John Cuthber

Anyone who wants to can collect the garden trimmings from my garden for free. It's not expensive. The last time I had a bonfire it took a few hours and got through about 100Kg of waste vegetation. It's not slow (though it was a bit warm). Precipitation of calcium sulphate is usually messy- it tends to form gels. That's why one of the "obvious" methods to get nitric acid (sulphuric acid with calcium nitrate fertiliser) isn't very successful. So you shortened the metathesis reaction from Ca(OH)2 + K2CO3 --> CaCO3 +2 KOH (which has been known since pre-industral days to Ca(OH)2 + K2SO4 --> CaSO4 +2 KOH (which doesn't work very well.) So, I guess that's "shorter" in some technical sense that escapes me, especially since you would have to get the K2SO4 from the KOH which involves another step. I'm still wondering why the OP wants KOH.

Yes. It's the length of the diagonal of a square with unit sides. It clearly exists, even if we can't draw with perfect accuracy.

In November 2008 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth (II) visited the London School of Economics. After a presentation about the financial crisis by one of the professors she asked "How come nobody could foresee it?". In July 2009 they wrote to her with an answer. There had been " A failure of the collective imagination... to understand the risks to the system as a whole". In short- they didn't understand the economy. It's all very well saying you have been in a room full of Nobel Prize winning economists, but do remember that they are not real Nobel prizes. It's a prize given by a Swiss bank, not the Nobel Foundation. You might also want to look at how well some of those prize winners did afterwards. They played major roles in LTCM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LTCM.png and platinum grove asset management http://www.davemanuel.com/2008/11/07/platinum-grove-asset-management-lp-another-myron-scholes-hedge-fund-is-struggling-as-well/ The real dirty secret of economics is that economists are not very good at it.

I though the point was moot anyway. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/29/ha-joon-chang-23-things

I may flatter myself, but I think I'm quite a good chemist. However I know that nature is a great deal batter at it than I am. So, if I want to get KOH I will not start from a mixture of roughly equal measures of potassium and something difficult to remove from it. I will let a plant do the job for me because I know it's much better at it. There's a lot of variation in such things but here's an analysis of some plant matter. https://www-s.nist.gov/srmors/view_detail.cfm?srm=1515 As you can see, there's a whole lot more potassium than sodium 1.6% rather than 25 ppm so, even if you don't recrystallise it or whatever, you start off with better than 99% K And, since the leachate is a dilute solution of alkaline carbonate, most other metals won't be very soluble. There's a hint about how to get hold of caustic potash in the name- you causticise ashes.

Congratulations! You are an agnostic. I'm an atheist and I guess the pope is a theist. I'm willing to bet that we will all stay that way whatever anyone posts here. So, can we stop now?

" If KClO ppts " Then I will be very surprised indeed The stuff isn't very stable as a solid. You could hope to precipitate the potassium selectively as the perchlorate or, probably more easily, as the hydrogen tartrate. Why start with a mixture of two ions that are difficult to separate when you could, for example, leach bonfire ashes with water? Calcium oxide reacts with water and gives out enough heat to boil the water - it's been known to start fires. So the idea of "Calcium sulfate will precipitate out quickly and eventually replace the calcium oxide floating in the beaker. " lacks a certain something. What will end to happen is that calcium sulphate will ppt out on the surface of the (fairly insoluble) Ca(OH)2 and stop any further reaction. What are you actually hoping to achieve here?

"At ground level the steepest you can climb is about 30°" What? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder#Safety suggests more than twice that is safe and, as I pointed out, it's not difficult to climb a vertical ladder. Even if you say that the ground lacks the good grip you get with a ladder, your own picture shows that a 30 degree slope isn't a problem to stay on without sliding off.

I have not been following this thread carefully, Can I just check how it's getting on? So far, 7 pages and no agreed definitions of "Christian" "evidence" and Christian evidence" yet. Should I come back in a decade or two or would it be more practical to lock it now?

Is it more likely that I'm questioning your ability to read or making you think about the ions present in a solution?

Because the OS doesn't have an address until it's loaded into memory.

How sure are you that it's not NaOH and KOCl ?

If I happen to be by The Shadow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow should I move away, or just put off judging things until I'm somewhere else? What do people think of this? "You should never make sweeping generalisations."

It works fine for 9,10,11,12,13,14 and 15 as long as you work in hexadecimal. Incidentally if you want higher powers of 11 you can copy (at least the first of them) from Pascal's triangle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_triangle

*Or an ion exchange filter or charcoal trap of the sort sold as a water purifier under trade names like "Brita". A sand bed filter seems like a good place to start (albeit a bit ironic in the circumstances.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_filter

My body seems to work just fine with a difference in density between the contents of my lungs (about 1.2 g/ litre) and the stuff the rest of me is made of (roughly 1000 g/litre). If you double the pressure that difference gets smaller. If air strictly followed the ideal gas laws the air would have the same density as my lungs at about 800 atmospheres pressure. Filling them with a fluorocarbon (density about 1900 g/litre) would be rather pointless: the difference in density would be worse than with air at well over a thousand atmospheres. The liquid is also probably something like 100 or 1000 times more viscous than air. The deepest dives are about 1000 feet At that depth the pressure is something like 30 atmospheres. The bottom of the Mariana trench is about 11,000 metres so, at the bottom the pressure would be something like 1,100 atmospheres. So, if you were scuba diving at the deepest part of the earth's oceans the air would be less dense than the fluorocarbon liquid. For very deep diving there might be advantages to using liquid breathing, but there would also be massive problems.

Congratulations! You have beaten your own high standard of pointlesness by coming up with something even less informative. The only way to say even less than you did before was by saying things that are simply not true- and you did that in a remarkably offensive manner.

gas viscosity is independent of pressure to a good approximation. You don't need 20% O2 in breathing mixtures. If the lungs are a bit less efficient then you can raise the O2 concn to compensate. I suspect other problems would limit the pressure people can survice. I think there's a direct effect of pressure on the nerve synapses

That's a good contender for the least informative post ever.

Do you actually have any real evidence for that?

And I would say no because most of the pressure is not to drive the liquid through in spite of viscous forces where increasing the area would help. Most of the pressure is there to overcome osmotic pressure which is defined by the concentration of solutes in the incoming water. Also if you put water in a vacuum, it boils, is carried into your pump and screws it up. So, once more, which part of "no" is giving you trouble?

What do you think might happen?

I wasn't joking.

"Premise 1) Everything that exists has a reason, but not necessarily a recognizable purpose. " That premise is false. There is a counter example. The universe.

Which part of "no" is giving you trouble? The only thing you might manage is to bugger up the osmosis system and your vacuum pump.