Next to "ranking" Norwegian/Scandinavian names, this might be the best story of the day. Sent to me by a reader. I would have definitely missed it. I don't follow:
- fjiord stories
- floating tunnel stories
- ABC News
With that said, here's the link.
Highway E39 in Norway is one of the most beautiful drives in the world, hugging the country's rugged west coast from Kristiansand to Trondheim.
It is 684 miles of unending scenery, including rivers and lakes, waterfalls and mountains and numerous fjords.
But if you look carefully at a road map, E39 is something of a dotted line. Each of the breaks occurs at seven fjords -- where drivers must put their cars on a ferry to get across.
This stop-and-start, sea-and-land journey takes 21 hours.
But the government of Norway has a plan.
"Ferry-free E39" would cut the driving time almost in half with a series of bridges and tunnels across the fjords.Video at the link.
I'm waiting for Elon Musk to weigh in on this one.
As long as I've rambled this long, some personal notes: my grandfather came from Trondheim.
From another site:
"Paul" is/was my paternal grandfather. Born in Inderøy Municipality, he always called it "Trondheim." He homesteaded near Newell, SD, that "dry, flat, empty northwestern corn of South Dakota.
***********************************
The Physics Page
Quick! Without looking, who coined the term, "black hole"? I was sure I knew. I was wrong.
From Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick, c. 1992, page 94:
Compared to the hydrogen atom, the stark kernel with which [Niels] Bohr had begun his quantum revolution, the uranium atom was a monster, the heaviest atom in nature, bulked out with 92 protons and 140-odd neutrons, so scarce in the cosmos that hydrogen atoms outnumber [uranium] by seventeen trillion to one, and unstable, given to decaying at quantum mechanically unpredictable moments down a chain of lighter elements or -- this was the extraordinary news that kept Bohr at his portable blackboard all though the North Atlantic voyage [from Copenhagen to Princeton] -- splitting, when slugged by a neutron, into odd pairs of smaller atoms, barium and krypton or tellurium and zirconium, plus a bonus of new neutrons and free energy.Krypton. Who knew?
From wiki: Superman is a fictional superhero created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. He first appeared in Action Comics #1, a comic book published on April 18, 1938.
Interesting coincidence, last week I just finished "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" by Richard Feyman. He's a brilliant mind, but I wouldn't recommend the book. The first few chapters are great and the back half on the Challenger disaster is interesting, but the other diary entries weren't particularly interesting.
ReplyDeleteRichard Feyman explaining magnets is a youtube video I go back to over and over again. It's a great way of explaining how questions break down.
I have both those books (Surely, You're Joking" and "What Do You Care..." and I agree -- I did not care for either one. On the other hand, the James Gleick biography is fascinating.
DeleteI've often been asked (when the subject comes up), who was smarter, Feynman or Einstein. They cannot be compared. Apples and oranges. Einstein made the leap from classical physics to quantum physics (although he did not call it that). By the time Feynman arrived, quantum physics was the new science.
Having said that, it is well known that Einstein was poor in math -- he admitted as such and often had others do the math that was necessary to explain/prove his "gedankenexperiment(s)."
I've read several Einstein biographies. I prefer to read about Feynman. But, of course, that has a lot to do with the times that both lived and worked.