Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).
Wasn't he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.
It's fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The "head with arms and legs" stage seems universal, and amusing.
The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.
The soul of the recently deceased can be contained using high voltages. Care should, however, be taken with grounding, to avoid accidental soul transfer.
Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren't actually that bad.
The problem is, we can't detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won't recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.
"You (complete) pillock!" is an often used insult for someone who's just done something idiotic or stupid.
I can definitely see dicksplash being used as an insult down the pub.
Fuckletoes is in a weird dead zone. It's far too poncey for working class use, but far too crass for the toffs.
The rest I've heard used before.
Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.
A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn't just luck out with the moon's large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.
I don't think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to "specialised generalists" would be a major hurdle.
Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.
Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.
I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.
And that's why it's currently a problem. There's not enough buyers, and not enough capability to switch supply in and out.
Without the price incentives to build large scale storage, it hasn't been done. The problem is that there is a delay between needing the storage, and it actually being built at scale.
One of Sir Issac Newton's famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!