Or roughly 100 knot seconds.

Right now, voting for someone named Malcolm Peter Brian Telescope Adrian Umbrella Stand Jasper Wednesday Stoatgobbler John Raw Vegetable Arthur Norman Michael Featherstone SmithNorthgot Edwards Harris MasonFrampton Jones Fruitbat Gilbert 'We'll keep a welcome in the' Williams If I Could Walk That Way Jenkin Tiger-draws Pratt Thompson 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' Darcy Carter Pussycat 'Don't Sleep In The Subway' Barton Mannering Smith could only be an improvement.

You're with the NSA, right?

The TSA will just love that.

Shame about that child stepping out in front of you.

Meat, by Terry Bisson

Not in the US. My friend was in foreign parts at the time, namely Australia.

FOAF story:

My friend was in a restaurant where a diner was complaining LOUDLY that the curry was not hot enough, and the chef didn't know how to cook.

The chef emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of clear liquid and a spoon.

"Your curry not hot enough sir? That's OK sir, we can make it a bit hotter if you like sir. I can put some extra heat in sir. Here sir, try this and see how much you think you need."

Hands teaspoon of clear liquid to customer.

Customer (egged on by drunken mates) sips liquid.

Customer is carried out of restaurant by his friends—to the applause of the rest of the patrons!

As the chef returns to the kitchen, my friend intercepts him and asks what is in the bottle.

"Pure Capsaicin. We use it to make the curry as hot as we need to" says the chef with an evil grin.

Peri-peri is about my limit, though Habanero stuffed with cream cheese is tolerable (and delicious).I also really like the taste of peri-peri, which is quite different from the somewhat smokey taste of Habanero.

That seems to put me at the ludicrously spicy level, yet that is only 'hot' according to the local shop.

It also depends on the cook. I'm not just into endorphin rush, I like food to taste rather than inflict. I've had 'medium' curry that was literally painful and not much else; the hottest curry I ever had was so perfectly balanced it didn't taste particularly hot at all---and then I swear my eyeballs were melting! I kept eating the delicious meal through the streaming tears and then enjoyed the buzz afterwards. And no ring of fire either.

As I recall, the sf author John W Campbell proposed a simple test for a 'clean' car. The designers would be locked in a room for an hour with the engine running.

I suspect that an electric car would pass that test easily; I'm less confident in the Mazda vehicle.

No, I'm saying you don't know. You can't trust the papers, and you can't trust your friends. It may well be that Internet censorship has wide support. It may equally well be true that it lacks massive popular support. Unless you, or someone else, does a properly conducted (and reproducible) survey, what you've got is no more than an opinion.

So you are taking the sample of people you speak to, your friends and colleagues (I'm guessing), and assuming that they are representative of the UK population as a whole.

That's not statistically valid. Tempting though it may be to assume that because the circle you move in appears to support something, doesn't mean that

Nor does it mean the opposite. Without a proper statistical sample you really can't tell, one way or the other.

And you know this, why? Because of what you read in the papers or see on TV?

It all depends on the questions you ask. "Do you want to protect children from predators?" "Of course I do!". "See sir, another supporter of Internet censorship."

No, I want something you need to hunt with a Challenger 2 because anything less is suicidal.

C'mon, are you up for a real challenge?

(Why, yes, I may have been watching too many sf movies.)

Aka Julian Day Number. Please note that the day starts at Noon, not midnight, so that ROUND(daynumber) rounds up to the correct day.

Plus ça change... I recommend C P Snow's The Two Cultures from 1959!

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

Note however the valid criticism of the essay (see the wikipedia entry).

And personally, I want artists and engineers thanks. I prefer my engines to be beautiful---most especially my engines of mass destruction :)