You may have been thinking about this... Submarine flatulence along the Hikurangi margin of New Zealand: Linking geochemical methane anomalies in the water column with hydroacoustic evidence of bubble transport, Geophysical Research Abstracts,Vol. 10, EGU2008-A-04390, 2008SRef-ID: 1607-7962/gra/EGU2008-A-04390 EGU General Assembly 2008 Author(s) 2008 K. Faure et al.

My personal favorite: "A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists" by T. Grim in Oikos From the Abstract: .... I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality) ... leisure time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and citation biases.

Douglas Adams had an English degree. What the hell did he know about psychology and information science? He wrote one somewhat-funny book series. Why quote him? What did Leary say about this? Jung? Meade? Wilson? Just because DA said it doesn't make it so. I see plenty of old professors that are far more tuned into to technology and information processing than the twenty-year old students that sit in their classes. It's an overgeneralized stereotype, and a poor one at that. The initial analogy is idiotic in any event. There's a world of difference between the time it takes to assimilate information from a library full of books (ala Gessner; serial-processing - one at a time) and juggling email, a cell phone, tv, the radio, books, journal articles, textbooks, facebook, twitter, podcasts...

At public universities in Florida you simply get an FF (not just an F) for the course. Doesn't look to good on the resume - kind of like a dishonorable discharge - yes, you served, but you don't want to broadcast it. I've only had to give a couple, always in the large first or second year lectures, never in upperclass coursework.

Maybe you sent her the wrong body part. She might have been looking for a pair of something.

Kind of like nailing a mobile home to your nice brick house...it'll give Cousin Eddie someplace *real nice* to stay while visiting.

Dead battery during critical lecture.

I thought it was a contraction of "Go ogle" as a nod to the amount of porn viewed on the internet each day.

The problem is that if you don't spell correctly and use improper grammar (who instead of whom, ain't, etc.), people (at least people that matter) aren't going to take your ideas seriously. Failure to master fundamental communications skills implies a certain degree of intellectual laziness. I'm not talking about a typo on Slashdot, or people trash-talking at a bar - who really gives a shit about that; I'm talking about students or employees that turn in final reports and correspondence filled with spelling errors and obvious grammatical errors.

My first introduction to logic was in high school English, Junior year - it was essentially an introduction to informal logic; how to recognize fallacies, validity, and plain-old critical thinking skills. It was invaluable, and led me to logic and symbolic logic in college. Formal logic (inference) and symbolic logic (useful in the computer field) aren't nearly as valuable as the ability to recognize logical fallacies...that's what everyone should learn before graduating high school. The other types are certainly useful to a subset of people, but I suspect they aren't especially useful in day to day life.

It isn't that simple. Plants don't just convert co2 into o2 through photosynthesis, they also respire, which releases co2. Besides, the fluxes involved will not significantly be affected by "thriving plantlife" (sic), especially seeing that we (humans) are currently cutting down biota faster than it grows (deforestation). Temperature is a moot point anyway; the real problem, to me, is ocean acidification i.e. the largest scale titration of the oceans. Sea water pH is decreasing, and will continue to decrease. The oceans are the cradle of life as well as the planet's lungs. Carbon, and especially carbon dioxide, chemistry is complex and counter-intuitive, especially on global scales. Trying to apply common sense without a solid background (textbook, not Discovery Channel) in the science will lead you astray.

http://www.vernier.com/ makes some outstanding equipment at assorted prices. The Loggerpro software (free 30-day demo, 190 bucks for an unlimited site license), combined with a data logger and a couple instruments (e.g. thermometer and ph meter), total cost maybe...400 dollars...would allow you to run a demonstration experiment, gather the data, distribute it to the students, and then have them analyze it on their own copies of the software (which includes a variety of analysis/graphing/statistical tools). They have a bunch of lesson plans on-line, too.

Alternatively, they could use Frank Herbert's screenplay that he wrote for the original Dune movie (rejected for length; hardly an issue given the length of recent epics). That would arguably be closest to his own vision.

High-speed rail will alleviate all your woes.