OT: Liquid water is composed of 150-unit branching polymers

The shuttle was crazy. Tiles killed one crew, o-rings killed another.

My wife is reading a book by an ex ISS astronaut. It involves a lot of very bad smells and vomit and such. I don't want to read it.

Exactly. Science is almost always driven by a need to explain observed curiosities, not by original thought.

Civilians and engineers often get ahead of scientists; use "the science" first. Construction, plant and animal breeding, water management, steam power, telegraphs and telephones, happened before there was useful theory.

Maxwell's work was pretty original.

Sloman is obsessed with me. He follows me around like some crazed Chihuahua trying to bite my ankles. That's pretty weird.

Actually suits overriding engineers to put on a good show was the main cause of the first disaster and an over confidence in the tile impact damage model led to the second one. Both were tragic losses of life.

You have to admire the cutting edge technology that went into it though. There were just too many dangerous single point failure modes.

Wernher von Braun was right when he said you should never strap men onto oversized fireworks (SRBs) - liquid fuels are a more controllable burn.

Space flight is dangerous whichever way you look at it. I had the chance to see the capsule British astronaut Tim Peake returned to Earth in. It was tiny and had three men in. I would have been too tall for the couch.

Space flight is definitely not for the faint hearted. The parabolic flight zero g training plane isn't called the vomit comet for nothing.

Yes, Sloman is pretty strange, but he is not alone as long as you are here. His obsession with you is about your inability to see your own flaws or to even consider the possibility that you have limitations... many, huge limitations.

Rick C.

sis to test, you aren't in the science business.

le?

nted the world to provide us with intellectual puzzles to tease out. Realit y is less constrained.

I'm taller than John Larkin, and I've got a couple of patents, and a couple of published and cited papers. He's the chihuahua here.

John Larkin's persistent enthusiasm for republishing denialist propaganda d oes strike me as rather like the yapping of a crazed chihuahua - the peopl e in one of the pent-house flats at the top of our building seem to have fo ur or five of them, but their's aren't crazed and don't yap all that often.

People do keep on swapping persistent sources of irritating noise, even whe n they know that the gesture is futile

Maybe John needs a course of anti-rabies vaccine.

That's just as true if you say 'sometimes' instead of 'almost always'; Democritus came up with the atomic theory without any observed curiosities that I'm aware of. Boltzman found the t**4 dependence of thermal radiation by pure reason.

Theoretician and experimenter/observer are both valuable harvesters of the science field, but the pair in cooperation generally glean most effectively.

hesis to test, you aren't in the science business.

pple?

vented the world to provide us with intellectual puzzles to tease out. Real ity is less constrained.

le of published and cited papers. He's the chihuahua here.

does strike me as rather like the yapping of a crazed chihuahua - the peo ple in one of the pent-house flats at the top of our building seem to have four or five of them, but their's aren't crazed and don't yap all that ofte n.

hen they know that the gesture is futile

e French for curly lap dog.

Rick C.

Huh, Boltzman and T^4.. is it similar to this derivation.

(I always assumed you needed Planks understanding of black bodies.)

George H.

Yep, that's the one. It is striking, just as the Pythagorean Theorem, that simple principles give the useful (and awesome) result, not as a cause-and-effect, but as a simple requirement for consistency. It's a theory-driven scientific process.

Kepler's laws of planetary motion were derived from observations (and couldn't have been formulated from then-extant theory); that's a lovely example of observation-driven science.

"hold"??? NUTS!

eresting paper

r chains, where the hydrogen bonds that hold the individual water molecules together last for about 90.3 femtoseconds, makes every kind of sense, and does explain why water is as odd as it is.

Robert Baer is nuts. As is pointed out in the article, 90.3fs is about elev en cycles of one the bending vibrational modes of the water molecule, so it is long enough to count.

The bond doesn't break after 90.3fs - it just moves to another water molecu le, reconfiguring the polymer, rather than breaking it up.

Pure Thermo is beautiful for it's simplicity, and should be studied for no other reason, (usefulness be damned :^)

(As a student, once I heard about Stat. Mech., well thermo became like Newtonian mech.)

George H.

The water molecules each have a dipole so Van der Waals forces tend to align them up +-+-+-+-+-+ tagging the hydrogen of one to the oxygen of the next and so on. It's what gives water its physical properties; tendency to form droplets, boiling point 'n' whatnot. But I'm guessing you knew that anyway, Phil. Having an off-day are we? ;-)

Robert Baer isn't Phil, and Phil Hobbs would have to have lost most of cran ial tissue before he had enough of an off day to perform down to Robert Bae r's level.

Cursitor Doom has explained hydrogen bonding as a Van der Waals force, rath er missing the point that the hydrogen atoms involved end up chemically bon ded to two different oxygen atoms - which is why "hydrogen bonds" are uniqu ely potent.

It's not just dipoles lining up - though this does happen as part of the pr ocess.

" The initial theory of hydrogen bonding proposed by Linus Pauling suggeste d that the hydrogen bonds had a partial covalent nature. This interpretatio n remained controversial until NMR techniques demonstrated information tran sfer between hydrogen-bonded nuclei, a feat that would only be possible if the hydrogen bond contained some covalent character."