Oh man, this is one of my favorite lines of all time:
> "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"
> "Geostatisticians..."
> "--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."
I adore when experts use their expertise to analyze real-world things like this and provide ridiculously thorough explanations :-D
My favorite story kinda of this nature, of an expert as alien intelligence, was Feynmann's calculations about computer architecture of the Connection Machine:
It's a few paragraphs, maybe too much to quote, but the bulk of it starts with:
> By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. [...] Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.
Guess who was right.
The whole essay is worth reading, if you haven't yet.
> "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"
> "Geostatisticians..."
> "--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."
I adore when experts use their expertise to analyze real-world things like this and provide ridiculously thorough explanations :-D