mississippichem

i really think that you need to substantiate this statement with some form of reasoning and plausibility... Otherwise it might be misconstrued as a personal attack. from the OP's link: Interesting, sounds very cold war. I'm surprised NATO hasn't been more sensitive about Russia's militarization of the Arctic.

Isn't this why we call the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7... the set of natural numbers? They are naturally intuitive by observing things like apples unlike negative numbers.

It is in my state. Evidently it is required in every state now except Florida and New Hampshire. Liability coverage that is. insure.com I'm personally not a fan of the recent healthcare legislation for fiscal reasons but any challenges to the legislation based on constitutionality issues are very weak arguments and require an unrealistically strict interpretation of the constitution. I can see the commerce clause issue a bit. However, the fact that we are already mandated into purchasing other insurance products kind of marginalizes that argument.

Thinking about starting a thread entitled "The Science Forums Hall of Shame". This guy get's first entry for sure.

Probably didn't look at all. Ah, the ole' Dean-Stark, haven't seen one of those in a while. Haven't run any condensations in a while I guess.

The amount of water stored in a substance? I don't understand the question.

That's a good one. Quite complex as well by my subjective standard. I doubt there is a true measure of compositional complexity though. One can measure things like average notes per measure that deviate from the key signature. But this starts from the huge assumption that the western 7-note harmonic system is the most simple. I think the closest you can get is listing a set of quantities like the one I mentioned above and comparing that to other pieces from a similar time and genre. I just don't think there is an objective way to weight and sum those quantities into some universal "complexity index". It would be interesting to try though. You have good taste in music Bignose. I seem to be a fan of everything you list. Great minds think alike.

Nothing stops them from doing labor on their off time. Then they just made the choice to expend their labor/time capital rather than their currency capital. Every action costs some sort of capital to the individual and to society. I'm saying that those individuals who posses skills that are of sufficient rarity and value to society will and should be compensated based on the apparent market value of their set of skills. If that compensation is sufficient to allow the employment of outside labor for daily tasks then what is the problem? If someone works forty hours a week and they don't have time to cut their own lawn what is wrong with them paying someone who needs the work to do it for them? Everyone wins in that trade. It is impossible for society to enjoy the variety of products and services that it does without specialization. Even if one grows a personal vegetable garden, environmental constraints still prevent us from enjoying variety. One just can't grow oranges in Ontario. So we pay orange growing specialists in Florida to do that for us. That is a more efficient use of resources as growing oranges in Florida requires less resources to produce the same amount of oranges. One could say warm climates have a comparative advantage in citrus agriculture. Also think of opportunity cost. If a doctor earns $100/hr. and can earn $10/hr. sweeping floors, then every hour he sweeps floors cost him $90. Or for every hour he tends to a home garden, lets say he produces $1 of food, he could have bought himself 100x more food than he could have produced himself. Opportunity cost is the reason there will always be an un-equitable division of labor. It is to the advantage of the individual and to the advantage of society as a whole to be devoted specialists.

You're describing osmosis. Solutes or gases tend to move from areas of high concentration to low concentration which is diffusion. Solvents tend to move from areas of low solute concentration to areas of high solute concentration; that's osmosis. Remember when the solute concentration is higher, the solvent concentration is lower.

Yes, fluorine chemistry is a dangerous hobby.

True, Americans are very unforgiving of politicians and any little quirk a politician has is sure to hurt him somehow. For example during the Bush years it became a common joke to poke fun at George's pronunciation of the word "nuclear". Bush would say "nookyoolar" will most here in the states say "nooklear". Not a huge difference but entertaining to American audiences [ruthless mob].

Its not a matter of looking in the right place for nuclear stability. Certain combinations of neutrons and protons are inherently unstable due to a bunch of well established factors. It just so happens, and logically so, that alot of the high Z nuclei are unstable. When the ratio of neutrons to protons gets too far out of whack or if the number of protons is really high in general then nuclei tend to be unstable. "Not looking in the right place" is kind of a meaningless statement when no matter what mechanism you use to create said nucleus it's still subject to the same rules that govern stability.

Whoa, I said I might land a well paid position...who knows these days. I think we can agree on that! Are you advocating subsistence farming as a viable alternative to a free market meritocracy? Society moved beyond that in the industrial revolution for a reason. People wanted more leisure time, greater access to a variety of goods, and a higher level of general education. Lemur, you know I've got respect for your skill in philosophy. I agree with your philosophy here, that would be a wonderful world. However, it could never happen if we wish to preserve the quality of life we a have become so accustom to. Technology and the collective human knowledge has advanced to the point where specialization is required. I don't know of anyone who conducts serious research who doesn't spend the majority of their time with books, pencils, computers, and calculators. Do you want a neurosurgeon operating on your brain that doesn't spend all of his time doing neurosurgery? I can tell you are an advocate of equity over efficiency. This is the great battle of economics. There is no way that the labor force can be divided equitably while still maintaining the level of efficiency that is required to maintain and innovate in our society. A choice must be made between an unfair efficient society and a fair inefficient society. I choose efficiency because I couldn't be writing this post right now if I had to work the farm from sunrise to sunset just to meet my nutritional needs. No one would have time to build computers anyway.

Cypress, in past posts we had a disagreement over entropy considerations and the length of a peptide or protein that could spontaneously polymerize in a prebiotic solution of amino acids. The following is an example of a short peptide (8 residues, linear) spontaneously (in thermodynamic terms) dimerizing with it's self complement sequence. Though this in itself is unremarkable, and chemically predictable, the fact that the peptide dimer went on to conglomerate into a macroscopic structure is somewhat noteworthy. The self assembly into a macroscopic structure was controlled by the specific amino acid sequence's tendency to form [math] \beta [/math]-sheets. However, the remarkable aspect is that the macrostructure was not degraded by the addition of 1% SDS (sodium dodecyl sulphate, common denaturing surfractant) @90 C for 4h. Nor was it degraded by pH 1.5, 3.0, 7.0, or 11. Finally it couldn't be beaten by 8M urea (yes 8 molar!) or even 7M guanidine hydrochloride (arguably the most aggressive denaturing agent). To be fair I'll add that it was quite susceptible to physical degradation. Point being that information is often selected for by nature because the chemical holders of this information display chemical properties that inherently favor the survival of the information. This oligopeptide macrostructure is chemically tough by anyone's measure. I don't know of many amide linkages that can take pH 1.5 and pH 11. No, this doesn't conclusively prove the chemical development of life from non-life but it does show how specific chemical coincidences of properties can add up to an increased stability of information. That amino acid sequence has a very good chance of being preserved in a primordial pool. I think it is not a far stretch to imagine this spontaneously formed protein pore getting randomly trapped inside a lipid micelle of sufficient size to form an even more stable pre-life information carrier . This becomes more and more apparent as the modern advent of inclusion chemistry is realized. S Zhang et al. The full version of the article is available free...click on the "full text PDF" link in the right hand column. The reason I am so convinced of the spontaneous evolution of life is that the deeper and deeper we delve into possible chemical mechanisms for the origin of life the more we find that there seem to be an infinite number of chemical routes to the formation of increasingly stable soluble macrostructures through mild conditions. *By the way on a lighter note, look at this guys circular dichromism spec. That must have been some clean stuff! He's got nice correlation where [math] \beta [/math]-sheets usually look nasty from random stacking interactions. Not relevant to the debate, but scientifically noteworthy.

I grew up somewhat poor (by American standards). Many months my mother really struggled to keep the lights on. Now I'm in school for chemistry at a major university and I have a 3.9 GPA. I'm actually making money in college through a lot of academic and music scholarship. I plan to get an MBA after that which might hoist me into a delightful income bracket. I went to high school in a school district with one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and statistically a great majority of students didn't attend college. I graduated high school with a 3.8 and a rocking SAT. So one can really "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" and change their financial situation for the better. It takes back breaking work, late nights, sweat, tears, and desire to leave one life behind for a different one. Not trying to pat myself on the back, but I'm saying that life can become whatever one wants if you've got the stones for it. By the way, I've been supporting myself by working the whole time in addition to the scholarship money. My school/work days are about twelve to fourteen hours long but I wouldn't have it any other way. Life is a game. If one wants to win, put on your cleats, get out there and score some goals.

I'm quite trained in music theory and I'll say that even though classical music has the superficial appearance of greater complexity, this is not the case. Yes, most modern pop music is very simple and even boring to those with academic ears. However, as Bignose stated there is a menagerie of non-classical music out there that has the same level of complexity. There are only 12 notes in the western tonal system. The odds of a repeat sequence amongst different songs is quite high. Upon analyzing the music from the Baroque and Classical eras (not so much the Romance era) one will find sequences of chords that are common denominators throughout the period. The I, vi, ii, V, vii harmonic sequence appears in almost every Bach concerto for strings or piano as well as many of the more prominent Mozart symphonies. The V7, vi "false dominant cadence" almost always happens before the "B section" in most of Beethoven earlier and Mozart's work. Take it a step further into the world of Jazz improvisation...my specialty. The minor ii, V, i turnaround sequence is almost always treated with "lydian flat seven and mixolydian flat six" modal triad pairs by the improvising soloist. This is true for Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie. There was actually a move in the early twentieth century among "classical" composers to add complexity to music by ignoring the traditional harmonic sequences that had been used so often in the past. This spawned the compositional trend of atonal serialism. In these compositions, there is no harmonic root and tonalities are grouped by interval from the previous harmony rather than by tonal function. The metal band Dillinger Escape Plan used serialism on there second album on multiple occasions. Given, they probably didn't realize it, but the complexity works out just the same. I was in a band for six years that played progressive rock with no vocals. We were all music theory nerds and our compositions all evolved out of the desire to blaze new theoretical territory like strict parallelism, odd time signatures like the dreaded 13/16 (practice, practice, practice!!), and concepts like sustained drone notes over radically changing harmony (the same bass note taking different harmonic functions under different chords). So yeah, classical music is complex but other styles can posses the same level of intellectual "snobbery" if enough time and effort is devoted.

There's a bit of sport in debate. I think most here enjoy it as long as the sport stays "sportsman-like".

I would like everyone to have a good standard of living, few wouldn't. However, I do like the exciting feeling that with a lot of hard work and a bit of good luck, I can make myself ridiculously wealthy. Or if I don't play my cards right, I could end up being an epic failure. It truly is the most dangerous and exciting game. So yes, if life were fair I would be bored. I think it would be great if we lived really long lives and went through multiple cycles of wealth and poverty. Everyone would have perspective and understanding of the other side. I know several people who started life at the bottom of the working class and through sweat and blood now drive expensive cars and park them at expensive houses. Those people tend to be wise beyond their class.

This is a guess, but I suspect it is the color of the cyclohemiaminal that will form when the proline nitrogen replaces one of the ninhydrin hemiacetal hydroxyl groups. This is speculative though; I don't see why not, but I have no source or confirmation so take that with a "grain of salt".

That's right. One molecule of amino acid has to react with two molecules of ninhydrin to form a highly conjugated chromophore that gives the purple color. Proline cannot de-aminate to allow the second molecule of ninhydrin to react. As you stated, proline's amino group is stuck in a pyrrolidine ring.

Chlorophyll A displays two absorbance "shoulders" and two "peaks" at wavelengths under 400 nm. So, in short chlorophyll absorbs somewhat strongly in the near and middle UV. It is worth mention that the strong ligand to metal charge transfer, or metal to ligand charge transfer (can't remember for which one for chlorophyll, probably ligand to metal) bands caused by strong [math] \pi [/math] back donation to and from the metal center drown out all other signals in the visible region. The peak 670 nm is the [math]\pi[/math]-metal LMCT. I tried to post a spectrum to show this but the forum software keeps deleting my image when I preview the post.

A conversion, or mole ratio problem. If you had given me the masses of the two substances instead of asking how much you needed, it would've been a limiting reagent problem.

First set up a balanced equation to give the correct mole ratios. Then you can convert to grams after you know how many grams of Zn you are using. Then either you'll know the density of the HCl you are using (different for different concentrations) or you can measure it. Use density to solve for volume of HCl needed. A different example: [ce] 2Na_{(s)} + 2H_{2}O_{(l)} -> 2NaOH_{(aq)} + H_{2}_{(g)}[/ce] [math]\left(\frac {mol Na}{1}\right)\times \left(\frac{ mol H_{2}O}{ mol Na}\right)\times\left(\frac{18.02 g\cdot mol^{-1} H_{2}O}{ mol H_{2}O}\right)=gH_{2}O [/math] [math]density=\frac{mass}{volume}[/math] [math]mL H_{2}O=\frac{gH_{2}O}{g{\cdot}mL^{-1}H_{2}O}[/math] This is a totally different problem that doesn't involve an acid but the math is still valid in your case.

Well since you don't have any stereochemistry shown , your substrate is a generic hexopyranose. I would protect the hydroxyl groups first. If you protect the hydroxyl group after opening the ring, you'll end up protecting the hydroxyl that you need to reform the cyclic hemiacetal.

I don't accept that reasoning at all. However, I don't wish to hijack this thread; If you want to start a new thread about such I'll be happy to discuss with you. Though I have a feeling the both of us are ideologically entrenched enough that neither of us are likely to change our minds.