"In 1944, while at a railway station he started chatting with a stranger who turned out to be an engineer who worked on ENIAC."
I thought this was precisely the kind of careless talk people were told to avoid during wartime.
That doesn't sound quite like the Balboa I was taught, where the contact is at the top of the chest (and along the arms and hands of course) and the partners are slightly offset to the side to avoid shin kicking and toe trampling. As you say, the footwork is very rapid and the hold is close - perfect for fast tunes and crowded dancefloors - but no hip mashing that I recall.
As far as I recall, QCD gives you a nice simple formula - a path integral over quantum operators - for any quantity you want. Lattice QCD works out the answer with great big Monte-Carlo integration.
The tricky bit is defining a field theory on a finite discrete space-time lattice that is provably equivalent to the continuum theory after controlled extrapolations to the continuum. And you have to show that you can define the correct operators in the lattice theory that really do give the quantities you want. Then you need to implement this in code that runs blazingly fast over huge data sets.
These considerations, and the fact that there are all sorts of solutions to these problems which might supported by a code base, tend to make code implementations complicated.
A London taxi driver explained to me back in the 1980's how he liked fares from clubs where boys wore make-up because anyone who has spent three hours crimping and back-combing and spraying their hair is unlikely to want to risk damaging it by having a fight.
Being at the front and facing the orchestra, a conductor can also balance the volume of the various sections. An orchestra is usually large enough that when you are sitting in one bit you cannot judge your volume relative to others.
The author says "the least likely element of this scenario is that Kellogg's will bring back free gifts". I have at home a bunch of squashy balls, eagerly sought by my son, from Kellog's Frosties from the time of Six Nations Rugby tournament this year. Does she know something I don't?
Having worked in a university mathematics department I noticed that the pure mathematicians tended to keep themselves to themselves, for instance not attending talks by visiting mathematicians unless it was of direct relevance to their research. In contrast, we theoretical physicists would listen to any visiting speaker just for fun - even on occasion experimental particle physicists, applied mathematicians or computing specialists.
Perhaps pure maths is just more deeply specialised and leaves no possibility of such dilettanteism.
I am suprised that there was only one. I knew someone who kept ferrets (to catch rabbits for her hawk) and was told that, as social animals, being kept in isolation would send them crazy, while all-female groups didn't get along well.
Was spaying Felicia not an option in 1971?