Viewing profile — Merrill

By being deported, Qian Xuesen was thrust into an environment where he was able to succeed. Had he been allowed to stay in the US, he may have had a brilliant career as a scientist…

Now that the California refineries are shutting down, where does LA get asphalt to do the paving? Has the price gone up due to having to import it from the Gulf Coast?

There are lots of sensors in a data center monitoring everything from CPU/GPU temperatures to drive health to data volumes to chiller operation to voltage and frequency on the inpu…

Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service New York NY 344 PM EST Fri Feb 20 2026 Issued by NWS Upton, NY https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=O... Con…

Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the ability to fantasize - to think about things that don't exist. In particular, it is fantasy about the "self". AI is getting close.

It doesn't appear to be equivalent. If one site in a stretched cluster becomes suddenly available, the same batch processing application would not be running on the alternative sit…

Are there ARM or Intel servers capable of the reliability and availability of the Z-Series in Parallel Sysplex operation where processing can continue uninterrupted even if one of …

Which language would you convert the COBOL to that has a compiler that compiles to the Z-series' fixed and floating decimal type machine instructions for financial calculations?

Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and la…

Very interesting that it did so well. Although it did leave out the point that reading and interpreting documents could also be done by an expert in the first paragraph as well as …

With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to cre…

Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells. Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into i…

Rather than trying to draw policy conclusions from an epidemiological study like this, wouldn't it be more accurate to give drivers measured amounts of THC, put them in a driving s…

The internet took every Cliff Clavin out of his neighborhood bar and gave him a global platform. Society wasn't ready for what had been private discussions to become public.

At the time PC's came to market, High Fidelity music systems still were built from components such as preamps, amplifiers, turntables, FM tuners, tape decks, CD players, and speake…

There is evidence that the ranking of students in order of who should get the best entry-level jobs is done mainly by the college admissions process which bins students into more o…

An old, unopened bottle of wine is like Schrödinger's cat - it may be alive; it may be dead.

1870 sees the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, and the reorganization of continental politics. The US is in dynamic industrial and Western…

The Sud Aviation Caravelle first flew in 1955 and entered revenue service in 1959. It was a small airliner with two engines in the rear. Although the Caravelle was retired in 2005,…

A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of polit…

A relative worked at home doing medical transcription. It was not unheard of for physicians to make up non-existent body parts, non-existent drugs, etc. Part of her job was to corr…

Why wouldn't any reasonably good AI be able to replicate large portions of the US Army TM 31-210 "Improvised Munitions Handbook"?

MPEG's patent policy was not its own. The Moving Picture Experts Group was Working Group 11 of Sub Committee 2 of ISO-IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. Other Working Groups in SC2 w…

Due to chromosome crossover, you do not inherit genes individually from ancestors, but instead you inherit segments of chromosomes containing many genes. However, the randomness is…

Migration and reassortment events in the US would include depopulation of Appalachian coal fields, the migration of farm kids from rural counties as farm size increased, and core c…