Recent content by Borek

  1. Borek

    KSR's Red Mars - Molecular sieve breathing mask

    No, you can have a third, inert gas inside. Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, inert gas stays inside and its amount is constant, keeping the pressure identical to the outside. I don't see how to get a mask working in conditions given without some additional pump. RO doesn't work against a pressure...
  2. Borek

    Question about lead & lead vapor

    Just a comment: if you see a liquid (whatever, be it water, molten metal, anything), there is a vapor over it. The question is not whether it "can" evaporate (answer is yes, always, actually there is even some vapor over solids), question is "how fast" (and here I doubt you will get a better...
  3. Borek

    Is A.I. more than the sum of its parts?

    Google for "emergent properties". And this basically boils down to eons old discussion between reductionists and their opponents. Don't expect clear answers, more like more and more questions.
  4. Borek

    Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics

    What it tries to say is that the relationship holds precisely only for ideal gas (pointlike molecules with zero volume, no interactions other than elastic collisions), and that the lower the pressure, the closer the real gas is to the ideal gas. This is quite common in the real systems, you...
  5. Borek

    Do light bulbs store energy?

    It is enough that one of them failed and shorted in any way (and for whatever internal reason) to burn two others as they are under 400 V now. That's actually the most likely explanation of what happened.
  6. Borek

    Do light bulbs store energy?

    Perhaps I am missing something, but what kind of li-ion batteries produces over 800V? As far as I am aware it is 4.2 V per fully charged cell, to get to 800+ volts you need almost 200 cells - but connected in series.
  7. Borek

    Chemistry Understanding Reaction Quotient and Molarity

    Equilibrium process. ICE is just a convenient way of dealing with the math involved (you can call it "math device"), but it doesn't define any property of the system, it just helps describing the principle of mass conservation with equations.
  8. Borek

    Solvents for cleaning soap film?

    5% HCl is 1.4 M, that's already quite concentrated in the context of just changing pH (yields pH in the zero range, that's seriously acidic). I would start around 1% (which is probably an overkill as well).
  9. Borek

    Chemistry Understanding Reaction Quotient and Molarity

    You are right in your first paragraph, but I feel like you are misunderstanding some basics here. Stoichiometry (described by the reaction reaction equation) and equilibrium are two separate (although in practice closely related) concepts. Reaction equation describes the stoichiometry, and can...
  10. Borek

    Alien life, probabilities, and interstellar propagation of human life

    I would add "at any given point". Our technological civilization grew in just about 3k years (give or take, add a zero, divide by ten, it won't change the weight of the argument by much), there is no way to say how long it will survive but I am rather pessimistic and I don't think it will last...
  11. Borek

    Alien life, probabilities, and interstellar propagation of human life

    Interesting approach, and definitely good candidate for something that can be turned into a detection technique. I feel like it is kind of a measure of "how thermodynamically impossible is to see the molecule produced by a natural, abiotic process" (yes, very handwavy, but I am sure it is the...
  12. Borek

    Alien life, probabilities, and interstellar propagation of human life

    (emphasis mine) Yes, we haven't seen anything that can't be explained as a natural process (there are some strange observations, but they are random and inconclusive) - but how much have we seen? Can be that the advanced life is quite common, as opposed to intelligence capable of producing...
  13. Borek

    Can you make pure water acidic by adding free protons to it?

    To some extent: your guesses are as good as ours. First of all: as I already signaled there is no way to add enough protons through irradiation to make observable difference in pH. Other than that - what happens is not much different from what happens during nuclear fusion, where instead of a...
  14. Borek

    Can you make pure water acidic by adding free protons to it?

    Something like that. Try to estimate forces involved between - say - millimole of protons and millimole of electrons separated by 1 meter. Or just watch any video about Kelvin water dropper, while it is not about irradiating solution the general principle - of water becoming charged - is very...
  15. Borek

    What glass is best at resisting acids when dissolving?

    No, I mean "any glass that is SiO2 based" - which in practice means all of them. Sure, there are differences, but as long as we are talking about laboratory glass (as opposed to "any glass container sold for general public") they shouldn't matter. Disclaimer: all possible warnings about...