"......Sotomayor wondered if speed-dating could be patentable, Breyer questioned whether a professor could patent a lesson plan that kept his students from falling asleep....." Uh hate to break it to Supremies, but there's a lot of patents already issued on both dating methods and teaching methods. Honest. You should get on your clerks case for not being able to find something anyone at all familiar with the patent system could find in about 5 minutes.

Actually using goats is common in the SF Bay Area. In the East Bay goats are regularly used to "mow" the steep hillsides in Berkeley and Oakland where mowers can't go. This keeps fire hazards down.

For the non-CS folks among us: The Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill Numerical Recipes - Press et al (I know it's got flaws, but this is an interesting and readable book on math!) Classical Mechanics - Goldstein Radio Amateurs Handbook - ARRL eds. The entire MIT Intro Physics texts by A.P. French Halliday and Resnick.

I didn't mean that he's obliged to search. What I meant was that IF he should know something then he is obliged to reveal it. See CFR 1.56. So if in the normal course of his work he happened to find something then he's on the hook.