When I was on Facebook, I didn't friend anyone unless I actually *knew* the person. If you friend someone on Facebook just because they friended you and you want a really big number of friends, well... the joke is probably on you.

''catastrophic,' 'complete devastation likely,' and 'unsurvivable,'" I think these words accurately describe the effect that their new, scary vocabulary choices will have on their credibility. Really, no matter how dramatic your warning is, some people are just going to think they can tough it out - has far more to do with the temperament of the person than with specific verbiage. Getting all hysterical might motivate a few more people in the short term, but long run it makes you look silly and might even lead otherwise sensible people to ignore your warnings.

Robert E Howard and all the original Conan books are pretty good (well, if you like the old stuff, which it seems you do!). Maybe you were looking for something more obscure, though.

Unanswered but interesting question - where did these extremophiles come from? Are we looking at evolution on a very short time frame (plausible for microorganisms) or are there actually very small numbers of these critters drifting around all the time, just looking for a toxic, acidic lake they can call home?

If the idea is to post a bunch of useless information about yourself, then I suppose it has some effect (bores anyone who is just poking around in your info for no reason). But obviously, anyone who really wants to know stuff about you can either wade through the cruft or else employ datamining tools (as already mentioned) to get what they're after. Now, *maybe* the idea is to create the illusion of transparency while actually carefully omitting some stuff that you really don't want online. In that case, fine... but for most, doing it this way seems harder than just not posting much stuff online in the first place. I guess if the government is already after you, like they were after this guy, then it makes sense.

'No scientific evidence that it's harmful' is overbroad. In the tiny amounts present in vaccines, it may be OK. The MSDS is still pretty scary, though! See: http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9925236 . Mutagenic, repeated exposure may cause organ damage, etc. Organomercury compounds are no fun, really.

By treating the lawn as a set of circular areas of radius equal to the mower disc, they eliminate all possible routes that would involve driving the mower on some path other than vertex to vertex. And I expect it would not be hard to construct a lawn where the best path involved just such a route. As constructed I think the problem is actually kind of boring (which is not to say I can solve it!); it would be more interesting if they had come up with some way to attack the optimization problem without turning it into something out of graph theory.

...when you're a Cabinet member. Even when your paper is pure theoretical wanking rather than any practical application of your idea.