The second link doesn't go to a login page for me.

All of Matematica, Maple, and MathCAD have had their own worksheet/document formats since the mid-90s at least. They have gone through many incarnations but I believe all of them now support embedding code, graphics, marked-up text, etc. Maple's Document format certainly does.

Exactly what is new about this, other than a new name and, well, further grist for Stephen Wolfram's publicity mill?

Is the idea simply to have a thin-client reader and offload most of the computation to remote servers? Because if so then that is the innovation, not some new document format.

I guess people like the chance of getting lucky occasionally, even at the cost of utility (average wait time) and fairness?

Yes, people, and monkeys too!

I find it hard to believe no one is asking exactly why the defendants son is creeping around looking up jurors from his father's trial on Facebook.

For all we know the juror in question mentioned the defendant's name in her FB post and it came up when the kid was Googling the defendant's name.

While the rest of the bird kingdom in NZ devolved their wings, the world's biggest eagle, The Haast Eagle enjoyed the easy life, often making short work of the Moa from time to time.

I read something once where a scientist was conjecturing about what the first interaction between a human and a Haast Eagle, a raptor adapted to carry off and eviscerate 2-meter tall bipeds, must have been like.

[Proto-Maori guy stepping out of seafaring canoe]
Wow, nice island. Hey, what the hell is that?

(was it 1953? don't feel like looking it up)

1955. Don't ask me why I remember that.

Because for all those years student have not noticed that he or she is lactose-intolerant. Yeah, sure.

Frequently you only develop lactose intolerance later in life, though the eventual onset of that intolerance can be inferred from your DNA.

Replacing the vowel in profanity with some other character doesn't fool anyone. Everyone knows still you're swearing.

Back in the late 90s there was a play out called Shopping and Fucking. I remember an article in the Globe and Mail summarizing all the various ways the name of this play was rendered in newpapers around the world. Some were bold enough to print the title in full, some resorted to "Shopping and F*cking" or "Shopping and F***ing", and one very delicately never gave to the play's name explicitly but described its name as combining "shopping and a profane expression".

My favourite was some Australian newspaper which gave the title as "Sh***ing and F***ing".

The beauty of these meaningless abbreviations is that people can think you're swearing when you're not. :)

From the very link you provided:

The letters C (sé, [sj]), Q (kú, [ku]) and W (tvöfalt vaff, [tvoefalt vaf]) are only used in Icelandic in words of foreign origin and some proper names that are also of foreign origin.

Carne Adovada, right here in New Mexico.

Isn't "carne adovada" Spanish for "marinated meat"? If I understand correctly from the Wikipedia article it's mostly an American dish by virtue of the Mexican-American War and continuing Mexican cultural influence.

If in this food contest the British got to claim any random dish from territory their conquered over the years, I'm sure they would have a lot more to draw from (e.g. all Indian food).

I know several Canadian citizens who moved to the states in a large part to escape the inferior national healthcare system up north. I suppose if you work part time at McDonalds, government run health care seems like a good idea, but if you have a job where you can actually afford real healthcare, it's terrible.

Amazing isn't it, how everyone has an ex-girlfriend's former roommate's Canadian cousin who has some unpleasant anecdote the public health care system, isn't it? I almost wonder sometimes if these are all the same person.

Well, I am Canadian. And I can say that while our system isn't perfect I honestly can't see it being vastly inferior to whatever you have down there, unless maybe you get wine & cheese and digital television in every waiting room.

I'm still fairly young with no major health problems, but of course I have friends and relatives have had serious medical issues (e.g. heart attacks, liver & stomach trouble, cancer) and by all accounts got perfectly acceptable treatment. Of course we have the occasional scandal: for example some doctors in Newfoundland a few years ago misdiagnosed a lot of breast biopsies, missed a number of cancer cases, and some women died, but that was pure incompetence and there's no obvious reason why a private system would've avoided that.

Canadian immigrants to the U.S. are not a statistically valid sampling of the Canadian population. I have a friend who's now in the U.S. who badmouths our healthcare system regularly, but that has more to do with his being a libertarian than from any actual bad experience, which he grudgingly admitted to after a long argument.

About 8 percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors

Not at all what TFA says. Sure, originally we must have had ancestors without any viral DNA, but unless the virus infected us personally and not any ancestor, the 8% of genetic material comes from a virus and from our ancestors.

So, do you ever get an American quarter in your change and think "Sweet, an American quarter". Until you try to use it in a vending machine.

Well, the Canadian dollar is now trading at 94.109 cents US, according to xe.com. So an American quarter would get me... an extra 1.5 cents. And unless you're going to the States, you won't have anyplace to use it except as a substitute for a Canadian quarter, so meh...

In the brief bit back in 2007 when our dollar was trading above yours, it was hilarious to suddenly see people demanding to pay the American price at bookstores. They had never realized that they were getting screwed before then, even though you always could have taken the U.S. price and multiplied it by whatever the conversion ratio was at the moment and ALWAYS end up with something lower than the Canadian price. It was a pretty savage indictment of Canadian numeracy.

You make a good point about not being a jerk. Honestly, I have found that once one displays a marginal degree of deep knowledge about some subject but makes a mistake, there are no shortage of "experts" willing to jump in and humiliate the poor bastard. It's as though they're delighted to find an opponent worthy enough to fight but weak enough to defeat.

All that said, Eritrea was in the news a lot in the 80s and 90s owing to its independence war against Ethiopia. That war has a lot to do with the state of politics in the Horn of Africa ever since, and is sort of the model for the attempted secession of Somaliland from neighboring Somalia. I think the fact that the name of Eritrea is not well known is a travesty on the part of the media, and I think that anyone who regards themselves as well-informed on current events should feel embarrassment at not knowing the name of every current nation-state. There are a lot of them, sure, but knowing them is the price you pay for the title "well-informed".

Well at least Australia is doing better than Canada. Those poor sods drive on the wrong side *and* use the metric system on their roads.

And on top of that we have French as one of our official languages.

Nous sommes vraiment des moutons perdus!