exchemist

No. Post the theory here, in line with forum rules.

My French mother in law thought an aeroglisseur was an “overcraft” in English, because it went “over” the water (in this case the English Channel/la Manche). The joke of course is that the way someone with a French accent would say “hovercraft” is more or less “overcraft”, so she had laboured under this misapprehension for years without anybody noticing.

This being a science forum, it is unlikely there will be experts on this subject here. Have you tried a religious forum? There seem to be plenty of them around.

I'd want to check very thoroughly any statement from an organisation calling itself "Gun Owners of America", because it is obviously a lobby group. My experience of US lobby groups (from when I worked in the oil business in Houston) is that they often present a crassly one-sided picture of the situation.

Ha! Don't talk to me about amines. I once had to take my French mother in law's fridge, at the holiday house in Brittany, to the déchetterie after it had failed 6 months previously......... with several packs of her coquilles St. Jacques in the freezer compartment. They had turned into a sort of black sludge. The only way I could cope with cleaning it out without throwing up was to think as hard as possible about amine chemistry. You never know when - or how - your degree will come in handy!

You need to have an idea of scale here. Molecules are of the order of 0.1-1 nanometres (nm) across. Viruses are of the order of 100nm and bacteria about 10x larger than that. Viruses and bacteria are made of molecules. So fairly obviously a molecule cannot carry a virus or a bacterium. I have not looked up the evolution of sense of smell, but given that smell is widely used in the animal kingdom to detect what is good to eat, it seems reasonable that part of that would include the identification of what to avoid because it would make the creature ill. But the way you phrase the question seems to be in terms of what an individual organism has learnt, from experience. That may be part of it but a sense of what constitutes a “bad” smell is instinctive. We all agree on bad smells - and sometimes even train ourselves to override them, e.g. in the case of certain aged or fermented foods like strong French cheese or game.

You still don't get it. The "those" you refer to are not just a handful of research scientists but include all the major automotive corporations in the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into this technology each year and sales of electric vehicles are already almost 20% of the total: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars There is no reason to think there is any significant limit, from the science or engineering viewpoint, to the potential of EVs to replace all IC-engined private vehicles. The constraints are mainly economic and political. The economics improve as sales volumes increase and as the technology advances. The politics have also greatly improved. Most European and Asian governments have now got behind the technology change. The laggard is likely to be the USA, at least if Trump is elected again. The chemistry of battery technology is one major area of development. The other is the engineering of vehicle charging: the infrastructure, the possibility of charging on the move, linkages to domestic solar generation, electricity tariffs linked to time of day and so forth. And then there is the big question of commercial vehicles. These are a lot harder to convert to EV technology, due to the power requirements exceeding what batteries can easily deliver. The answer could better batteries, or current collection on the move, or hydrogen-fuelled IC engines.

What, then, is the "strange pattern" referred to? If you can describe that, it may help us grasp what is meant in this context by bias. If it simply says human brains are biased to prefer simple explanations to more complex ones, surely that is no more than restating the principle of Ockham's Razor, is it not? Do you want to criticise the principle of Ockham's Razor? This is still unreadable rubbish, I'm afraid. Do you think it makes a useful point? If so perhaps you can summarise what it is. Or did you copy the link without reading it yourself?

Your misunderstanding is to think in terms of “particles”. As @CharonY says, the smell is due to volatile molecules, not macroscopic particles. It is an evolutionary advantage for animals to be able to detect these molecules at low concentration, either to avoid contact with decomposing flesh or, in the case of flies, to be attracted to it to lay their eggs on it.

This looks like yet another of your attempts to cast doubt on the viability of EVs, while pretending to be in favour of the energy transition. I do not think it worthwhile to address the issues you mention, as I no longer accept that you are posting in good faith. -1.

That link is unreadable shit. Have you a version that one can read without all the imbecile whizzo graphics?

Perhaps you could post a summary, or abstract, as text, on the forum.

Ah so that’s what this is about. I didn’t realise Bezos was also into entertainment. This handful of oligarchs really do insert themselves into every aspect of our lives. And now one of them is trying to buy the US election, ironically on the pretext of “saving democracy”. 🤪

Your emphasis on fear is misplaced, in my view. You ignore the appeal to people's better nature that is found, both in civil society and, even more strongly, perhaps, in religion. It is perverse to claim that religion is all about retribution for wrongdoing. The basic message of the Christian gospels is to love your neighbour. Christ set an example through his behaviour. Similar sentiments encouraging altruism are to be found in other religions. It may be that your exclusivist Calvinism is all about retribution, but that is not true of most religion. Secular society also sets great store by people's sense of "the right thing to do". Most people comply with laws because they realise at some level that we need rules of behaviour in order to get along. People have quite a string instinct to help one another, as a matter of fact. We saw this vividly during the Covid pandemic, for example. A lot of people are looking for an excuse to make friends and be nice, not by any means only people with strong religious faith. On the other hand, one can certainly have forces that encourage selfish or hateful behaviour towards others. Trump's appeal, for instance, is largely because he makes it seem normal to hate other people and actually encourages it. He empowers people to cast aside their civilised constraints and indulge in an orgy of hatred. So yes, I would agree there can be kind of "Lord of the Flies" effect, leading to a descent into savagery. A lot is to do with the prevailing mood and with the example set by key figures. (Orwell recognised this phenomenon with the "Two Minutes Hate" sessions organised by IngSoc in "1984".)

Well the author is Belgian, so it is only to be expected he thinks about the need to eat well before reading his paper. Bon appétit! 😀

I’m not sure I follow. I admit my experience of Amazon is limited (I try to avoid it and only use it perhaps twice per year), but my impression is they only suggest other goods you can buy from Amazon. Since people go to Amazon to buy goods rather than to watch entertainment - it’s not a media channel: nobody sane spends 20 minutes “watching” Amazon’s website - I can’t see any point in them starting to display ads for things they don’t sell. Now, if you want to talk about an entertainment channel like YouTube which makes money by showing ads, that’s a different matter. YouTube most certainly does show ads targeted by what it thinks an individual viewer is interested in. This already includes political ads. We got some in the UK during the last election campaign.

What is a PS 2 Slim 900000? Mineral oil will not damage metal, but it can affect some elastomers, including rubbers, causing them to swell or shrink. It is best to follow the advice of the handbook for the equipment in question.

So you advocate mob rule, then?

Then they would lose half their customer base. That's the (really rather obvious) reason why retailers seeking to appeal to a wide customer base generally avoid taking overt political positions.

Urban Autumn - S London, tree illuminated by a street light.

Yes I think so. Although his speculations were pretty well spot-on, which is amazing for the time: the stars as other suns, the possibility of life on other worlds around those suns, and the idea of the cosmos as infinite. He may not have been the first to have such thoughts, according to the little I have now read about him, but he was perhaps the first prominent thinker to write about them. He was also an alchemist and astrologer, it seems. But then, at that time, science was only starting to disentangle itself, by its insistence on accurate observation, from medieval philosophical ideas which were a hotchpotch of poetic and philosophical ideas, much inherited from the Ancient Greeks, theology etc.

OK, that's enough, I think this is all bullshit. For example, I quote the following sentence:" The DDS explores this instantly created real-time database to conclusively determine the correct composition using the principles of Vernier's coincidence, superimposition, concordance, and wave-interference patterns. The determination of the correct composition with an absolute degree of certainty and accuracy from the real-time database of numerous PICs is a significant achievement, unprecedented in the history of materials science. There is no such thing as "Vernier's coincidence, superposition, concordance and wave-interference pattern". This is sciency-sounding gobbledgook. Similarly, all this bullshit about "real time" has no relevance to the alleged subject of study, which is determination of the composition of an alloy, i.e. an entirely static problem. Real time in relation to what activity? Your blob of alloy just sits there indefinitely. You can analyse it as fast or as slowly as you like. I'm starting to suspect this is all just nonsense cobbled together by an AI program.

He was clearly a victim of the same church paranoia of the time, being an almost exact contemporary of Galileo. But Bruno seems to have been very different. He espoused a whole series of unorthodox (i.e "heretical") theological beliefs, including rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity and belief in reincarnation, despite having been ordained as a Dominican monk and as a priest. He seems to have renounced his holy orders and gone on the run to various places, in almost all of which he made himself unpopular. He even got himself excommunicated by the Lutherans, apparently. Although he is best known today for his imaginative cosmological insights, it looks as if his heresy trial was about the more serious (in the eyes of the church) charges of departure from core church doctrine. So it looks to me as if he was basically a renegade priest and monk, not an oppressed scientist like Galileo.

Do you mean the assumptions that the molecules engage in perfectly elastic collisions and that the volume they take up can be neglected? These are just the types of simplifying assumption that science theories often resort to, in order to build a simple, idealised model that is easy to work with. It is very often found that by working with simplified models one can get pretty close to predicting behaviour correctly. (Simplifying, in order to see the main thing that is going on, is a very useful way to approach many problems in life). What is also interesting is then to investigate the deviations of some real substances from the ideal behaviour predicted by the model. That can allow you to understand the particular extra effects that are responsible. In this example, the effect of the volume taken up by the molecules becomes important at high gas pressures (i.e. when the molecules don't have a lot of room to move around in). Similarly at very low absolute temperatures, the slight "stickiness" between molecules resulting from van de Waals attraction between them can be important. Both cause deviations from the simple kinetic theory model (and in fact van der Waals himself developed revised equations to account for each of these effects). So the basic model explains most of what is observed, while studying the deviations gives you a more complete level of understanding.

Amusingly, it took 350 years before the pope (John Paul II) finally lanced the boil by arranging for a formal statement that Galileo had been right all along. More here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460-600-vatican-admits-galileo-was-right/ But really, the point of the story in this thread is that, contrary to Dixon White's thesis, it is about the only example of hostility of what one might call traditional Christianity to scientific ideas. It's true there was initial controversy over Origin of Species within the Church of England, but that's because the C of E encompasses a wide range of beliefs, including some on the Evangelical wing who are pretty close to being biblical literalists. (Ever since they got so badly burned over the Galileo affair, the Catholic church has generally been jolly careful not to take a position on matters of science.)