In order for a Northern European to evolve fair skin and hair, there has to be something that will kill a human of dark skin and hair. Since people with dark skin can survive in Northern Europe, it is not through evolution.

Doesn't it hurt your brain to write that?

• X can survive under condition Y
• ...therefore there is no evolutionary pressure on X under condition Y

I think my biggest problem was the phrase "ISTM your question is meaningless". It reinforced my general impression that a lot of physicists treat the math as the be-all-and-end-all of physics, without trying to develop an overarching (for lack of a better word) "narrative".

You end up with statements like "going faster than c makes you travel backwards in time" or "an electron doesn't have a position until it's measured". Both fit the math, but are probably simplifying things greatly. I suspect the physics of the future will provide intuitive explanations, with new underlying rules that will seem inscrutable. Dismissing the importance of the ACTUAL reality shuts down avenues of investigation and harms discourse.

That said, your last paragraph makes me think I was just overreacting. You've made it clear that intuition is an important aspect of theoretical physics, and people aren't blindly following the math.

I like to think of an electrons a droplet of water (well, droplet of EM-field) with some very exotic properties.

• 
  It tends to stick together, but can be pulled apart.
• 
  When an electron is pulled apart (forced through a double-slit, for instance), it's strongly self-attracted, and tries to spring back into an electron-sized droplet very quickly

I think there's a very good reason electrons bound to an atom act like an "electron cloud". It's not that the electron appears and jumps randomly, it's actually everywhere.

I hate this point of view - the one that says our math is everything, and there's no objective reality underneath driving it all. The math absolutely has to match observations, but describing physics without trying to understand what's ACTUALLY happening is like describing a baseball game purely in terms of Newtonian interactions. You'll understand individual phenomena very well, but you'll never understand the model well enough to make accurate predictions.

The reason we're still "blathering about non-existant [sic] WMDS" is because "WMD" is a shorthand for "nukes". The yellowcake uranium evidence, the aluminum tubes that "were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium", the quote "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud".

All of the WMD arguments for war were in the context of nukes, not chemical weapons.

So yes, you're technically correct - which is the best kind of correct - but you're also missing the point. None of the WMDs that we were warned about were found.

Not to mention if chemical weapons were a casus belli, just about every country in the world would be a legitimate target.

This is an incredibly disappointing comment to see modded Insightful. It's a non sequitor, it insults the parent, and most importantly, it adds nothing to the conversation.

I guess you can no longer use the traditional response to accusations of Russian misdeeds, since the US has stopped "lynching negroes"?

And then we'll *still* need developers.

If someone ever invents a language that let's people program in plain English, it will be discovered that the majority of people cannot learn English.

Okay, I've read through a number of your replies, and one question keeps coming up. Who the Hell are you? What skin do you have in this game?

Companies pull books all the time for all kinds of reasons. Why is this one worth disrupting the site over? Are you Dinesh himself, trying desperately to get more income (or mindshare, whatever). Or has he hired you to spread the word on whatever sites you can? Are you simply a Concerned Citizen for whom this one book is the final straw?

Or are you a crazy lib who hates Dinesh D'Souza, and intends to delegitimize him by being a dick on websites in his name?

Or are you just trying out a new trolling technique? In which case, full marks for creativity, full marks for getting the bites. But 0/10 for pulling at the emotions like a traditional troll does. You're stirring up more confusion than anger.

If you want the book to reach people, maybe you should apply the same persuasive techniques to Costco stores that we've seen in this very thread.

For instance, you might find yourself in a Costco and see a small group of people gathered around telescopes, discussing the many wonders of the universe they hope to see. You could shove your way to the center of their attention and shout about how Costco censors a completely unrelated book! I can think of no finer way to win the respect and admiration of the scientific community.

Damn, that was an incredible volley of logic. I'm convinced.

I think they probably meant GWh/h

You're absolutely right. I was trying to be clever and ended up with an unexpected "+5 Insightful". I assure you, it wasn't my intent to be taken seriously.

We're trying to make smaller and smaller cars out of silicon, because then we can fit more cars onto parking lots. The number of cars we can fit onto a parking lot has been doubling approximately every 18 months for the past half-century, but we appear to be approaching some hard physical limits for the actual size of cars. In addition to the limits imposed by the size of the cars themselves (below a certain size, cars start interacting at a quantum level with the other cars around them), there are also challenges inherent in manufacturing cars at such a tiny scale. There is some new car-making technology on the horizon that may resolve these issues by using higher-frequency car-making lasers in our car foundries. But top researchers still have technical hurdles to pass before they can manufacture cars that are smaller than 7nm.

I once worked in engineering group that also had couple of architects, we called them "farcitechs" and now you all know why

It may seem obvious to you, but I felt you could be clearer on why all your architects joined the People's Army of Columbia.

I'm not sure I follow. If antennas are the most likely thing to be struck by lightning in their immediate area, in what sense don't they "attract lightning"?