The biologist E.O Wilson was famous for the idea of consilience, where instead of specializing in one field you look for the unity of knowledge and the synthesis of science and the humanities.
This graph of academic disciplines shows the fragmentation of academia, measured by co-citations. A kingdom of epiphanies is waiting for the people who can find new ways to connect the dots, filling in the donut hole.
The Bignum Bakeoff was a competition held in the early 1990s to determine the best software library for performing arithmetic operations on very large integers. The aim was to write a C programme with ≤512 characters that would return the largest possible number, assuming a computer with infinite resources.
The competition was won by Ralph Loader, a Kiwi. The output of his program, loader.c, is in fact one of the largest numbers known.
Source: Googology Wiki, and my often-esoteric colleague from MoE
The Nature Index ‘Big 5’—the United States, China, Germany, United Kingdom and Japan—are at the heart of a web of global academic partnerships. Together, these five countries were responsible for almost 70% of the output in 82 natural-sciences journals tracked by the index.
Although the strongest relationships are within the Big 5 group, they are not necessarily each other’s biggest partners. Japan is the outlier, with Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom all collaborating more with France than they do with Japan.
There was some controversy in 2001 when the Labour government disbanded the RNZAF air combat force. The Government also cancelled a $1B deal to acquire F-16s after reviewing the deal. At the time the decision to disband the combat force was opposed by ACT, National, and many inside the RNZAF.
Last summer I worked with someone who worked on the review of the F16 aircraft. He said that the RNZAF actually hadn’t had airstrike capability for years before the review because they lacked the supporting plans to get planes into combat. They were unusable because there wasn’t the operational management to support the pilots who were combat trained. They didn’t mention this in the report, but it would have been useless to acquire even more expensive jets only for them too to sit idle while operations struggled to maintain plans for the equipment they already had in inventory.