exchemist

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.)

I see a bit of problem with this. The density of an alloy will in generral not be a simple linear interpolation between the densities of the components. There will be a degree of interaction between the different elements present, according to their mutual chemical affinity or otherwise, and effects due to the packing of atoms of dissimilar size in the metal lattice. This is addressed for example in this piece of work: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0364591619302524. in which the enthalpy of mixing is used as a way to estimate these effects. I am also rather confused by the following sentence in your post: " In this pursuit, we have found evidences of chromosomal structure of probability distributions of the probable iso-density compositions, butterfly effect stemming from alloy density, principle of vernier caliper in multi-dimensions etc." What is meant by chromosomal structure of probability distributions? What is meant by a butterfly effect in this context? What is meant by principle of vernier caliper in multi-dimensions?

No it was indeed about the heliocentric stuff, but he explained it, as I recall, in the form of an argument between two people, the nitwit being the person with the pope's ideas. Not a clever thing to do! I think describing house arrest as life imprisonment is not really right. Obviously he was not a free man, but he was not incarcerated in prison.

OK, my comment about Galileo’s tactlessness was he put some of the pope’s ideas in the mouth of a fictional character in his book, for the purposes of argument, making this character out to be a bit of a simpleton. Not a great move, considering how jumpy the church authorities were at the time! Not sure why you mention execution. Galileo was put under house arrest and told not to publish any more.

While it may be the object of religion to provide meaning in life, that is not the job of science. Trying to set science and religion up against one another, as if they are alternatives in some way, or even rivals, is to misunderstand science. Science is the study of nature to understand how it works. As others have pointed out, people can derive a sense of meaning and purpose in life from all manner of things they do, which give them a sense of achievement and fulfilment. Science can be one of them. Ethics is an entirely separate question. Immense damage was done, over a century ago, in the United States, by the ideas of somebody called Andrew Dixon White, the first president of Cornell in the late c.19th. He promoted the so-called "conflict thesis" which claims science and religion are inherently opposed to one another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis This is a rather discredited notion, belied, for example, by the number of clergymen and religious people who have played prominent roles in science. About the only serious example of conflict, historically, was the Galileo affair. This was largely a result of paranoia in the Catholic church about "heresies" at the time of the Reformation, combined with tactlessness on the part of Galileo. Dixon White's perspective was no doubt coloured by the upsurge of creationist, extreme Protestantism in N America at the time, which of course had huge problems with Charles Darwin's ideas, but that is hardly indicative of an intrinsic conflict between science and religion. Nevertheless the idea of conflict has taken root in some quarters and remains influential to this day.

I'm not sure the number of people available to give the injections is normally the limiting factor in the take-up of vaccinations. I think it's more a question of getting enough doses sent to the right place and getting people to come forward to be vaccinated. Nurses and even nowadays pharmacists can administer injections. The local clinic I attended last Saturday for my 'flu' and covid jabs (which I am automatically offered now that I am over 65 years old) did 400 people in a single morning. But regarding members of the public doing it, I do not think that is a good idea. People need to trust the process if they are gong to come forward to be vaccinated, and there are plenty of ways it can be messed up in unqualified hands, ranging from unnecessary pain during the process to bruising, or even introduction of infections if proper sterility is not maintained. I certainly would not be willing to risk it.

Yes I know the story. The Greeks didn't do algebra, so I was baffled by the reference to "density equations" attributed to Archimedes. What he did for the king was to measure the volume of a complex object by the water it displaced. There is no obvious equation to be derived from that other than V(crown) = V(water)! And Archimedes's Principle is just F = ρgV, which seems to have no bearing on an alloy composed of 2 or more metals, not submerged in any fluid.

OK, thank you for clarifying that you are indeed using other input data relating to the constituents. That makes sense now. Saying it was "encoded" in the density number was misleading. You are combining density data on the alloy with density data on the compenents. But tell me, what are "Archimedes' density equations"? I am aware of Archimedes' Principle (not equation), but that relates to the upthrust due to buoyancy on an immersed object. That does not seem relevant here. Are you referring to something else?

I don't disagree at all. Trying to read across that hypothesis to the Earth, even if it makes sense on Mars, about which I am agnostic at this point, is pretty ridiculous.

No, present an example here please. This is a discussion forum and we should not be required to go off and read other material in order to understand your claims. You should be able to describe the principle your technique uses and give one simple example of how it is used. Secondly, the passage you quote, which I have highlighted in red, is nonsensical. You cannot say something is "encoded" if there is no code present, which there is not in a single number such as density. If you are drawing on other information, such as limits on possible ranges of density of certain alloys, or on compositional ranges, then that information is not present in the density number but in the other information you are drawing on. Furthermore the generalisation describing density as a "magically unique and extraordinary numerical value" conveying compositional information about, not just a limited range of alloys, but matter in general, is absurd and completely unwarranted.

It is apparently hypothesised that the core of Mars may have ceased to develop a magnetic field due to phase changes or fractionation of the mixture.

OK, I have to say the attempt an an analogy with DNA sounds seriously overblown. I understand of course that alloys often have a range of possible compositions and so if you know the elements present you may be able to work out what combinations are possible that could give rise to a measured density. But this stuff about "encoded information" being present in a density makes no sense to me. What are the symbols of the code? In DNA we have a 4 "letter" code: A,C,G,U, denoting the 4 base pairs. A density, being a single number, has no code whatever. Can you perhaps give an example of an alloy with, say, 3 components and show how you deduce its composition from density alone?