John Cuthber

So, you do accept that the term is essentially wrong but you think we should keep it. Because of that you think my attempt to send it on its way to oblivion was unnecessary. If ammonia solution was actually ammonium hydroxide then it would dissolve aluminium just like sodium hydroxide does. The reason there is a difference in reactivity is that ammonium hydroxide doesn't exist. That does lead to an answer to the original question. Logically, something that does not exist does not attack aluminium. I grant that I could have been clearer and perhaps more polite- but I did answer the question. You seem to have been to busy complaining about my post to realise that. Incidentally, on this side of the pond, the term seems to be quite rare.

There's quite a lot of stuff here http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq_wksp/Rochell_Sep.pdf Page 17 has the equation you want.

Because.

I'd like to do that comparison too. Could you find some video on Youtube or something that shows Schultz ranting like that please?

"Do you accept that this is the reason why I chose it? No, I said that iNow might have a point "IF" we can assume the numbers are accurate. I still believe that the reasons I gave play just as much of a role in infant mortality as do the reasons that iNow gave." Justin, stop calling me a liar. No matter what someone else said, I told you quite clearly what I think and why.

From a quick look on youtube, he doesn't seem particularly batshit crazy to me. Come to that he doesn't seem very left-wing. Can anyone find Mr Schultz or any of his colleagues doing anything like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9lHs8n4tfw&feature=related

Type less: read more.

"unlike your "salts of lemon" example which describes only the origin of the compound" Nope, the point I was making is that salts of lemon isn't, and never was, made from lemons. It's a hopelessly inaccurate name. I grant you that ammonium hydroxide is only about 99.9% wrong but I think that's bad enough to ditch it. "If someone refers to methylated spirits in a post are you going to jump on them with "Actually, methanol isn't added to ethanol cleaning products anymore- you need to call it denatured ethanol."? " No, because, it may be anachronistic, but it's not wrong (in particular, some still does have methanol in and, short of analysing it, I wouldn't know). On the other hand, if they said "I'm going to distil some methylated spirits to get methanol" I would warn them that they might be on a wild goose chase. The distinction I am making is not between "IUPAC approved" and "archaic" but between "reasonably correct" and "hopelessly inaccurate, if not misleading."

There is a whole stack of related stuff here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_common_multiple

Justin, I see you have realised that "The infant mortality rate correlates very strongly with and is among the best predictors of state failure." (That's a quote from one of the pages you cite.) Do you accept that this is the reason why I chose it? I presume you don't plan to argue against your own evidence so, there's no doubt that a poor inant mortality rate makes the US look bad However I'm puzzled by some of their assertions- for example they say " For example, in Germany and Austria, fetal weight must reach one pound to be counted as a live birth" Which is very odd. those countries don't use the pound as a unit of weight. Perhaps it's better to look at the source the refer to " A good source for the most recent IMRs as well as under 5 mortality rates (U5MR) is the UNICEF publication 'The State of the World's Children" With a little digging around you will find that the US still does badly compared to Europe on under-5 mortallity rates here http://www.unicef.org/rightsite/sowc/statistics.php Where you can also find what the page you quote describes as some of the best data. Guess what. The USA still comes out as doing badly and they still spend more money on healthcare. Even the webpage you linked to shows you are wrong. Why are you trying to defend the indefensible? "Quote Better health care leads to fewer premature babies- more or less by the definition of "better" and "health". Show me something that can back up that statement. " OK, no problem. You said it yourself. To be specific, you said "low birth-weight infants have had a growing chance of survival, due to growing medical advancement. " Now it's obvious that premature infants have low birth weights and you accept that progress in medicine is improving their chances- but their chances are measured not just wrt how thing used to be but also compared to babies whose birth weight isn't low. So what you have said is that (low birth weight i.e.) premature infants have a lower chance of survival (though medical research is trying to address that disparity). What I'm saying is that "a lower chance of survival" is not "better health" so anything that reduces the rate of premature babies (with their lower chance of survival) imporoves the net health. To be simplistic, it's healthier for babies to stay in the womb. More premature babies means fewer are staying there so that's bad for them. I really cannot understand why we need to explain this to you. "Countries that are behind in that area will have more abortions due to the fact that the odds of saving the child are lower." And once again, I ask how? How do you know in advance "this baby will be born prematurely and so be at risk of ill health or death so I will abort it"? By the time it's premature it's obviously too late for an abortion. "And again you're missing my point." Possibly, but you are missing the evidence. A higher abortion rate is not a good thing. In response to "speaking of economics, I'll ask you the same question. What's wrong with this? http://politicalcalc...ate-part-1.html" the simple answer is "plenty" They choose to use a different model explicitly because it doesn't fit t the data as well as the usual simple correlation. "We can see from this chart that the linear regression no longer does such a good job in describing the relationship " They also rather miss the point of their own graph. As they say "Our next chart takes our first chart showing the 2005 OECD Nations' Health Care Expenditures per Capita vs GDP (PPP) per Capita, and simply adds some fifty data points for the individual U.S. states " And, if you look, practically every state in the US is above the line through the rest of the data. Now their claim was that because the US is very big, it isn't fair to compare it against the smaller countries. That's not a valid argument anyway, but if you swallow it you still find that each state in the US- just like the US as a whole, spends a disproportionate amount on healthcare. Plotting each state is an invalid experiment because they are all strongly related to one another- they all have the same federal laws and government for example. So, in effect it's like putting the USA on the chart lots of times and then saying that a line through the states' point goes through the most points. It's true but it's deceitful. They also say " The economic "law" of diminishing marginal utility suggests that there is a limit to how much additional benefit an individual or a population may receive from additional spending for health care." Nowm, the law of diminishing returns is fine, as far as it goes but it's not a mathematical law. It's a statement of how the value of things tends to fall if you already have lots of them. My first chocolate bar of the day is much nicer than my tenth. But there's a different approach to healthcare. The first dollar you spend improving my health will probably achieve more than the second , and the thrid will probably achieve even less. But here's the kicker. No matter how you spend I will still die. I will always really really want that last dollar in a desperate attempt to stay alive It's an infinite sink for money so you never get close to "we have spent enough on that" in absolute terms. The "law" of diminishing returns doesn't fit healthcare expenditure. Now I have no doubt that the people who drew up that website knew perfectly well what they were doing. They were telling lies. It's quite a long and complex page and I really don't have time to rubbish each part of it in turn. I might come back to it when I get bored but in the meantime: trust me- you can't trust it. "It is founded on the basis that, as you pointed out the US certainly hasthe medical knowledge to offer better treatment to many of it's citizens. Since the US is reasonably democratic, the people have chosen not to. How so?" You failed to copy the important bit of what I wrote. The full quote is ""That's an unfounded, disinginous statement if I've ever heard one." It is founded on the basis that, as you pointed out the US certainly has the medical knowledge to offer better treatment to many of it's citizens. Since the US is reasonably democratic, the people have chosen not to. What problems do you have with the foundation of my statement?" Now answer the question. "show me some numbers that support your assertion that "pregnant women lose their babies for lack of healthcare". " Why, you already accepted it. You said that medical advances enable fewer women to have premature babies and that premature babies are more likely to die.Since women without healthcare don't get to take advantage of those advances, more of them lose their babies. You are arguing against yourself again.

Aman, You misunderstood my post. You are saying that all the scientists are idiots. You are not only wrong about that, but you are wrong about how gravity works. If you take the trouble to learn what you are talking about then you will realise this. Until then you are wasting not just your time but other people's time trying to teach you. Until then you will remain just plain wrong.

What did you think of the information you got from Google?

Anyone who notices that it goes dark at night can, with a couple of reasonable assumptions, show that the universe is finite (spatially or temporally) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox However I think the monumental cockup about the Earth's special place at the centre of the universe is more impressively wrong than anything they got right.

Nujol is a perfectly good name for the stuff it represents. So is ethylene. On the other hand ammonium hydroxide is outrightly misleading. A bottle labelled as 50% ammonium hydroxide contains the ions equivalent to about 0.05% ammonium hydroxide. Would you be happy with that in any other context? It's not that it isn't isolated that's the problem. The issue is that it's about 99.9% not there. I'm perfectly happy with the outdated names but I'm sure you agree that they are not helpful except to a historian. Salts of lemon is pretty unhelpful (never having been near the yellow citrus fruit) and, in much the same way, killed spirits was never really alive. Thankfully the preparation of "oil of Dutch chemists" doesn't involve alchemists from the Netherlands any more that advocaat is made from lawyers. We have ditched most of the silly names- why keep this one? It also seems odd to say "Also, here- it is called "ammonium hydroxide solution" anyway " It was indeed called that in your post- but not in the original one to which I was responding, and I don't do time travel " It is possible you might produce an ammonium/aluminium complex? " I'm not saying it's impossible, but a complex between two positively charged ions would seem unusual. And it's just as well that tools are, by definition, useful or someone might interpret "Stop being a tool. " as an ad hom which would be particularly unfortunate in a first post.

Insanely, the current UK government is trying to make the UK health system more like the US one. If I remember rightly, something like 27 of the 30 members of the cabinet are millionaires and don't need to worry how bad public healthcare is. As such, it seems they are elected unrepresentatives.

Getting from NaHCO3 to NaOH isn't practical. But heating NaHCO3 solution to boiling will convert it to Na2CO3 (And CO2) The Na2CO3 solution will absorb CO2 when it's cold and can be recycled.

This is not organic chemistry, and it's not good manners to post the same question twice.

You seem to have written that in pale grey/ blue on a white background so I'm not going to bother to read it.

BTW, I'm particularly amused by this juxtaposition " any studies that put Cuba's healthcare quality above the US's should be rejected out of hand." and " It seems the study started out negative for the US before it actually even began. " Amusing, but not any use to anyone trying to find out the truth. I presume he only wants studies that assume the USA is the best in the world and represents good value for money, which explains why he cites the American Enterprise Institute.

I edited it a bit Water is, by it's nature a moisturiser, which leaves us with Wash and scrub the skin with hot water: washing the oil away dries the skin and makes pimples worse. which strikes me as odd.

"So you think they include abortions in the infant mortality rating?" No. I think that they count dead children. They count them in the US and they count them here too. And there are more of them (statistically) in the US. What you seemed to be saying was that they somehow counted wrongly. Specifically what you said was "Over the past couple of decades high risk, low birth-weight infants have had a growing chance of survival, due to growing medical advancement. Some die not long after birth, which raises our infant mortality rate. But in other western countries, those high risk, low birth-weight infants aren't included like the US's are. " Now, do you actually have any evidence for that? "Yes and the US delivers more premature babies than any other country due to higher levels of technology and better care." No. That's nonsense. premature babies might be though of as bad luck, or they might be thought of as evidence of poor maternal health care. If it's luck then the US should have pretty much the same rates as the rest of the world- the foetus doesn't know what country it is in and that it should arrive early or stay put accordingly. Better health care leads to fewer premature babies- more or less by the definition of "better" and "health". So obviously my answer to " Do you not think that is a major factor to be contributed to the stats." is no. And again with your assertion that "So it isn't that more babies are dying for lack of care in the US, it's more at risk babies are being brought to term and given a chance to survive." you have missed the point. Any baby born prematurely will be counted among the live births. If it soon dies it is counted towards infant mortality. If the US actually has a higher incidence of premature birth (and I remind you that you have offered no supporting evidence for that suggestion) then it is failing the mothers as well as the children. If more of them die that's because they were already disadvantaged by whatever led to their premature birth. "Looking at the numbers only strengthened my claim as far as I can see. Even the example I gave (Cuba) was only the fifth one down. You don't think that abortion rate coupled with the amount of care for "at risk" pregnancies can be a reason that the US's numbers look so bad?" No. Some of the babies will be aborted because they are found to have congenital problems. But an aborted foetus isn't counted towards the infant mortality rate. So, if the US were offering , for example, better screening and this was the reason for the higher number of abortions (and I'm willing to bet it isn't) then the infant mortality rate would be lower in the US. It isn't. The US has a lot of abortions compared to the rest of the Western world (which is, in itself, not a positive indicator on healthcare) It has a higher infant mortality rate which also indicated poor healthcare. "I think you chose them because they were the ones that make the US's medical care seem insufficient. " I told you why I chose them. Don't call me a liar. Incidentally, they are fairly widely used as an indicator. "And no, the criteria for "dead" is not the same everywhere. " Get a grip. It's not a big challenge to find out if a baby dies- you can often ask the mother who will generally know. "No I'm saying reports like that shouldn't be used when arguing for a universal healthcare system, especially when the report automatically gives negative remarks for not having one. Seems a little one sided doesn't it?" Not to me. It seems quite sensible. It looks at first glance like begging the question but it's not because the decision to include it was based on the evidence. Countries with universal healthcare are generally healthier (mutatis mutandis). "I had left out a word in that sentence. I meant to say "Try getting a healthcare system that keeps someone from getting shot", because I felt it was also invalid to use a report as an arguement for a universal system that includes factors that healthcare cannot be judged on. Such as suicides, homicides, accidents, etc... Sure people can survive some of those things, but the study doesn't determine whether they were dead before they even got to the hospital." I guessed that was what you meant and I answered the question. You can have a healthcare system that significantly reduces the chances of you being shot or murdered. It doesn't involve asking people how much money they have before considering the appropriate medical treatment. "That's an unfounded, disinginous statement if I've ever heard one." It is founded on the basis that, as you pointed out the US certainly has the medical knowledge to offer better treatment to many of it's citizens. Since the US is reasonably democratic, the people have chosen not to. What problems do you have with the foundation of my statement? "To a degree? Frances inability to control their healthcare deficit, Along with Italy's monetary problems and insufficient facilities, or Norway's 3month waiting period to even be admitted into a hospital. But the list can go on, but it doesn't matter, they've been adressed to a degree." It's better than not even addressing them to a degree. If you think Italy's problems are due to healthcare spending you have not thought it through. Norway has a relatively large fraction of elderly citizens. Fig 6 here http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/49/1864965.pdf which , together with the fact that it only spends roughly half as much on healthcare (per capita) as the US may explain the waiting lists.

For a start, I'm not "comfortable with the weirdness" for a finish , reality does not give a damn what I'm comfortable with. It doesn't know or care if I'm "sold on the idea". The experiments do counter-intuitive things. If your scheme doesn't give you weird answers then it gives you wrong answers.

"As I see it - health insurance is in reality - a necessity: do you know anyone who could afford health insurance but chooses not to have it?" Yes, me. (and I think most of Europe). It depends on your definition. We don't buy insurance because the government acts as an assurer. It has the biggest possible pool among which to spread the risk. Incidentally, for all practical purposes, it's not insurance it's assurance. You are going to need healthcare so it's not as if you are gambling that it won't happen to you. It's like life- cover. It's not usually insurance I was talking to a friend the other day- he has a couple of long-term medical problems. He simply can not get medical insurance for travel outside Europe. Do our US cousins think that's fair?

"Indeed, peer reviewed journals are the gold standard of publishing. However, if a university puts something out on the web, I do not know what you can call it except publishing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-publishing#Vanity_publishing

OK, just a couple of points about the assertions you make " But in other western countries, those high risk, low birth-weight infants aren't included like the US's are." How not? They count dead babies. It's not rocket science. In many or most countries, the state was funding prenatal care for the women. Do you think they "don't notice" the absence of a baby as an outcome? "Hmmm...Could it be because many of those countries use abortion to eliminate problem pregnancies?" How? Much infant mortality is related to premature birth- and you can't really judge that till it's far too late to consider abortion. Also, you might want to look at the numbers. The US has higher abortion rates than most of the West http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/wrjp334pd.html So their high infant mortality rate looks even worse by your criterion. And, are you sure that "American Enterprise Institute" counts as an unbiased source? Their website didn't look "even handed" to me, but perhaps that's just because I'm not from the US. While I'm at it perhaps I should respond to this assertion " It seems that most of the areas that are chosen to judge quality are chosen on results that they wish to recieve" I posted data on infant mortality and death rates. I chose those data because they are pretty robust. Diagnostic criteria for "dead" are fairly consistent across the world. I also chose them because I didn't think anyone would feel the need to question them. It seems I was optimistic "In a 2000 WHO study, the US was penalized under several highly subjective categories. Things like fairness, not having a sufficiently progressive tax system, not providing universal healthcare, and having a general paucity for social programs. It seems the study started out negative for the US before it actually even began. Hmmm..." It is equally valid to say that this is evidence that the USA started out negative before the study began. Are you saying that fairness etc. is a bad thing? In respect of this "Try getting a healthcare system that keeps from getting shot " I think I already cited this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortion_on_Crime "In fact America has played key roles in over 80% of major medical advancements in the past 3 decades. " You see, you do know how to look after all the people- you just choose not to. "When I think about changing our healthcare system and the way people want to change it, I don't think about it fixing our problems rather adding others. " What problems would you add? Do you understand that the rest of us must have addressed those problems to a degree or we wouldn't have better outcomes?