A. B.

How often does "Voting corrected" update? It seems like, I've just logged in for the first time for a while and apparently I got docked 100 reputation on July 24th for "Serial voting corrected", and I hadn't had any votes, up or down, for six weeks before then. Possibly, I don't care, but I'm wondering if it's a glitch.

@TheLethalCarrot Maybe I'd just somehow missed the "Edit" button on the answer, I didn't spot one :-D It seems to be there now. Sorry about that.

It doesn't seem to be possible to edit an answer to a closed question. Is it possible to get a question temporarily re-opened for editing, or for someone to add something to it? I found an Internet Archive link for "The Old Army Game", in the answer to this question scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/42620/… .

o/

What's the name of that oxygen compound that's described as smelling like rain after a thunderstorm? It seems like, not ozone, tri-something, was investigated as a hospital disinfectant at one point, it's on the tip of my tongue :-D

Leaving aside the question of what it's made from, are there in fact any substances with the properties described? Liquids with a specific gravity of anywhere near 10 seem to be quite rare anyway, although this may only just count as a liquid.

(Loong or anybody else who's interested, I mean, of course.)

It'd presumably have to be quite a small amount, though, which seems on the face of it unlikely to allow such a drastic change, but my chemistry knowledge (BSc level) isn't enough to be sure about that.

@Loong Care to enlarge on why? This is, of course, verging on polywater, which has been shown to be a mythical beast, if there was really nothing in the jar but water, hydrogen and oxygen. One idea that occurred to me was that maybe some contamination got in from the silicone seal (there was some silicone sealant in his electrolysis set-up, too), or from elsewhere in his set-up, leading to some kind of weird polymerization reaction.

It's possible that they all made it up, but still, out of curiosity, is there any reasonable chemical explanation for this?

The jar was kept at 37 degrees C and over the next few days, the liquid turned white and shrank to roughly one-tenth of its volume (but didn't change in mass).

According to the original description, he used a home-made set-up with stainless steel electrodes to run an electric current through water, producing small bubbles (which he thought were ozone rather than hydrogen and oxygen, but he didn't give any evidence for that). After five minutes the water and bubbles were emptied into a glass jar with a silicone seal and immediately sealed.

I haven't got the chemical myself, it's an experiment that somebody on another site swears blind he's carried out, and other members of the same site say they've managed to replicate part but not all of.

Been puzzling over the identity of an unknown chemical (if it exists) and thought I'd ask here, since it sounded as if it wouldn't be up to the standards of the main site.

Hi.

On another forum I was reading an account of something somebody had produced in a home experiment, and the physical and chemical properties of the substance he described seemed rather bizarre, especially considering how he claimed to have made it. Assuming he didn't just make the whole account up (and the account is very detailed and circumstantial), I'm curious to know what are the possibilities for what the stuff could be.

(Sorry possibly didn't notice the chat had started moving again).

(I'm not sure whether this is too newbie a question for the main site).

Apparently, old-fashioned spark-gap radio transmitters are now illegal because they cause interference across a wide band of wavelengths. But, it seems like, an arc welder is also a spark gap. Anyone here happen to know, do they not cause an interference problem, and, if not, why not? Less power? It seems like, they look like a lot of power :-D

I can't find your eukaryote question (or any question from you at all) on Biology.SE, was it deleted?

@user250478 I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Is English not your first language?

The volume of ancient eukaryotes question seems like one that you could ask on the main site.

Thanks!

Although the example of the alleged light micrograph of the head of a Clostridium tetani bacterium at about 9,000x remains - that one doesn't seem to disappear in a puff of smoke. After reading various things I'm confused about whether that would be surprising for a light microscope or not. Would it be? Or would that be more of a Physics.SE question? It's awkward to know, since it involves both optics and microbiology!

@uhoh I hadn't asked it yet, I was asking whether it was considered OK to. I may have answered some of it myself since asking - some of the examples seem to be just a case of newspapers misreporting the magnification of images that, if you look up the size of the organism and calculate how much the magnification should be, aren't actually too out of the ordinary.

@BryanKrause It seems no more or less interesting than "What is this random insect", which Biology.SE seems to get a great many of.

:-D

@BryanKrause Actually, no. The question is more the opposite - "assuming that this isn't really a light micrograph of the head of a Clostridium tetani bacterium at about 9,000x," (to take one of the more surprising-seeming examples) "what exactly is it a picture of?"

@user4539917 Fair enough!

Doesn't seem like there'd just happen to be a lot of people there who know about micro-organisms. Seems like I'd just get a lecture about the Abbe limit which I already know, and/or about how this microscope has been the subject of a lot of ludicrous conspiracy theories, which I also already know.

Why would Skeptics.SE be a good fit for identifying micro-organisms?

I already know that it's theoretically impossible because of the wavelength of light. What I was wondering was how you account for the micrographs.

So far, I've identified a few of them as real enough photos but what the captions say about the magnification seems misleading (though, with some of them, if they are what the captions say they are then the magnification they're actually at still seems impressive).

@BryanKrause Well, there's a sort of ongoing legend about a mysterious optical microscope built in the 1920s that could supposedly achieve magnifications that are theoretically impossible for an optical microscope. There are some photographs supposedly taken with it that are supposedly proof of this. I was wondering whether anyone could identify what the photographs are really of, and thus whether the magnification was really as much as it says.

I have a possible question about some micrographs (basically, there are some mystery micrographs that it would be useful to have identified), but there are 12 of them. Is that too many pictures to post in one question? If so, could try and weed out just the most puzzling ones.

A feature that might make a difference to how this plays out is, does it require belief or only imagination? That is, would a god being widely known but believed to be fictional, like the Tooth Fairy, give them power or not? If it wouldn't, a big publicity/misinformation campaign to say that the gods are lies might be useful. If it would, that (since it would attract attention to the gods) might be a disaster! Or, for a plot twist, maybe your giants think it's one but it's the other!

The idea of gods "powered by belief", a setting in which your being convinced that God exists would measurably affect God, is a pretty widespread one in fantasy fiction. (Possibly an illogical one, maybe based on equating "religions" with "gods", but it seems to have been around since long before OP posted).

In your system, are the gods weakened if people's beliefs about them contradict each other? If so, spreading contradictory beliefs about them might also be a way to go. Get one village thinking that Zog of the Rivers is a dragon god and the next that she's an otter goddess. Encourage the city people to be smug at these superstitious hicks thinking that Zog has a physical form. Get them angry at each other for getting it "wrong".

A lot might depend on what your "gods" can do. If they could actually do things to demonstrate that they exist, that might be tricky - unless your giants have the ability to somehow suppress their powers, or to cover up the evidence. "It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows." - Terry Pratchett.

Never mind, I looked at it carefully and it looked as if I could just replace the .deb file path with the path of the .deb file that was in my "home" folder (leaving the .list file path alone) and the most it could break would be that one .list file which was already broken, so I tried that and it worked.

Anyone know what might be going on there? And would just copying the file into /var/cache/apt/archives/ work, or might that break things?

Got another problem now, though. It's refusing to do the "download". At least sometimes. I tried it on "outguess", and it worked. Then I tried it on "python-zeitgeist", which is the package that I'd most recently got that error about, and though the .deb file turned up in my "home" folder, it did not turn up in /var/cache/apt/archives/, so the code didn't work.

@andrew.46 Thanks very much, that worked!

Specifically, I found this askubuntu.com/questions/648736/… which is the same error I've got, but I don't know how to run the piece of code in the top answer.

Complete beginner question, but does anyone know how to run multi-line if-else commands?