exchemist

There is an account of what has been found here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/covid-19-origins-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-data. which is not behind a paywall. It seems the international team has found evidence from details of DNA sequences, uploaded by the Chinese analysts who sequenced the Covid +ve swabs in question to an international database called Gisaid. These sequences have since been taken down without explanation by the Chinese, but not before they have been copied. So the mystery now is why the Chinese researchers originally claimed there was no animal DNA, and why they seem now to be covering the fact there was in fact animal DNA after all. One might think that the Chinese authorities would be very keen to claim the virus came from animals and not from a leak from one of their own labs. It is also not clear to me at least, exactly what these swabs were, i.e. from where and when they were taken. I start to wonder if there is a disinformation game of some kind going on.

This reads like the complaint of someone that does not understand a subject and decides to attack those who do instead of getting the books out and bothering to learn. Choice of units is basically irrelevant to the complexity or otherwise of physics. Such complexity as it has is the result of applying Ockham's Razor. This does NOT, as some people fondly imagine, argue for simplicity above all else, but for no more complexity than is necessary to fit the facts. So, to the extent physical science is complex, it is because that's what observing nature tells us it is like. You can't wish it away just because of your lack of understanding.

Yes some truth in that. Some English méthode champenoise can be rated as highly in tastings as champagne these days, now that English producers are learning how to grow the grapes (chardonnay and pinot noir I think) and make it well. I was given a bottle of vintage Nyetimber some years ago which I forgot about and then found and opened last year, by which time it was starting to go a bit orange, and it was very good indeed. But when I visit Oncle Philippe in Rouen, for gatherings of my wife's family, he generally serves Deutz, which I like very much, so that's what's in my cellar. I don't drink champagne often enough to start experimenting with English producers.

Chaptalisation. It’s still allowed but less necessary because of climate change. The issue now, increasingly, tends to be holding the degree of ripeness down, to avoid excess alcohol which upsets the balance of the wine.

I would certainly try that. It never ceases to amaze me how many extraneous ingredients manufacturers seem to need to add to ready meals. Also you can cook the onions slowly which may help. I don't seem to be bothered by oligosaccharides myself, so can't advise from experience. But I do have quite a lot of garlic, brassica vegetables and lentils in my diet so, looking at @StringJunky's explanation, it may be that I have reached equilibrium in my gut long ago and that's why.

I don't think this is right, actually. According to the link below, in the UK the tax per bottle is the same for any wine between 5.5 and 15%. https://www.decanter.com/learn/tax-wine-much-pay-uk-ask-decanter-357119/ Furthermore, as a rule, expensive wine has no higher alcohol content than cheap wine. A bottle of good Bordeaux will have an alcohol content of 12.5-13% and cost £20-50 per bbl, whereas a bottle of supermarket plonk will have the same or slightly higher alcohol and cost under a tenner. Table wines in general are between 12% and 15% in alcohol, which is not that much of a variation from the health point of view. (Though personally, having a susceptibility to atrial fibrillation, I admit I tend to avoid wine >13.5% and beer >4.5%, to improve my chances of staying out of trouble). Fortified wines are something else, port being ~20% for example. And it's true they can be jolly expensive. But again that's not really due to alcohol content. You can see from the link the difference is only a pound at the most.

The choice and sometimes blending of grape varieties, age of the vines, control of the crop size and, most significantly and hard to analyse, the land they are grown on. The basic process is the same though, so provided there is no actual adulteration of the product with harmful substances (cf. Austrian antifreeze scandal), the wine making process should have minimal impact on how the wine affects the health of the drinker.

Word salad.

In science, we tend to make implicit use of a principle known as Ockham's Razor. This principle is that one should not introduce more complications into an explanation or theory than are strictly necessary to account for the observations. Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate , or equivalent. Postulating a change in gravity would seriously affect many aspects of physics, earth science and biology - and there would be plenty of evidence if it were true, which there is not. Also, the "trajectory" - I suppose you mean orbit - of the earth has nothing to do with its gravity. Gravity is determined by the mass of the attracting body, the mass of the earth in this case. But what makes you think the weight of the blocks would be an insuperable problem for the pyramid builders? They could build ramps and pulley systems.

What the hell are you talking about and why is it news?

Only just seen this thread. When I was at Shell, we marketed products called "vapour space inhibitors" that were used to protect things like engine components - or even fully assembled engines and other machines in prolonged storage. There is an article on them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_corrosion_inhibitor With most machinery of course it does not matter if there is a very thin chemisorbed film on the surface. So what I can't comment on is the effect any of these compounds might have on the conductivity at electrical contacts. If voltages are low I imagine even a thin protective film of a chemisorbed compound could have an effect.

In what academic subject was this set as homework, and what are your thoughts on how to tackle it?

It was the height of the British Empire, though, and long-distance travel by ship was commonplace. Chronometers also were needed to determine longitude for navigation, so society, one way or another, was aware of the way time zones arise. And domestically, "railway time" had been established by the 1840s, to make time uniform across Britain, which was important to run a railway timetable, whereas previously it was not. In fact there is one relic of the Oxford meridian to this day, in the tradition of Tom Tower, at Christ Church, striking at 5 minutes past 9 each evening, which it does 101 times, commemorating the number of original scholars at the college. I remember as an undergraduate questioning whether noon at Oxford was really 5 minutes later than at Greenwich, so, with a bottle of port among us, we chemists sat down in someone'e room and did the geometry. And it is.

I got the same score, having forgotten how to do lowest common multiples and, like you, getting the St Petersburg time zone wrong (I thought it would be the the same as Helsinki).

No, an organism does not evolve during its lifetime. Evolution proceeds by differences in reproduction rate between individuals. Over many generations this affects the genetic composition of the population of organisms. Evolution is something that changes populations, not individuals.

What do you mean by taking a backup? They are passing on their genes to be mixed (at least in the case of sexual reproduction) with those of the sexual partner. So they are making a new mixture, rather than cloning themselves, if that is what you are suggesting.

Ah autism. That accounts for it. Possibly.

The atmosphere, broadly speaking, rotates with the Earth so to a first approximation the rotation does not make anything suspended in the air move, relative to a point on the ground. If this were not so, you would feel a constant wind, always from the same direction, due to the difference in rotational speed between you, on the ground, and the air. When it comes to second order effects, the rotation of the earth plays a role in determining various patterns of air flow in the atmosphere, e.g the jet stream, the trade winds, etc. But do not imagine these are simply due to a difference in rotation rate between the surface and the air above. The jet stream, for instance, flows from west to east, the same direction as the rotation of the earth, but faster, thereby creating a west-east wind, relative to the surface. This and many other air flows arise from a combination of heating and cooling in different parts of the globe with the effects of rotation, via Coriolis effects and so on.

How would your proposed index be an improvement on this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index

I think trying to reduce the host of factors that comprise a desirable civilisation into a single index is not likely to be successful. I am not convinced all the peoples of the world want or expect the same things from their civilisation or society and I don't think publicising a single index with periodic rankings will capture their imagination. I think people are more interested in indices that reflect specific aspects of a desirable society, for instance an index on press freedom, or on the opportunities available to women. Such things have a clear meaning, whereas a single index putting everything into one pot will not. I also think the term "civilisation" is not the best to use in the context of social development. "Civilisation" encompasses a huge mass of factors: history, language, traditions, religions, moral codes, as well as modes of social organisation, institutions, political systems etc. If, as it appears, you are trying to create an index to rank some form of social progress, you are not talking about a lot of this and indeed a lot of it cannot be ranked in an index at all. So if I were you I would talk of "society" and not "civilisation.

What do you want to discuss?

All I mean is that the word interaction implies an event involving more than one entity. It is an action "inter", i.e. between, entities. What is interacting? There have to be somethings to interact, or it is wrong to describe the phenomenon as an interaction - it would just be an event. Clearly something is there in between (which we may describe by a wave function for example), sufficient to render the next interaction predictable. If there were nothing, there would be no predictability about the next interaction. So it seems to me it is the nature of that something that is up for debate.

S u r e l y n o t.

That view - of reality as a network of interactions and relationships - seems to fit well with Rovelli's relational interpretation of QM. But as it is those interactions and relationships that our mathematics models, such a view of reality implies that what we are doing (or should be doing) in science is to model a physical reality. And to go further, if we model interactions, there have to be some entities that interact, whether or not they can be said to have continuous existence in between. I may be in a minority, to judge by the other comments from the physicists here, but I suppose I am a bit of a Baggotista on this, cf. Jim Baggott's slightly provocative book "Farewell to Reality". (Full disclosure: I worked with him for a while when we were at Shell. Admittedly we are both chemists rather than physicists, which may colour our perspective.)

Ah well, what can be said to be "true" is another kettle of fish entirely. In science one tends to avoid bald truth statements. for the standard Popperian reason, viz. "truth" in science is only provisional. But the statements we make, with whatever caveats, are nevertheless about something that we think is real, I would say.