Maybe we’ll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence.
Without us, Earth’s geology will grind on.
Q. How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backward into the net?
What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?
I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions.
Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a collection of particles.
2 Note: If you’re ever trapped with me in a burning building, and I suggest an idea for how we could escape the situation, it’s probably best to ignore me.
If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.
The Pauli exclusion principle keeps electrons from getting too close to each other. This effect is one of the main reasons that your laptop doesn’t fall through your lap.
Okay, you can stop looking at your hand now.
Project Orion, is detailed in the excellent book of the same name by Freeman’s son, George.
Periodic Wall of the Elements Q. What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?
Cook’s The Science of Good Cooking was also helpful.
Rule of thumb: One person per square meter is a light crowd, four people per square meter is a mosh pit. 2.
Laser Pointer Q. If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
A child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage.
A new milestone: The hair dryer is now, impossibly, consuming more power than every other electrical device on the planet combined.
This means the last few years of hard-drive production – which, thanks to increasing size, represents the majority of global storage capacity – would just about fill an oil tanker. So, by that measure, the Internet is smaller than an oil tanker.
In a billion years, Earth will become a second Venus.
So, as far as swimming safety goes, the bottom line is that you’d probably be OK, as long as you didn’t dive to the bottom or pick up anything strange. But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.