tries to endow spiritual concepts such as the soul with physical properties like vibration frequency, I am going to call bullshit, because that is Chopra-esque woo.

Aha, so that would I suppose indicate that formation of the rochelle salt is in fact favoured thermodynamically, compared to the the two unmixed salt structures. Interesting. And of course what it is known for is its piezo-electric properties. I'll have to look up how all that arises. (I'm just old enough to have had at one time a hi-fi amplifier with 2 inputs for record player cartridge inputs, one for magnetic cartridges and one for crystal or ceramic ones. Presume rochelle salt may have been use in the latter.)

Quite right I was talking nonsense, once the acid is fully neutralised it’s just a solution with equal numbers of Na and K cations. Serves me right for trying to do chemistry with brain fog from my ‘flu’. But will crystallisation produce just Rochelle salt, or a mixture of Na/Na, K/K, and Na/K tartrates, and if just Rochelle salt why? Is it a happy accident of thermodynamics that the mixed salt is preferred? My instinct would be that either Na or K would fit the lattice better and the mixed salt might be disfavoured relative to the one with the better fit.

Hmm, not sure about this. How do you know you will get the mixed metal salt,, rather than a random mixture of sodium and potassium tartrates? According to WIKI, Rochelle salt is made by adding NaOH to potassium bitartrate, i.e. potassium hydrogen tartrate, up to a pH of 8. This suggests you need a 2 step process, first generating the K bitartrate and then treating with NaOH. Generating the bitartrate suggests to me a process of gradually adding dilute KOH solution and stopping while the mixture is still acid, to make sure you only neutralise one end of the molecule. I have not looking into what pH that would be but no doubt you can look up the pKas for tartaric acid. The usual source of K bitartrate is the crystals naturally deposited in white wine barrels. There is potassium in the grapes and the acidity of wine is appropriately mild.

Well I suppose there is the “solvated electron”, formed reversibly by dissolving an alkali metal in liquid ammonia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvated_electron But that’s definitely in the “don’t try this at home” category.😀

Neither dark matter nor dark energy provides you with any justification whatever for imagining energy is a substance, nor for some wacky notion of souls with frequencies.

In the UK we had sodium vapour lamps for street lighting until only a few years ago, though now almost entirely displaced by LED. One of the curiosities of sodium vapour lamps was because they emit just the sodium D lines, you got false colours. But they were almost universal. I also remember mercury vapour street lights, which also gave false colours. I don’t know offhand what emission lines were excited - green and blue was the general effect.

Thanks, temp down for now at least but sense of taste still screwed up and lungs congested. Might be covid, I suppose, though the cheapo over-the-counter test didn’t come out +ve. When I have more energy I might try to work out the work function, i.e. latent heat, in eV, just for fun.