I first thought of Edison, but then it occurred to me that this was actually Tesla's approach...

Huh, haven't you forgotten Riau Indonesian?

Bah, I didn't even know this guy ever lived, much less that he died. I guess that biology is simply a more familiar topic to me. Well, don't let the Doors hit you on the way out.

But you've only asked for engineering projects. I don't know where you live, but when I look around, most engineering projects contracted by the government have nothing to do with any kind of R&D at all.

Hello, this is Prenda Law. It has come to our attention that you've been watching Prenda-lawyer's-hard-first-day-in-prison porn without having paid for it. Please kindly send $4,500 to our bank account or we'll have to tell your neighbors about it.

You must be religious. You know, one of those people whose brain works along the lines of "It's good that we have God to send us to hell if we murdered someone; imagine how many people would go on a killing rampage if there were no God - I know I would!".

That's funny, I've always called it "peer pressure". What's the difference?

Mummifying a mountain must have been difficult. Also, trace amounts of arsenic in copper are fairly common - it's a regular copper ore admixture; but I was referring to intentional alloying.

What I meant is that such a long-lasting blade probably will be difficult to hone into a falling-silk-cutting edge. But then again, you don't do that often in battle, do you?

I thought that the kinds of steel that are difficult to blunt (= take longer to get dull) are also difficult to sharpen. As in, I have a kitchen knife that is fairly easy to shapen into a very keen edge, but it also gets dull fairly quickly and needs to be sharpened quite frequently.

That might have been an alloy of copper with arsenic. Also, I wonder how much time it took them to build those structures. Given enough people and time, you can do anything. If you're interested in how many new houses you can build for new families with the smallest number of construction workers, chances are that working granite for dry masonry with diorite is not exactly the preferred technique.

If you were the last of yout kind, would you want to be alone? Oh, wait, that doesn't make sense...

Actually, no. In, that case, my post would read "CONJECTURECONJECTURECONJECTURECONJECTURE..." etc., which it doesn't.

It's not a matter of number of inhabitants (you still living in the 1950's? I mean, Europe has something like 7.5e8 people living in it at the moment), it's a matter of the size of the continent and the prevailing meteorological and climatic patterns, the size of the weather systems travelling over the continent, and simple statistics.

I think you missed the "we need a better grid" part of my post. You also missed the part where I observe that the wind and solar contributions to the grid can be anticipated (and acted upon in advance) if you have real time meteo sat coverage (as in, you can predict the insolation and winds). To anticipate, BTW, if you don't understand Latin, means "not letting anyone catch you with your pants down". I don't believe anyone is doing that kind of data feedback right now, therefore problems - how difficult is that to comprehend?

In a point installation, the same size as the dam? You can't. But averaging the wind power from a geographically larger area (the whole of Germany might just be large enough, but barely, I guess) ought to smooth thing up a little bit...that is, ONCE the distribution grids are smart enough to handle that. Right now, I don't think the infrastructure is ready for it. Also, you need a good predictive model to anticipate the changes. Again, something yet to be done. Oh, and there's this silly stuff called "national borders" to complicate the building of the smart grid. Oh, hell...