"Dean Hoffman" wrote in message
...
On 2/18/03 1:47 AM, in article , "Oz"
wrote:

Never read that group, and don;t read sci.physics any more. Too many
kooks, I remember Archi in his prime (shudder). I moved to a rather more
demanding group, where I seem to be kept as a pet.

We have discussed special relativity on UBA, though.
Which was quite fun.

I had a dummy attack. The one I look at is sci.physics. Don Sheade is
still posting his stuff about mass and units of measurement. Arch is into
his Fusion Barrier Law. I really liked one of Archie's previous ideas.
He
wanted agriculture to go to muscle power instead of diesel power. Much
more
efficient, you know. Now if we can just get the big city people to pull
farm equipment around manually we'll be set. 150 horsepower tractors are
fairly common in my area. I think a human in good shape can put out about
about 1/3 horsepower. Let's see, 150 divided by 3 equals 450 people
equals
900 feet compacting the ground.

We had a grad student from Ethiopia doing a maters project on improving the
wooden plow that is often pulled by humans in his country. We tried very
hard to get his advisor to pull the plow for a picture opportunity.

We also had a difficult time building the plow and getting it to work. There
is more to one than there appears to be and modern methods couldn't do much
to improve it either. The only thing we could do was use a wider point for a
few days after a rain than they do. But the price of steel over there is
such that the sweep is about 5 times as expensive as the point they use. The
point they use is not that much different than the narrow chisel point on a
chisel plow. It is just not reversible.

Gordon