Really? It's illegal just to run the test? (Or at least, too close to a gray area to even consider it?)

Wow, that sucks.

I've read the review, but not the book, but a key element seems to come down to "Maybe it's real, but nobody knows". It seems a fairly simple procedure for him to order some of it and have it tested, and then he'd know. Yeah, that's a legal gray area, but it would make his case a lot stronger to be able to say "Yeah, I ordered a bunch of Russian Viagra and it tested out as 75% as good as the real stuff".

I know that means taking a risk of being prosecuted, but isn't that something we commend journalists for? At least, better than making allegations about what corporate execs and government employees are thinking without evidence.

I really miss my iPod Nano, the 5th generation, the last one that was really a dedicated music player rather than an iOS device. It was very small and did one thing really well, which made it perfect for running.

But eventually I got a smart phone, and since I'd be carrying it on runs anyway... it's more cumbersome to use as a player, but at least it's able to update itself without having to go through iTunes. I suspect that iOS-based Nanos can as well, but I just didn't need a separate device any more.

I'd also like to see it controlled against a pepperoni pizza, which practically everybody seems to like. (Oddly, except for me. I'm just not into fermented sausages. Not into salami, either. I'll eat pepperoni pizza, but I'd rather have sausage.) Once you exclude the obvious failures (e.g. vegetarians) I bet you could get 98% approval.

If that 98% figure means that they can differentiate vegetarians from non-vegetarians just by watching their eyes with near-perfect accuracy... that actually sounds like an interesting result all by itself.

Thanks for the tip. I do have a stone, and get tolerable pizza out of it, but your physics makes sense and I may have to give it a try the next time I'm feeling flush.

Meantime... we've got a place that brought a pizza oven over from Naples, and their pizzas do in fact come out in 90 seconds.

There's a lot of great cuisine in England. It's got some amazing chefs, like Heston Blumenthal and Fergus Henderson. The "gastro pubs" are serving some amazing food. The influences of south Asian cuisine are incredibly creative.

OK, they're not the French, who make great food an extremely high priority, so there's a lot of great food and very little bad food. The English got a bad reputation in the mid 20th century, having depleted their agricultural system to keep from being conquered, but that ended a while back, and they're no longer tolerating bad food. English cuisine is now on par with anywhere else in Europe or the US. Even Italy (where I've had some surprisingly mediocre pizza).

You can still get crap, of course, but it's not at all difficult to find really good food in the UK. (I'm not a resident there, just an occasional visitor and fan of food.)

iTunes remains an astonishingly bad user interface. It wasn't originally an Apple product, which explains some of it, but they took it over a decade ago, and it's still incredibly bad. (Caveat: I finally gave up on my iPod, so maybe it's gotten better in the last two years. But given how abominable it was, with massive and obvious bugs being ignored, for so long, I doubt it.)

I don't know why Apple has a blind spot for an incredibly bad user interface for a flagship product (I mean the music store, rather than the iPod), but it does. So any accusations of bad design rather than malice seem credible, even though in general that's a bad heuristic when applied to Apple.

And I bet it delivers something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pizza.

"Cyanogenmod is in many was less customized and more like stock Android"

So not stock Android, eh? What was your point again? I'm consistently impressed by the amount of whining that happens here these days. Years ago, we used to whine about things that were actually significant to professional developers, not whiny users whining about their phones.

Isn't it the big two? Android or iPhone? So why not just get a Nexus 4 or 5, unlocked, nice and cheap? Root it, and you're done.

The definition of gaming as a hobby is not, "Gaming where ever, whenever you like, however you like."

Thank you for that incredibly lucid explanation. (Sorry, no mod points today, but you were at 5 anyway.)

I got the impression that the idea was to use the breast itself as the scattering medium, in an attempt to focus on something inside the breast, namely a cancer. The chicken breast was used to simulate breast material, which would probably be pretty clever if it weren't so confusing.

Chicken breast is very different from mammalian mammary tissue, but it was probably the cheapest source of meat. It may also help that it's relatively uniform, to simplify things, while simultaneously being sufficiently random at the tissue level.

Both the floret and the katana are designed to allow blades to slide along and be kicked away. A crossguard like this is often used to trap, or even snap, incoming weapons.

I like to think that the choreographers will find clever and interesting things to do with this. They always have in the past. It is a little odd that it appeared to have a metal nub near the base, where it could potentially be damaged by an energy blade, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were still able to use it to trap an incoming blade (and perhaps counter by pivoting around that point and using the crossguard offensively).

The lens flare that was there was actually well used, when the Falcon went up into the sun. It helped highlight a dramatic moment. I thought that was good work.

Once. The problem is that he over-uses the trick.