Recent content by Mike S.

In the Ukraine thread, first they told me not to post about ancient history of Ukraine and the East-West schism; then they told me not to post a news story about unencrypted Russian communications because "this isn't Facebook" (?). I stopped trying to contribute after that. I peeked in now...

The use of gcd seems so surprising to me. I wonder if you can simplify this... 1. ## \sqrt[n]{n} = x ## with x being rational. 2. ## n = x ^ n ## 3. n is an integer, so x must be an integer 4. ## 1 ^ n ## is too small and ## 2 ^ n ## is too large.

I never spoke of whether it "is" a SI unit, but whether we should treat it as one. Letting those people tell us what to do can lead to terrible nonsense... would we inflict on any chemistry student a unit finely tuned according to a hypothetical eye of The Genetically Perfect Human? Nope, that...

The average learner is far enough away from whoever BIPM is that they can probably figure out how to do chemistry before they have to worry about what those people think. :)

I'm surprised a treaty from 1995 already has so many signatories, and indeed Ukraine and Russian Federation are among them. I'm also still more than a little amazed people are actually sticking to it, when common violations such as the use of nerve gas are so much more technically difficult and...

I've often seen it said that hobbyist-grade UV lasers, sold for a few hundred dollars to those brave enough to buy one, cause a serious risk of blindness. In the literature I see reference to eye damage from as little as 5 mJ/cm^2, which seems absurdly easy to attain. And every time I think of...

The confusingness of how moles are presented is right up there with my pet peeves about how chemistry is taught. I mean, they hit people with the most absurd nonsense - teach them two different terms (mole and Avogadro's number), call it a "unit of quantity", otherwise known as a number, and...

I'm afraid I'm not getting it. And whatever else happens, this AI can pull a tag for #963 in line behind all the other fascists who are going to torture you for all the things you said or didn't say by the time it comes around. You think Putin and Kim Jong Un aren't going to be there first?

I think of AI mostly as a form of legal loophole, and mostly for the purpose of institutional racism. An AI is free to look at a person's entire social network to decide whether to avoid doing business or to charge a higher rate, and that way the company can say that no person working for it...

I'm getting the impression that you think it may be a crackpot theory. At the same time, it's published in AIP Advances, a journal that Wikipedia says has an impact factor of 1.5. I would think it was peer reviewed at least enough that he didn't just misremember the sign of the mass involved...

Don't forget liquid crystals (nematic, smectic, hexatic... I've never even learned all the different 'phases'). Superfluids? Supercritical fluids? What about substances with a liquid-liquid phase transition? I'm afraid I gave up on counting these a long time ago, and I haven't even thought about...

I'm afraid I'm still confused. :) I can almost understand the idea of spending energy to get rid of energy - like the eraser is a heat pump, say. Except ... the information is gone after that! If your air conditioner spends energy to cool the room and the energy isn't seen again, the First...

For a week I've been seeing Russian allegations that the U.S. was researching bioweapons in the Ukraine. Today's example specifically targets a company, Metabiota. To be clear, I have seen nothing persuasive so far, for the following reasons: Metabiota's entire role is to track emerging...

Epimetheus and Janus switch places periodically, because they follow a horseshoe orbit around Saturn, which is considered a "pseudo-orbit" around each other. I'm thinking that if you look at the conic sections - taking an elliptical orbit of two moons to greater and greater extremes until they...

This article makes much sense, except ... I was under the impression that it takes energy to erase a bit of information, but here the information in the electron has energy that can be converted into photon(s). Where am I confused?