Recent content by N1206

The Nordics are where English got subject-verb-object grammar from, which Dutch does not have--and so the Nordic languages may indeed be easier to pick up than Dutch. And the Dutch have kept the German 'megaword' habit. 'Cellular telephone factory parking lot' could very well be a single word...

Well we have a few 'double u' words. Vacuum and continuum. But those come from Latin, I think. And I think McWhorter was just trolling with his comments about Fries. The DUTCH can't understand their Friesland countrymen, so no, Fries is not the closest thing English has to a sister language...

As Balancore has said, Colossus had bigger fish to fry, as it were <grin> It was used to attack the more complex 'Fish' cyphers. So the reason that electronics weren't used to brute-force Engima is that the scarce resources (Colussus) were used to break things that could NOT be broken...

You are right, it probably isn't any different in theory. Instead of plumb bob hanging from a long wire to get as frictionless as possible, we have a puck bouncing back and forth between bumpers on a frictionless surface. Neat! Foucault did his experiment in Paris. I wonder what the...

There are tides to consider. Water slops along in tandem with the moon and sun. It takes The mass of a whole ocean and the right underwater topography to get measurable tide. The Great Lakes tidal height is about 5 cm. Prevailing winds are generated by the atmosphere 'slipping' in regard to the...

@peanutaxis "Another observation. It seems obvious to me that the hard limit for the real cart is that it can't accelerate air past zero ground speed; it can't (net) accelerate air backwards(from the frame of the ground), because to do so would be to be putting energy into the very energy source...

No one--NO ONE-- said anything like that. Only that it is not perhaps the most important thing. The economics of rockets are a minimization of $/(kg of operational payload delivered) + (% probability of non-operational outcomes)*(cost of payload) You want the cheapest possible delivery of...

"In at least one mobile application - rockets - energy per unit mass is the most important thing." Well, not most important, since not all rockets actually use hydrogen. Space-X rockets have been using rocket grade kerosene (RP-1) and Space-X is playing with methox rockets. The shuttle main...

You had cross-mixed the terms from your reference. You wrote '3 times the energy density (energy/unit mass)' but your reference defines energy density as energy per volume and specific energy as energy per mass and doesn't use 'volumetric' or 'gravimetric' at all. And when it comes to fuels...

"I was a bit surprised to see that Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density (energy/unit mass) of diesel fuel." You were a bit surprised only because that statement isn't right. From #7 from Andrew Mason, you will see that Specific Energy (MJ/kg) for hydrogen gas is 141.86 (HHV) and 45.6...

Lawyers are going to do law--and law has rules. Turing was charged and convicted. Evidence was presented and a verdict rendered. The only lawyerly way to make that go away is to be re-tried and acquitted. And the rules are that you CAN'T do that for a) dead people and b) repealed laws. So the...

"I was just trying to understand the difference." I get where you are coming from. On the surface, you look and say "if mv is conserved, and mass doesn't change, doesn't it follow that 1/2 mv2 should be conserved, too?" The critical thing is that v (velocity) is a vector, having both magnitude...

You have asked one of those questions, like 'do Irish monks and the Norse get enough credit for European discovery of the Americas?' or 'How and by whom were the Americas populated?' Much of the evidence for your question disappeared into the murk of the wartime secrecy and the Cold War...

"I have had to do all my brother's chores since he left." Most English speakers would find no ambiguity in this sentence. To nitpick you could rearrange it 'Since my brother left I have had to do all his chores' Either/or -- but the sentence is clear that the brother leaving increased your...

Ah, the novel with the exploded moon was: Ice Prophet by William R. Forstchen. (1983)