exchemist

I’m certainly with you 100% on maps. Like you I feel a need to know where I am going in relation to other places. I also like to have a mental picture of the journey. It makes me feel I am in charge rather than blindly following instructions.

On the contrary it seems to me that modern life requires mastery of an ever-expanding battery of computerised tasks, mostly to be done on your own without help. So mental agility is still needed but of a different sort. However I have certainly read of the importance of exercising the mind as one grows old. That’s one reason why I sing and why I do sudoku after lunch and wordle at teatime. And hang around science forums of course.

Yes it is only ex cathedra pronouncements on faith and morals. Most popes are very sparing indeed in their use of this. I think I recall this dodgy (and risky) doctrine was only formalised in the c.19th, at a time when the church was going through a phase of dogmatic absolutism.

Yes, pH can increase or decrease, or one can speak of a low (acid) or high (basic) pH.

Bed bugs are bloodsucking insects. If you’ve got those you need to fumigate the entire bedroom, paying attention to the underside of the bed and mattress as well as the top. But I doubt this is what you mean. If you mean dust mites, then washing should help. Woollens are washed not cold but at 30C usually. That should be OK. I would not go hotter if I were you.

I have a couple of questions: - How does your radiation concept account for the time dilation we observe in communications satellites, which is accurately predicted by relativity? - Are you an electrical engineer, by any chance?

Makes no sense. Vacuum fluctuations arise due to the uncertainty principle. Nothing to do with relativity.

That looks a lot better, certainly.

Yup. Chalk. CaCO3.

OK. By the way the anthocyanins in my red fruit turn blue just rinsed with water - before any detergent is added. So the water itself is sufficiently alkaline to do it. From looking it up, I see the pH of London water is in the range 8.0-8.5.

Yes I would definitely use deionised water and a fresh, untreated cabbage. But I've never done this myself, I should stress. My experience is only in the kitchen, where I find the juice from red fruits goes distinctly blue when I rinse dishes. Almost all of them get the purple colour from anthocyanins, I believe, from blackcurrants to aubergines and red cabbage, so the same behaviour is expected, modified only by whatever acidity there may be in the fruit or vegetable involved.) The reason for the colour change is quite interesting. These are conjugated ring systems with extensively delocalised π-orbitals. Protonation and deprotonation alters the bonding and thereby changes the energy gap between ground and first excited state, so that the molecule absorbs a different chunk of the visible spectrum.

These show different ranges in detail but in all cases the pH is 8 +/- 0.2or so. So red cabbage should be blueish, if there are no acids around to distort it. But as @John Cuthber points out, at such a neutral pH, very small changes in H+ concentration have have a big effect on the value, so any traces of acid contamination can alter it quite a bit.

Paul, when I cook red cabbage the problem is to stop it turning blue when I sweat it with butter or add any water (I live in a hard water area). The normal way to do this in cookery is by adding acid, e.g slices of apple, or vinegar. How did you prepare the indicator? Did you buy a fresh red cabbage and extract the anthocyanin yourself, or does it come from something in a jar. If the latter, it will almost certainly have some sort of acidifier in it, to keep the colour.

If it goes black when heated, you have some organic material present.

Daily Mail?

You are right. You've tried to explain your idea - and nobody here thinks it is a good one, for reasons they have explained. So that's that, really.

Love it! This is just the sort of stream of impenetrable management bullshit that made me so grateful for the chance to take early retirement. 😃

On a point of factual detail, this seems to be untrue. According to this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country The US has 403, the UK 137, Germany 114, France 72 and the rest of the EU countries between them have 171, or, if one excludes the recent admission of former Warsaw Pact countries, 131. The UK does well, it is true, but one needs to bear in mind the advantage of language. Language is important for information sharing and collaboration in science. When I was at Oxford in the 1970s, the old-school dons were still advising chemists and physicists to learn German, as so much of the good research had been written in German. But in fact English was already becoming pre-eminent and that has of course continued. France, a country comparable to the UK and Germany in population and intellectual tradition, has done well, all things considered. So in Europe we have the big 3 industrial economies - the UK, Germany and France - dominating, which is to be expected. In any event, Nobel prizes are not much use as a measure, if your aim is to contrast a supposed love of theory with supposed excellence at practice. Nobel prizes are awarded for theory just as much as for application, if not more so.

Aha yes of course.

Surely (1+√5)/2 : 1 ?

Agree strongly with this, especially your last point. I must say I have always objected to the narrow view that education is merely equipping students for a job, which seems to be what runs through @Erina's approach to the topic. People change careers, sometimes radically, fora variety of reasons. They need a rounded education to do that, not just what is necessary for one particular career path. Even more fundamentally, education should equip them to get more out of life in the round, not just to do a job of work. Time spent teaching them how to read literature, how to appreciate the arts, how to understand history, are all helpful to an intelligent enjoyment of life. These things can give you some independence of your circumstances - even an unemployed person can read a book - a way to enjoy your leisure time more productively, and a better sense of balance in your life. The most enduring things I got from my schooldays, apart from an interest in physical science, were choral singing and rowing, which have been features of my life ever since. And as I get older I find the history I learnt is becoming useful, not least as that is what my son has chosen to study at university. So we can still have a conversation about his studies, even though I went the STEM route. So yes, let's teach our children broadly, so they can pick routes from a variety, have the flexibility to change horses if they need to, and are equipped to stay sane and happy. Most private schools in the UK are non-profit entities. They charge a lot because they are in an arms race with their rivals for better facilities and better exam results.

You can always spend more on health but we spend too little, given the ageing population, relative to our peers. The basic problem is the Tory pretence that we can have an EU level of welfare with US level of taxation. But I'll stop here as I've realised I'm taking the thread off-topic.

Sometimes I wonder if this is the approach of the British Tory party to our National Health Service: starve it for years, demoralise the staff and then say, “Look, it doesn’t work.”

Knowing the difference between "refute", "rebut" and "disagree with", and between the singular and plural of criterion, would be a start. 😉 More seriously, surely the criteria for a new teacher are subject knowledge and evidence of the ability to teach, i.e. to motivate pupils to enjoy the subject and be able to show that they have learnt effectively, e.g. by good exam results. (Plus the usual hygiene factors of course.). But is this what you are interested in, or is it what should be in the syllabus? From your previous posts it feels as if the latter is more what concerns you.

Yes, we know what a microwave oven looks like. Your question has been fully answered, several times now. You are behaving like a neurotic timewaster. Kindly stop this nonsense.