Darn, have they already taken that title too? I thought I had a winner after getting turned down for "Call of Booty: Black Ops" and "Call of Booty: Big Red 1".

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I thought I had seen some proposals for water injection where the water was only injected during full-power operation, where it would help keep the combustion chamber cool, and boiling the water would put more combustion energy into mechanical work instead of just heat. I agree that using it full-time would have its drawbacks.

Is this like Settlers of Catan, only instead of a sheep port, you have a hobbit port? "I'll get wood for two hobbits," indeed.

The guys in the unicorn paddock are fine; they just ride the animals in and lock the doors. It's the god-damned leprechaun valet parking attendents that are the problem. Half the time you have like ten "mystery miles" on the car, or a fresh ding in the bumper.

I'm not sure how "fast" fast enough is. Assuming the Wikipedia article you cite is accurate, Schon received his PhD and was hired by Bell Labs in 1997. He submitted his fraudulent papers over several years, and a committe was set up to investigate discrepancies in 2002, and submitted its report that year showing how Schon had lied. So in roughly five years, the peer-review system did its task to uncover deliberate, premeditated fraud in the field of basic semiconductor research. That seems like a reasonable time to me, given the nature of the research, and the time required to properly document failures to reproduce results and cross-check data. From the sound of things, the fraud may have not been that complicated, basically reusing the same graphs in different papers with different labels, so you would have hoped it would have been caught sooner. I'm not familiar enough with the case to know if Schon was careful to reuse graphs in papers in widely different journals to minimize the possibility of someone seeing the identical graph twice.

Yes, it would have been better if the fraud was caught sooner, but I'm not sure how you would do it, short of something hella expensive like instituing a two-man rule for all research positions everywhere, and demanding independant experiemental validation of all papers before they can be published.

Is _that_ what the kids are calling it these days?

Don't worry, your teacher's an idiot. Aside from their obvious failures in instruction: that is, the teacher should have explicitly asked for a discussion of the symbolism inherent in the southward journey in Huck Finn, instead of the broader question of just why did Huck and Jim go south; the teacher obviously missed the explicit instructions regarding the finding of motives, morals, and plot in the novel, and should therefore probably be prosecuted, banished, or shot.

I had a somewhat similar experience: in 11th grade, we read the novel "The Awakening", in which the protagonist undergoes a radical personality shift, which is supposed to have all sorts of symbolic origins and meanings. When asked in class, I ascribed the changes in personality to a minor cerebral aneurysm.

Duuuddee... your taakkinngg all the fuunnn out of it.

I have proposed we use the infinitive verb "to spatulate" to describe the thing that is done with a spatula. For example, "After adding eggs to the flour, you will need to spatulate". Or, "I've been spatulating all day, and wow my arm is tired."

The trick is to figure out which flavor of poison each of them uses.

Just to make sure, wasn't that General Chang in Star Trek VI, commenting that the Klingon people needed breathing space (to which Spock replied with the GP quotation)? Unless you're being a pendant, and insisting that "Final Frontier" is discontinutious... in which case, carry on.

I could see another potential problem being that some jerk is going to use this to justify raping women because he "couldn't get them pregnant anyway".

Darn... and I thought the only winning move was not to play.