John Cuthber

That makes 3 of us.

Should that be 7 nm?

They aren't. Well, the first thing to consider is that aluminium might be present as a compound or as the metal. There are almost certainly aluminium compounds in the dust and in the wheat. Aluminium is the commonest metal in the Earth's crust. It gets everywhere. Aluminium metal is less likely- unless the material has been stored in aluminium containers or some such. Why do you want to know?

That's what I call distance learning.

Do you mean this sort of thing? https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2040-1_8

If you want to make a capital purchase within the civil service the first thing the form asks is effectively "What is wrong with the status quo?". Occasionally having to close a bridge may be less of a problem than the "solution" you are offering.

Aluminium is the commonest metal (and third commonest element in the earth's crust. It's really not very toxic; if it was, we would be dead. That's pretty obvious if you just do a bit of googling. And yet the pro-death campaigners keep banging on about it. Mercury is toxic. One way to significantly reduce that toxicity is to convert it to thiomersal- the form in which tiny quantities are present in some (but not all) vaccines. There's simply not enough there to be a threat. Again, the pro-disease lobby go on about it, even though the actual evidence makes it clear that they are wrong. If they were really concerned about health, would they do that?

Has anyone ruled out the usual confounding variable that people overlook in doing correlations? Many nobel prizes were awarded quite a long time ago. Acknowledged atheism was rarer in the past. . If you looked at people who won awards for playing the serpent, a disproportionate (by today's standards) number of them would be theists simply because it's a medieval instrument and most players were around before atheism was common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_(instrument)

The fact that America needs to sort out its healthcare system isn't really the point here.

I wish headline writers would take more care Humanity has been playing with single atoms for ages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms) And even taking their photograph (Technically, it's an ion...) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/trapped-atom-photograph-long-exposure-competition-spd/ What's new is getting a few atoms together close enough to react- which is neat

Yes they do. Did you not notice the general election in December?

You have mistaken the idea of insurance (which is fairly Left wing) for the activities of insurance companies (which are very Right wing). If everyone pays and everyone benefits and everyone has a say in what they pay (and what benefits accrue) then it's insurance.

It depends what you mean by "funny" "Funny peculiar, or funny ha- ha?" because it's not actually much of a joke. On the other hand, it's possibly unusual enough to warrant a mention- but not in a jokes thread. And the sad truth is the hypocrisy among politicians isn't very unusual

That escalated quickly.

Good point. In my case it's generally mixed with gin. Alcohol isn't going to help the immune system at all. So a G&T probably isn't a good idea overall. Having said that, I really hope quinine ( or chloroquine) works as a treatment for coronavirus. It's cheap.

The concentration of quinine in (modern) tonic water is tiny. It's not nearly enough to influence malaria and it seems odd that it might treat a viral infection.

Too simple. That rule means nobody can do anything (for fear that someone else objects). All rights granted to any individual or group constitute an infringement of the rights of others. Your right to walk down the street without fear of being killed infringes on my right to kill you. My right to have a barbecue infringes on your right to enjoy fresh air But your right to enjoy fresh air infringes on my right to enjoy a barbecue. In the end, it comes down to compromise. Is the right to protest more important than the right to easy holiday travel? Well: you only get to have a holiday because, in the past, people protested about not getting one.

Through what mechanism?

In fairness to Fresh, it's worth remembering that the available data on this virus is from the Chinese government- and their first reaction was to pretend that it didn't exist. It really is hard to find trustworthy data here.

In order for light to do something different in deep space it would have to "know" that it was there. How could that happen? Does it carry a map?

Those compounds wouldn't surprise me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_molecule

It's a good man who can admit he was mistaken.

You seem to have built a very complicated barometer.

Both were originally defined geometrically. Pi = 5 arccos (.5 Phi) (shamelessly stolen from here) https://www.goldennumber.net/pi-phi-fibonacci/

So little that it would be quite hard to measure. The sound levels in an office are about 60 to 65 dB That's something like 10 to 30 microwatts per square metre.