John Cuthber

How would you react if a woman had said it?

This sort of thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charged_aerosol_detector The last time I looked they weren't very sensitive- but that's probably improved and they will be cheaper than MS.

It's very water soluble, so extraction into a solvent won't work- pity, because that's ofte a very useful first step. You could remove the water by simply boiling it off. The poly glycol will remain. But, so will all the other stuff you find in swimming pools. Let's be polite and call it urea. The urea would upset any attempt to identify the PAG by IR. So IR is not going to get very far (and it's also not very sensitive) The mixture of materials present is going to be complicated so it's probably best to try to unmix it before you do anything else. The go-to method for sorting mixtures in the laboratory is chromatography. As has been pointed out, this stuff is too involatile to try to GC it. So we are looking at HPLC There's no useful chromophore so UV detection's not going to work (not at ppm levels anyway). So I think you are pretty much stuck with HPLC MS. I hope you have plenty of money.

And those battles are every bit as much of a white elephant as the wall. It's time to kill the idea before any more money is wasted on it.

It may have been mentioned already in this thread. There's some evidence that a "strong" border does keep immigrants in. If the border is "open" seasonal workers come in from Mexico when there's work for them. And when the work isn't there they go home- because the cost of living is lower. They know they can always come back next year. But if you make the border "strong" they still cross it because the same financial incentives etc exist. But now, when the "season" is over, they can't easily get home and they are more concerned about getting back to the US next season; so they stay. The net result, as CharonY says, is more immigrants in the US.

It depends, in the long run, on whether you want America empty because you deported everyone to Mexico. (That's what happens if the leavers exceeded the joiners to a large enough extent). So, the problem doesn't exist anyway and the wall wouldn't solve it anyway. 5 billion is a lot of money for that. Perhaps we should just tell Trump we built the walL. Tell him the Mexicans paid for it. And just show him the net immigration figures- which are near zero or even negative. He will claim credit for this "achievement", and the rest of the world can just carry on as before.

"Are benzodiazepines the same as narcotics?" It's a matter of definition. Both sorts of drugs cause sleep. However, when people refer to "narcotics" they often mean opiates and those act at different receptors in the brain from the receptors which teh benzodiazepines act on

This is the assertion you made. And it may be close enough to true. But it's beside the point. To be fair, Charony misses part of it too If the net number of immigrants is near zero, then: The existing system works (you don't need to look at whether it's voluntary or deportation etc) Of course, it's possible that the wall is a "better" way to address the "problem" of immigration. Well, if that's the case then you can take funding from the current system to pay for the wall. there's no need to find money to pay for a wall.

If that interpretation is correct then there have been essentially no "new" immigrants in 10 years. What's the wall for?

Yes. But what, exactly, does it let you judge? For example, how well does it judge the intelligence of the dyslexic ones? The blind ones? Those for whom it's not in their first language? Those who have never used a pen before? In all those cases, what it measures is their ability to do an IQ test. And, as you point out, that's partly down to practice rather than innate ability. So, what use is it? Well, it doe a fair job of what it was originally intended for- but that's it. There's this, which is pretty close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford–Binet_Intelligence_Scales But, obviously, it's not for everybody- not least because it's in English. So, what it measures is... how well you do in this test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford–Binet_Intelligence_Scales

If they knew that... Mind you, I'm not sure it's accurate to describe it as "streaming across", unless you mean out of the US, and back to Mexico. "The number of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. illegally has declined by more than 1 million since 2007." From http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/03/what-we-know-about-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/

It would be really nice to be able to say something like "I think the question is meaningless. The medical schools and army recruitment offices don't measure IQ (or, at least, I hope they don't) because it's not a measure of anything these employers are interested in. IQ only measures how well you do in IQ tests. No war was ever won, nor any patient cured by some soldier or doctor doing an IQ test." But... They do have a proxy measure for IQ, and they have limits based on it. https://www.quora.com/Does-the-U-S-military-have-a-minimum-IQ-requirement-for-entry But, even that doesn't actually exclude any individual from joining- regardless of IQ

In the very real sense that sometimes heat flows from the house, and sometimes it flows into the house. It's a bit like saying water flows down hill. That's true- except in a discussion about water pumps.

It's practically impossible. It depends too strongly on the nature of the materials you mix. For example, with two simple metals, lead and tin, you gate a phase diagram that looks like this. https://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/using-lead-tin-phase-diagram-figure-63-determine-liquid-solid-phase-compositions-nominal-c-q9962295

It seems there's one thing the Republicans are better at. Trying to screw over the workforce. http://deadstate.org/here-are-the-7-republicans-who-voted-against-backpay-for-workers-furloughed-during-the-shutdown/?fbclid=IwAR1PkfpilqIZZwxbN9P-ONnQg-Tkd5FER6ftzv18iMyEdfSPn5qWBZXbiO4

Please do not ask us to comment.

Well, the earthquakes and volcanoes are currently happening so...

No it isn't.

Bother! I should really learn to read.

You may be aware that the original definition of the metre was made in reference to the size of the Earth. " one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator" (specifically, the meridian that runs through Paris. That distance was measured, to very good accuracy (about 1 part in 10,000) , hundreds of years ago (1792 to 1798). It's been pointed out that more modern methods also exist for measuring the Earth. A determined conspiracy theorist might claim that the data show that the Earth is growing, but "the authorities" are keeping it under wraps. If the Earth's size was changing, so would the length of the day. And if that changed over the last 4000 years or so, Stonehenge wouldn't be correctly aligned, yet it is. There's no plausible way to blame that on conspiracy. If the Earth was expanding, we would have noticed. So, your logic must be wrong somewhere.

By some measure, you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate I understand that prisons are a very profitable industry in the US

No, because the data simply is not available. You don't need to be a psychopath to think that way. In one case you get killed; in the other case you get killed more than once?

That's the position they were elected to hold. Trump was elected on the basis of getting the Mexicans to pay. Is the US a democracy?

OK, so, in this dispute between Trump and almost everybody else in America, which side are the republicans backing?

The shutdown costs billions per week, so nobody should ever implement one. So, why are the Republicans not telling Trump to stop wasting tax dollars on both the pointless wall (Mexicans have ladders) and on the shutdown? Why are Republicans not doing the best for the USA? If you were in congress, what would you do? Would you support Trump's white elephant, or would you seek to oust him?