Actually, "out of Earth's gravity well" would truly be the "edge of space", i.e., infinitely far away. As I understand, the biggest problem in getting to space is to spend as little time as possible in the deepest part of the well, because, going straight up, maintaining that altitude costs a lot of power. But if the structure is self-supporting, then you can hoist up your fuel and payload using more efficient means, since you don't have to actively maintain your altitude. It's called "gravity drag". I'm not really up on the numbers, but the first 10% costs you a helluva lot more fuel than the "last" 10%, for most values of $destination.

Well this is closer to "universality", which is a concept in field theory and condensed matter physics, in which the "atomic" characteristics of a system are largely irrelevant to its macroscopic properties, save for specifying a few parameters like viscosity or resistivity. Unlike your differential equation example, the equations for both are very different and non-trivial. When you start enumerating differential equations starting from the simplest you can write down, the harmonic oscillator, heat equation, diffusion equation and so forth pop out right away. You'll be writing for a long time before 11D supergravity equations of motion pop out.

From context I gather that the author of the book *review* is a man.

Many women are interested in using technology, they just don't want to dive in to quite the same depth. Or they may not be interested in the way most men approach it.

Or... and I'm going out on a limb here... many women don't want men telling them what they want. "Just don't want to dive into quite the same depth"? Dear lord.

Weird. I plugged my KRZR into my monitor and it charged just fine. Only later did I install drivers to get mass storage to work.

You'd have to watch for atomic scale foxes, which will tunnel right through to your chickens.

AFAIK, this is essentially the script paradigm of AI, which is fine to augment intelligence (we do it all the time), but without learning, it is quite expensive, and susceptible to the Chinese Room argument.