Recent content by DavidLloydJones

Jim, Or is it jim, If we're crossing the Bering Strait it's not a matter of beefing up the power lines, it's a matter of building them right from the start. My guess is they'll be DC cables on the ocean floor, but we may have railway tunnels soon, so there's no telling. As for water in the...

Old Jim, Neville Shute was always great fun, and ver-ree often right. 'Course we hope he was too pessimistic on the nuclear war thing, but his writing on the aircraft industry (and the folly of the Zeppelin and airship honchos) was great stuff. I think your vision of local labour, doing local...

The unthinking belief in "maintenance trucks" has burdened no end of city parks with ugly and unnecessary asphalt all over the place. A couple of criss-cross tracks eight feet wide ("feet," a measure of length used in the United States and Saudi Arabia) would allow the truck now and then to...

The exact difference is that wave functions exist in our minds, and are therefore as smooth as we feel like making them. We can dream up functions with almost no limit, and do collaborative work around any of them we have symbols to convey. Bubbles, on the other hand, go bub-bub-bub in the...

Seems to me they have to be at least thirty light-years away. Any civilization at our level of ability and confusion will spend at least thirty years debating a loud reply once they find out about us. If they'd been on Mars, their thirty years would have been up some time ago, so they're not...

Zapper, You're going to a lot of unnecessary trouble here. Evolution doesn't compete with the Second Law. This is simply because the Second Law is about closed systems, or about the Uni/Multiverse as a whole, while evolution always takes place in systems with external energy sources...

Yup. Found it. But thanks, Dave.

I think you're being a little cavalier about that factor of two in there. Never forget the businessman who made his millions in Popsicles, or whatever it was: "I make them for a nickel and I sell them for a dime, and from that one percent difference I have become rich." -dlj.

Czcibor, I was going to suggest The Economist, too. They carry a heavy bias: they, somewhat idiosyncratically, hew closely to the same Gladstonian liberalism that so deeply moved them 140 years ago. They even reflect Gladstone's most intimate views. Where the Prime Minister would atone for...

I.I. Rabi did a thesis in school on the proposition "How likely is it that a brick will spontaneously leap one foot into the air?" I think he did his undergrad at Buffalo, which would account for that archaic "one foot" thing. I remember the answer as being "It'll happen about once in every...