There was a electromagnetic simulation software called Ansoft-HFSS. Most structures it dealt with were IC chips, packages, PCBs and antennae. Most of these were drawn in microns, or mils (milli inches, don't ask), mm or at the most in meters. But the drop down box for unit selection went all the way to light years. I thought must be some inside joke, some user must have complained some unit was not available and the developer, in a fit of indignation, must have added every damned length units he/she could find. Now it makes sense. You can use that software to simulate black holes gobbling up stars.

Actually it is a lot more funny than this. You are only looking at crony capitalism of railroads. Expand your horizons to include transportation in general.

In the 1700s canals were the big thing. A nearly bankrupt Brit baron built a canal to deliver his coal to a harbor and became fantastically rich. Then there was this canal building boom. Eminent domain to take land and give to canal companies, tax incentives, tax abatements. Lots of speeches about how canals are going to create jobs and development would pass the city by, unless the poor, the unwashed and the indigent chip in to pay taxes. Canals were built. Early canals really created prosperity. But almost all the late canal extensions were boondoggles.

Then the railroads came in. The canal companies hated the railroad companies. Canal towns created stumbling block for the railroads. Local ordnances, zoning rules, misinformation campaigns. Rail roads passed the canal towns by. You can still see quaint little abandoned villages and hamlets all along the Erie canal untouched by progress. Rail road barons, who were canal barons earlier, ran the same damned schemes all over again. They got so egregious their exploits are more remembered than their fore runners in the canal era.

What is history if it does not repeat itself. When Eisenhower kicked off the interstate highway construction boom, the railroad towns fought the highways tooth and nail. But high ways also had powerful cronies based on the illegal cartel of Firestone, Ford Motor Company and Standard Oil. So railroads towns did not win completely. But there are hundreds of railroad towns like Altoona PA that made sure no high ways come close to them. Altoona with its location on strategic location in the Appalachia is still holding on to rail roads because almost all the East-West rail road traffic must go through that town. But it made sure I-76 came nowhere near it. Till data all auto traffic between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh curve sixty miles south to avoid Altoona. https://www.google.com/maps/@4... (The mountains in between are not the issue. All the railroads go through Altoona. The passage has been graded ages ago, with bridges too. Would have been cheaper to build the new highway through Altoona. But the resurrected the old turn pike)

America has always been afflicted by this crony capitalism. But our Democracy was bringing sanity and regression to the mean, till about 1980s. Then Reagan came, and they perfected the art, nay science, of persuading folks like our friend roman_mir to vote against their own self interest. No wonder we are going down the drain now.

This was one for the first exercises done in Introduction to Computing 201, using a random number generator to find the value of PI. I did it in FORTRAN back in the days with punch cards in IBM370/155. Recently I did it again to teach myself MPI. This is a basic exercise in Probability and Statistics course. Once can draw a circle in fly paper. The number of bugs caught inside the circle to total number of bugs caught would be approximately PI/4. But that would get you a better headline, "Bugs commit suicide to tell us the value of PI".

First episode is already done. Second, "Your Inner Reptile" is next Tuesday. I have read the book, so I know what is coming. Truth be told, I was very surprised to see Charles Koch foundation funding a real science documentary in the liberal bastions PBS and NOVA.

German hasthishabit of squishingtogethermanywordswithoutanyblanksbeween and creatingnewwordsbytheverysameprocess. It is a bigsurprisethegermanscouldread anythingatall inthefirstplace.

Did you know Charles Koch funded the PBS-Nova documentary "Your Inner Fish" by the prominent evolutionist Neil Shubin, Prof, Univ of Chicago, explains the vestiges of fish anatomy in our bodies as artifacts of evolution?

My point is, unless we have rules, regulation and the damned government interference, private sector would not deliver prosperity. My point is, it is not a coincidence, the rise of prosperity for the middle class coincided with increasing regulation starting with trust busting, disclosure in stock market, truth in advertising, truth in labeling, product liability laws.

We have known this since the days of Adam Smith, but till about 1960s, the private sector preferred to invest in the developed world, and the third world figured only as a source of raw materials, not competition. Then Japan modernized, then Korea and Taiwan, then came other countries in the Pacific rim. By 1980s the interests of private sector and interests of the general population started diverging. We are still trying deal with the multinational private sector corporations using the lessons learned between 1780 and 1960, without giving due credit for the role of government regulation played in it.

Efficiency in private sector is defined to be maximizing the return on investment. Private sector efficiency is NOT delivering goods and services at the least cost to most people. If that is the *only* way to maximize the return on investment, they will do it. It happens on simple products like cereal, bread, milk etc. For private sector to deliver most at least cost, many conditions have to be met. There must be competition, product should be simple enough to be understood by the consumer to do value over price evaluation and there should unambiguous price feedback signal.

But private sector efficiency of maximizing return on investment would also include, undermining competition by buying them out, collusion, cartel formation, lobbying the legislators, media misinformation campaigns, bribing the media personalities, intimidating critics and many other tactics. Some of it legal, some questionable, and some outright illegal.

If we confuse the private sectors definition of "maximize return on investment", even after they have openly admitted "it is the fiduciary responsibility of the directors of corporations to maximize profit", with lofty goals like job creation, low prices, wide choices, improvement in living conditions, we are the fools, shame on us, not them.

My supreme skill is calculating the intersections of triangles with tetrahedrons with highest possible accuracy at the lowest computational cost. I am sure there is a job for me in the post apocalyptic world. But, in the odd chance there isn't, I certainly will be useful, may be as food.

I mean this is a free market economy pal. The markets have spoken. They have declared the professor to be worth about 140K a year. On the other hand the market is blessing Becks and Limbaughs with millions of dollars a year. Clearly they must be 10 or 100 times smarter than the professors, right? So you should just accept the pearls of wisdom hurled your way by the Rileys, Hannitys, Huckabees etc. If you could not trust someone who roasted squirrels in a pop-corn maker in the dorm, who could you trust?

All these so called scientists, spend 4 years in bachelors degree, 2 more for masters and four or five years to get a PhD. Work for about 80K a year median wage. They create these scare mongering stories to gin up grant money, totally untrustworthy.

On the other hand the media consultants employed by the billionaire owners of coal, oil, petroleum companies and investments in forestry products have absolutely no conflict of interest and they speak the original unvarnished truth.

I mean, who would you trust? Some one who is smart enough to make millions of dollars working for billionaires? Or the fools who spend so much of time studying and ending up working for a pittance? If these so called scientists are so smart why aren't they billionaires and millionaires? Shows who is smart and who you should listen to.

Yup. I can tell.

Or find a 65 year old ex mayor and teach him coal mining.

Everyone knows real programmers code in C, and in C you count from zero. Counting from one? that is so FORTRAN. Retire already, old chap.

Enough said. As more and more people become familiar with it, people would realize how easy it is to code. The standard canard has been women don't code, or they don't code well. We have hired women coders and they do as good a job as men.