exchemist

Hmm, a YouTuber who makes a point of trying to get round EU laws. Not sure I approve. But purely from the chemistry point of view, if the oxalate is insoluble and precipitates, then that should drive the equilibrium to the right, for a while. As the acidity increases though, less and less of the oxalic acid will dissociate into oxalate ions, so the thing will slow down and stop at some point.

I tend to agree. Everything has to have some value and the fact that a constant it has the value it does is no more improbable than any alternative value. To give a trivial example, the fact of my personal existence relies on a highly "improbable" chain of coincidences, regarding how my parents were conceived, how they happened to meet and so forth. But nobody feels the need to argue my existence must have been "designed" by some great plan, because of its intrinsically low probability.

OK, understood. Though this seems to be a very roundabout way to make it. Can you supply a link to show us where you are getting this route from? Zn oxalate seems to be insoluble in water so I imagine it might work in the same way.

Ah, possibly not. Regarding whether it works, I was wondering about that. If an insoluble chelated metal oxalate is precipitated from an aqueous solution, I guess you are left with an acidic solution with sulphate ions, i.e. dilute sulphuric acid. But it can't be a way to generate pure sulphuric acid.

Why are you doing this? Sulphuric acid is readily available, surely?

What bothers me is that this looks like a reduction overall, yet I can't see what is being oxidised. Unless it is the methanol.

I don't remember much organic synthesis, I'm afraid. I can see how you will get an enol (or enolate, under alkaline conditions) but how do you think the oxygen is removed?

It's in trouble then. They have no teeth, so how is it going to deal with the tail?

Yes, it is one of my go-to references for this kind of discussion.

A transatlantic ship crossing takes 4 days (on a fast, purpose-built ship), during which each passenger has to be given a cabin and meals, as if in a hotel, with all the associated staffing costs, but at sea, so a lot more expensive than on land. The cost of that has to be compared with a 7hr flight, with 2 in-flight meals provided. Planes can be tuned round in a couple of hours at each end, so a single A340, taking 250 people each flight, can transport 1000 people in each direction during a 4 day period. That's hard for ships to beat. And that's before you take into account of the value of time for the passenger, as others have pointed out.

I think it's the sort of question that people who believe in the "hard problem of consciousness" sometimes ask. It seems to me that if one takes the word "like" literally, the colour red is sui generis - it is what what it is - i.e. it is not "like" anything else - except for another similar colour, perhaps. But I think the question is actually intended to invite an answer to the (to my mind unanswerable) question of how to describe the sensation of experiencing the colour red. Another similar, well-known one is Nagel's: "What is it like to be a bat?" I assume they mean a flying one rather than a cricket bat*, but perhaps it doesn't matter. Massimo Pigliucci has little time for the "hard problem". He doesn't think it is a problem at all, but arises from a category error: https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Hard_Problem I'm inclined to agree. *Reminds me of a scene in one of those 1950s schoolboy books, "How to be Topp" etc, in which a boy is not paying attention in biology class, when hibernation is being discussed:- Teacher: Molesworth! What are you doing? Molesworth: Me sir? Nothing, Sir. Teacher: Molesworth, what does a bat do in winter? Molesworth: Er, er.......er, it splits if you don't oil it, Sir.

Depends what they are doing. Filming police is ethical. Trying to provoke police into reactions that are subsequently misrepresented on social media is unethical. However many journalists and media interviewers habitually misrepresent interviewees, which is just as bad. There’s a lot of unethical behaviour about, unfortunately.

I think you have a good point in principle, regarding the general case of two masses attracted together, but in the case of objects falling towards Earth, the movement of Earth is negligible, as its mass is so much vastly greater than the object that is regarded as "falling" towards it. So if you really want, you might say the usual description is an approximation, but you might run the risk of earning points for pedantry.😀

Agree with much of this - except that I am not convinced by the "experienced air force personnel" argument, which is one that is frequently aired. These military people are not trained in careful evaluation of data in a scientific manner, but in quick evaluations biased towards the detection of potential adversaries. It has been shown in several cases that they can be wrong, due to being misled by such effects as parallax. But this has come to light as a result of careful analysis after the event. I must say I am a sceptic about the whole thing, due to there being only a tiny residue, in % terms, of unexplained cases, while the vast majority have been shown to be nothing special. What it seems to me this conclusively shows is there is a great capacity for human beings to misinterpret what they think they see, even aided by instruments. This, I think, is the only tangible outcome of all this research effort. I have nothing against the exercise of evaluating those outstanding cases, where the data permits it. But we should not fool ourselves: there will always be a residue of unexplained incidents, simply through lack of data to determine what was responsible. For this reason, it will always remain impossible to convince the confirmed believers that there is nothing out there cf. JFK, Diana, Bermuda Triangle, etc.

It is all in a day's work for one politician to claim another is telling lies, or to make assertions that indeed turn out to be lies. Let's have a proper reference for this claim.

Spot the non-sequitur. This has, of course, bugger all to do with climate change. London has been found to have poor air quality, especially along busy trunk roads where poorer people tend to live, sufficient to have adverse impact on health. The fact that it was worse in the 1950s is no kind of argument for saying it is acceptable now. Please provide substantiation of this allegation that does not rely on a YouTube video. YouTube is full of crap. (And that fat git with the glasses is the moron who said you can grow concrete, so we can safely discount anything he has to say.😄) By the way, it's called Imperial College, not The Imperial College.

There is research showing the effect of air pollution on health and also research showing the improvement in London air quality since the original central area ULEZ was created. It's probably too soon to have research directly on the impact on health of ULEZ, as these health effects become apparent over a period of many years, but it would seem quite reasonable to infer from the above that ULEZ has a beneficial impact. (I'm in London and the air is still filthy: I can wipe a black film off the glass topped table in the garden after only 24hrs.) P.S. It looks from this link that there is a study now in the works to see what difference to health ULEZ is making: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.04.21251049v1.full.pdf. But we'll need to wait for some years before it reports, of course.

The government of Mexico is not saying any such thing. They are conducting an enquiry, that is all, and this apparent fraudster* Jaime Maussan has presented these objects as evidence. It should hardly need saying that you need to be extremely circumspect about YouTube videos. * QUOTE: In 2015, Maussan, who reported the existence of the "Nazca mummy," led an event called "Be Witness," at which a mummified body, purportedly of an alien, was unveiled. However, Maussan's alleged "alien" discovery was later debunked, and the mummified corpse was shown to be that of a human child. UNQUOTE From: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/09/13/alien-corpses-mexican-congress/ P.S. I see, from later on in that linked article, that Avi Loeb has got in on the act again - though not in relation to these dodgy dolls - airing his speculative ideas about Oumuamua.

I'm not a mathematician but I think you may be confusing inputs and outputs. As I understand it the domain of a function is the set of inputs it can accept, i.e. the values that x can take. What you seem to be saying is the output, in the case of the function you have chosen, is imaginary rather than a real number.

Christians use church bells, though.

Slightly lazy shorthand for the government of Israel. I take your point about the distinction between that and the people (and a fortiori you of course, personally). But Israel is (so far) a democracy, after all, so it is to some extent fair to hold the citizens accountable for the government they elect. All power to you, your friends and the demonstrators. May you prevail at the ballot box before too long.

The Hitler bit is hyperbole (an attack of Godwin's Law?), but the rest I think is fair comment. One neg rep unwound. It is hardly a new observation that the treatment of the Palestinians by recent Israeli governments is particularly shocking, considering the experience of the Jews in the first half of the c.20th. Not only are these Arabs second class citizens but their land is being taken by force - which has unmistakable echoes of lebensraum. One might have hoped that, of all the people in the world, the Israelis would show some understanding of that. But apparently not, so the occasional comparison with Hitler should not be surprising (though most comparisons seem in practice to be made to apartheid era South Africa.).

This was the message of Lord of the Flies, if I remember correctly. There were quite a few explorations of human nature after the war, trying to make sense of how it happened, especially in a supposedly civilised European culture. Even Dr Who revisited the idea, with the Daleks.

I expect Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged could tell you how to do it. As I recall, it involved a particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and two rubber bands.