My column Tuesday about the possibility of having a Stirling engine power part of a state-owned building has generated more online discussion that anything I’ve ever written, I believe – more than three dozen comments from two dozen people at the moment, and they’re still trickling in. It’s also produced four times the page views of anything I’ve done on this blog since I started keeping track (I had a couple pieces Slashdotted a few years ago, but I wasn’t counting page views then).
The best part is that the discussion has been very high level, the way early Internet pioneers imagined they would be: polite and informed and intelligent, conducted by grown-ups instead of the nasty pre-adolescents who usually populate comments on news articles. Not a single mention of politics (woo-hoo!) nor personal insults. Check them out and learn something about units of energy and power and the history of Stirling engines.
Actually, my comment about insults isn’t quite correct. I just approved a comment listing various energy technologies that includes this sentence: “My take on Brooks (D) is that he’s not capable of understanding much.” (No, I’m not a Democratic office-holder – that was a joke about my name listed as D Brooks)
If you insult other commenters, your comment won’t appear, but you can insult me all you want as long as you have something else to say.
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