Thanks for all the fish, indeed (ATM that is a tag of this story).

I started reading /. about one year after I had my first internet connection (A 14k modem which I shared with about 100 people such that 40B/s (yes, bytes, not kilo bytes) was considered to be quite fast and downloading the newest winamp (about 1MB) was quite challenging) but registered for an account much later which spoiled my ID. I think it was about the first useful thing I found on the Internet. Since then I read /. almost every day. It will be a tough change if one day there will be no /. (as we knew it) anymore.

Thanks a lot for starting and managing this site

Unfortunately I do not have a reference handy but some time ago I read about a study that found the exact opposite of what you claim. The result was that even rich people are happier in countries where the range of wealth is relatively narrow than in countries with a large inequality. They argued that your perceived risk of becoming poor contributes to your stress

The way it was done ruined it for a long time if not forever where it would have been easy avoid this mistake. They should have given the engineeres enough money to research bridge building for a few decades. During that time they could have performed experiments on a few experimental tree bridges and later stone bridges. Many safty nets and standby rescue boats could have been used for those research bridges until they had figured out all possible dangers and how to mitigate them. Then after maybe 50 or 100 years they could have started increadibly safe commercial bridges without the need for all the expensive safty nets and boats that are much too expensive for a widespread use but that are not necessary any more. From then on everybody would like those handy new bridges that make river crossings both easier and safer. Because bridges are supposed to be used for the next couple thousand years, it is completely irrelevant that the first commercial bridge would have been delayed by maybe 100 years compared to the approach that actually happened.

that is, ... almost as loud as dropping a frying pan. Very impressive.

* According to Google Scholar it is cited 2461 times

With high quality fine clay you could probably make 50 bits per square centimeter including ECC. If we make the panels 50 by 50 centimeter this amounts to about 16 kB per panel. Let them be 1 cm thick including padding. Wikipedia says that the Library of congress has 1200 km of shelves which means it could hold about 2 TB. Compared to the estimate of 20 TB it is holding now this is only one order of magnitude lower. Maybe it would be worthwile to backup everything in clay.

I do not have numbers but I would think is is well above 80 percent. Although most people in germany have learned some english in school, I do not think most of them are proficient enough to follow anything but very simple stories. More or less technical articles on Wikipedia are certainly out of reach for most

Then again, I consider the fact that we have so many different languages on this planet somewhat of a curse(are you listening, Babylonians?). I see very little added value and a ton of effort to ensure we can communicate with one another.

Communicating is certainly a problem. On the other hand it was proven time and again that the language you speak shapes the way you think about the world. That is, as we are losing more and more languages (which I think is inevitable as we are more closely connected than ever before) we also reduce our chances that somebody somewhere gets a really helpful idea

and in the same list with "watching grass grow"