Shredding a body and chassis is cool. Shredding engine blocks is hard core.

I'm struck by the almost complete lack of snow cover in the southern hemisphere. Some in the southern Andes, Tierra del Fuego and New Zealand, maybe a dot in Tasmania, and nothing else. Snow can fall on the highlands in South Africa, but it doesn't show here.

No, Starry Night is exactly what it seems to be. On a dark night when the stars are impossible to count, the eye really does organize them into lines and curves.

It's all in the palette. If they used shades of blue and green you'd want to go there on vacation.

"Conditional" surrender is the operative word. Richard B. Frank, in "No Bomb, No End," (What If? 2) has pointed out that there has never been the slightest evidence that the Japanese were willing to surrender on terms that could or should have been acceptable to the Allies, including dissolution of the military junta…

The difference here is that the men were volunteers and their health was carefully monitored. Doing it to unwilling subjects would have been unethical (not that there haven't been unethical experiments). Studying actual starvation victims would have been hit or miss since we'd have no baseline information, the goal…

Both drives allowed slip for variations in speed and were mostly passive during play. The capstan is what made the tape move at a uniform speed since it rotated uniformly. That's why (a) you got snarls when the takeup reel stuck and (b) the tape would jam sometimes if the feeder reel was miswound. Squeezing the case…

If you do this with physical wheels, say two disks of wood with the smaller glued to the larger, you'll find it won't work. One of the two wheels will have to slip to allow the other to roll.

An interesting statistic: During the years 1939-1945, global population growth was about 50 per minute, 3000 per hour and 72,000 per day. The death toll from the war, assuming 60 million over six years, was about 27,000 per day and 1100 per hour. Only during very fierce fighting and events like major ship sinkings did…

Wow. American history on an acid trip. You need to talk to your supplier about quality control.

I knew Typhoon Haiyan was powerful, but I didn't know it was so powerful that it actually blew away the central Philippines.

Complaining about the science in this is like the car commercial where the car jumps on a speeding train and the subtitle says "Cars can't ride on trains."

Chances are, since the star was a white dwarf, any planets already had some very bad days, although maybe life might have re-evolved on some of them.

It actually happened 12 million years ago. The debris will expand (has expanded) outward, but by the time it spreads that far, it will be indistinguishable from the very thin gas of interstellar space. Also, the debris doesn't expand at the speed of light.

I've had conversations in other languages that I know were not English, but I recall them in English. I've also had conversations where I cannot recall whether I was speakin English or another language.

Planning for the future pays off in the future, but procrastination pays off RIGHT NOW.

There have been enough scientists who went into politics for us to conclude their record has been pretty lackluster. Science and politics require different skill sets. In particular, politics requires an ability to accept less than optimal solutions and sometimes outright defeat. Politics is the art of the possible.

Play fair. Don't postulate wholly unreasonable changes in the laws of physics. Both The Change novels and Revolution postulate the disappearance of electricity. O RLY? Are there still thunderstorms? Do magnets still work? How do your nerves transmit signals? Did the radio section of the electromagnetic spectrum just…

I'll do it right now. Say the development has 100 kilometers (60 miles) of pipe with a cross-section of 200 square cm (a bit bigger than 6 inch diameter). The volume is 100,000 meters long times .02 square meters cross section = 2000 cubic meters. That would fill a pond 40 x 50 meters by one meter deep (125 by 160 by…

California has a Mediterranean climate with wet winters and dry summers. Lots of it is chaparral as bob_d noted. The lower hills are often open grassland with scattered oaks. Higher elevations have various forests (the green in the satellite images). Some is desert, but only 10% or so of the state. California gets…