How did El Naschie game the system?

According to Elsevier, his impact factor is 3.025, which does seem high compared to Elsevier titles like Advances in Applied Mathematics (founded by Gian-Carlo Rota, who was a respectable mathematician).

It's clear from the samples that El Naschie's articles are complete garbage, and I'm sure no respectable mathematician would want to publish in what's effectively a crackpot's vanity press. This is obviously the scientific journal version of Googlebombing.

So how did he pull this off? Is he citing himself, and if so, where?

While it is possible to extract DNA from feces it is difficult to say whos it is, the DNA and feces.

Well, that's not completely true... you can tell the difference between, say, a cat and a bird. So unless you have a cat that has eaten another cat, this should work for you.

Usually, you need to catch the thing, this is of course hard for rare creatures and it may also incure the rath of the endagered speices act.

Um, no. All you need is a blood sample, and as watching any popular-science nature show will how you, scientists are certainly allowed to take samples from and monitor the populations of endangered species.

Um, what is all this talk about the guy being Japanese?

He may be into anime, but "Le Trung" is not a Japanese name. (Offhand I would guess Vietnamese, but I'm not sure.)

In any case TFA says he is from Ontario, Canada.

Java is compiled Just-in-time, though I don't know about smaller, obscure or embedded platforms.

Not all Java is compiled JIT.

Eutherians being the technically correct name for placental mammals.

Well, technically I don't think Eutheria and placental mammals is *exactly* synonymous. They have different criteria for inclusion, with placentals a subgrouping of Eutheria. It's just that there are no living non-placental eutherians.

Dinosaurs and mammals did not coexist. There were some small rat-sized reptiles who were gradually evolving from scales to fur, but they did not take-over until after the dinosaurs were wiped out

No, you're wrong. The first mammals were alive long before 65 million years ago, and even the first placental mammals precede the dinosaurs.

Before the K-T extinction, most of them were believed to be small scurrying critters, but that is not to say they weren't mammals. See for example the Wikipedia categories Triassic mammals, Jurassic mammals, and Cretaceous mammals.

And some of them weren't so small: take a look at Repenomamus.

Anyway, I mean no offence by this and I commend your interest in paleontology, but you would do well to not rely on vague impressions from television specials when citing facts like these. A lot of this info is also checkable with a couple Google queries.

Watch the BBC's "Before the Dinosaurs" to get a better idea of how life evolved on earth. There's basically two "families" of animals and they keep alternating in dominance. First one is dominant, then the other, and then the first comes back to prominence. Next time a major extinction happens, it might be the dinosaurs/birds that take over the planet.

Um, no, that's just your interpretation, presumably taken from the fact that the mammal-like reptiles were "dominant" before the dinosaurs, and they are more closely related to us than were the dinosaurs.

But before that, it was other reptiles which for all we know *may* be more related to us. And before that it was random giant amphibians which are equally distant from us and all other reptiles.

In any case, this narrative about "dominance" is a complete misinterpretation of evolutionary history and suggests you're trying to project some kind of modern military idea of "dominance". It's misleading to just look at apex predators and big vertebrates and think of them as "dominant"... by another equally defensible standard, cockroaches have been dominant for the last 200 million years!

You mean it's actually possible to be more of a socialist for Alaska than Ted Stevens?!

You do know that to be an actual socialist (as opposed to a cable-news caricature of one), you have to do more than just spend bucketloads of money on any random thing, right?

Now, I am going to come off sending sexist here but men go into engineering because it's an economically viable way to live their lives while women go into liberal arts because they're "fun".

Sexist and wrong, to boot. I went into computer science because it's fun. Sure it happens to pay the bills, but I assure you that was not what I was thinking of when I was seventeen. (I did a double-major with pure math because that was fun too, though thus far less commercially applicable.)

Of course people *do* choose liberal arts and engineering on economic motives. But asserting that *everyone* does it, and furthermore that there is a clear gender split on this basis, is simply wrong.

You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.

The GP was not complaining that computer scientists get paid more, but noting that complaints about gender imbalance are more likely to be made here because it's a high-income industry.

Apparently even Jesus had a sense of humour. "Peter you are my rock" is probably the most famous pun in the world (Peter = rock).

Dude, he was called Peter (Petrus in Latin, Cephas in Greek, both meaning "rock") *because* the J-Man said he was his rock?

This is like saying that Snoop Dogg appearing in music videos with a canine companion is a clever pun.

The jurisdictional variety pretty much stems from the foundation of our country and the various states that it is comprised of.

Sure, I'm not debating the cause. Canada has its share of historical peculiarities also (e.g. a totally separate legal code in Quebec, an appointed Senate) but this at least one case where the Canadian system seems transparently better, and that was my main point. (Lest you think I'm just speaking from habit or bias, I can certainly think of others where our system is not better.)

Each soldier is provided with the list of candidates and a ballot, and you go behind the little cardboard screen and write in the candidate's name you want. That gets put in an envelope with the riding information on it, and the whole kit and kaboodle is mailed off back to Ottawa.

This is possible because in Canada we actually have a nationally standardized election system. I can never get over how in the U.S. they defer so much stuff to the state and even to the county level, from hours of voting to seriously important administrative decisions. With so many different elected officials at so many levels all intervening in the system, there's serious potential for corruption there.

As far as I know, there have never been any serious accusations of vote fraud with Elections Canada.