Did you just call concentrated methanol a "wicked buzz" and not "poison that can make you blind"? Or am I missing something?

[removed]

[removed]

This makes me happy to hear it's a legitimate process! I'm not crazy yay!

[removed]

[deleted]

Yes, it's sorta how icewine is made. Using late season grapes, high in sugar, the grapes are pressed while frozen. "After grapes are picked for ice wine production, they are lightly pressed into the grape must under much higher pressure than grapes in the regular season. Since grapes are frozen when they come to the press, the ice (water) representing most of the mass is left behind in the press. Thus only a small amount of highly concentrated and sweet juice is extracted. Actually, only about 10-20% of the original crops end up as ice wine." Source Article.

[removed]

They’d sometimes get applejack up to 40% ABV, not just 44 proof.

The problem, which comes up with ice wine as well, is that you’re not just concentrating ethanol, which is a desirable toxin. You’re also concentrating undesirable toxins like methanol and aldehydes.

The same thing happens with stills that use evaporative distillation, but there they distiller can divert the head and tail (ie, the stuff that boils off first and the stuff that boils off last) and keep it away from final product. You can’t do that with applejack, which means it’s likely to be a wicked buzz if you choose to drink something at 40 abv

[removed]

[removed]

If a single atom does not have a 'temperature' or a 'state of matter' but only the interaction between atoms has these properties... then where is the temperature "stored" in the atom? How does an atom "know" from one instant to the next what its temperature is?

I made the point about time to show how you can prove the entropy exists in the absence of large N. It is not exclusive to that however.

I was not making a point about the OP question as much as clearing up a statement that entropy is a strictly bulk property when it isn't. Unlike many thermodynamic definitions entropy is actually defined the same way on both a macro and micro scale.

Thus why I called it a nitpick.

Sort of similar concept to cells and whether or not they constitute a tissue or an organism. If you're zoomed all the way in on one cell in isolation, it loses the relativity you would need to determine higher classifications.

[removed]

[removed]

Sure! You've basically described fractional crystallization (also called fractional freezing or jacking) as originally used to make Applejack potent.

Just as you can purify a solid by crystallizing it out of solution leaving any contaminants dissolved in the solvent, you can purify a low melting solid by partially freezing it out of a melt, and leaving the contaminants concentrated in the residual liquid. As they are excluded from the solid phase the contaminants get more and more concentrated in the remaining liquid phase, depressing its melting point, so it doesn't all freeze and it can be separated from the crystallizing solid. By repeating the process you can recrystallize the solid and get it purer and purer, like in zone refining silicon to get the high purity required for semiconductor applications.

Or you can turn this around and work with the unfrozen phase, as you are suggesting, getting the dissolved component (the "juice" in your example) more and more concentrated. The classic example of this is actually very close to your idea. It is the original process to concentrate the alcohol in making Applejack: partially freezing fermented cider, removing some water as ice, and repeating the process. The separation isn't 100% so you will never get to pure alcohol: there will always be a little alcohol left with the ice and some water remaining in the liquid phase. (The theoretical limit is 92% pure alcohol). But by going back and forth, thawing and refreezing the "ice" phase to get a little more alcohol out, and adding that to the liquid phase and refreezing that to remove a little more water, they get to 44 proof in Applejack.

Since states are defined by how "they exhibit different physical properties," how many N2 atoms does it take to behave like a solid/liquid/gas in any given system?

>In the 1980s people would seemingly go from health to HIV+ to AIDS to dead in a matter of years.

Because we didn’t have treatments.

>Today you rarely hear of AIDS-related deaths.

Because they’re not news worthy anymore. It’s not novel. But people absolutely die from it. People who are not adherent to treatments. People who are homeless without resources. People with significant mental illness who are one or both of the former. I have cared for quite a few individuals who either died or did very poorly otherwise.

But you can see that death rates dropped off significantly after introduction of antiretroviral therapy.

I was a grad student in the early 80s. There was a prof in our department who had been doing slow steady respectable RNA biochemistry work for 20 years. Not in HIV or even with whole viruses, with RNA viral enzymes. His work was barely funded, some semesters his 2 to 3 grad students taught, sometimes they’d get a break. By 1988 agencies leaving sacks of 50s on his doorstep. To his credit, this guy didn’t expand too much. He got a postdoc and better equipment and his students didn’t have to teach. It was fascinating to see that field go from backwater to front burner like that.

Educating. Thank you.

As others have said, no. Phase, like temperature, is an emergent property, which means that it appears upon interaction with others. Like the saying, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Extra info no one asked for:

Non-linear pattern formation is a branch of soft condensed matter physics that studies emergent patterns. Look up books by Philip Ball. Also the prof from the increasing-size dominoes meme, Dr. Stephen W. Morris, researched in this area before his recent retirement.

First part of your theory is true. The natural defenses do generate heat via inflammation. Which usually does nothing good or bad, unless it sometimes gets really bad.

Beneficial part, mostly no. You aren't cooking virus or bacteria, and heat doesn't make the defenses work faster.

However, the really interesting fact of the day is body temperature does kill fungal infections. >36.6°C will kill fungal infections. Majority of fungal infections are on the outside of your body where it's relatively cool, but if they get into your blood, travel up inside your urinary tract or reach some organs, they are incredibly difficult to treat.

Average human body temperature is dropping over time. Humans were constantly sick with some persistant virus or bacteria, an average body temperature was about 37°C (above the fungal limit). Then modern medicine started to fix those persistant infections, and average human body temps dropped to about 36°C (below the fungal limit). As a result, in modern times we find a lot more internal fungal infections that are difficult to treat.

An atom has kinetic energy due to the random movement of electrons within the atom. The movement of electrons are theoretically relative to the nucleus, and single KE is a function of mass and velocity, the components of atoms have a speed and this a temperature. A self contained particle nearing absolute zero could again be stationary.

Temperature in a normal situation relies are other particles, but then as others have said breaks standard conventions of physics and chemistry

So viruses need to be able to spread. If they are too deadly too quick, the infection burns out and the virus may die out with the people who died to quickly to spread it much. So take a hypothetical new virus that is 100% deadly on day three of infection and very contagious. People would die too fast to spread this around the world. So from the virus point of view, it can be deadly, but so deadly so fast to do what it wants to do which is spread itself around. Now viruses don't think of course, and if one existed like the one I made up above it would die out too quickly. So this is sort of where people started getting the incorrect belief that viruses mutate towards less lethality with time. No what happens is there is a selective pressure against a virus that is both very contagious and lethal in a short period of time. They certainly can exist, and perhaps they have in human history but they just died out before spreading too much. Now that is for a very contagious and quickly lethal virus. The virus did not mutate and become less lethal, it just didn't have the right "growth strategy" if you will that worked as far as spreading is concerned. So it may go extinct.

What if you were 100% lethal, but not for many years, say on average 8 years? Well now the lethality is not so much an issue as it allows many years for spread before it kills the person. In that scenario that selective pressure of "burning out" isn't there and it can continue to be lethal and spread around since it has time to spread. HIV is an example of that more or less. Also worth noting Over time it is certainly possible HIV could mutate to a less deadly virus but overall it has not really happened. And there really isn't a selective pressure for it to do so, but things like this can happen anyway over time, but not guaranteed.

Just as an aside, what would have happened with HIV if it happened in say 1900 before we understood viruses like this and really lacked the ability to do anything about it? It would potentially pass through a lot of the population ultimately killing those without some genetic protection that prevented lethality. But we humans have genetic diversity though, and there are some people out there with key mutations out there in one of the HIV receptors who seem resistant to HIV lethality. Over time those that had that key mutation would increasingly become more and more of the population as the others died, and the virus would become less lethal to the population due to the viruses selective pressure put on us humans. Then the virus might be able to infect some but not kill them, or not be able to infect them at all, and as a viral threat would become less and less a threat to human lives. It is thought this may have happened with other viruses throughout our long term evolutionary history. It is possible some viruses we get today that are not deadly to us may have been deadly in the long past but this selective pressure took place and the humans with some genetic resistance are the ones that survived, reproduced and make up more recent human populations. So in this scenario the virus didn't get less deadly, people essentially were selected for who did not succumb.