I'm glad I'm not alone in hearing "The Sound of His Wings" in Santorum's campaign speeches. If Santorum gets nominated, or God forbid wins, I will consider it proof positive that Heinlein was in fact a time traveler.

I always opt out, and under *no* circumstances will I let them grope me in a private area. You want to violate me, you do it where grandmothers and children can watch. If I'm going to be degraded to do my job (my travel is mostly work), so are you.

Not entirely accurate--one of the things I like best about ebooks from Amazon is that I can (and do) read them on the Kindle, my phones, and my computers. The Kindle app is available for just about everything, and syncs between devices so I can pick up on one where I left off on another.

I miss us too.

One of my first hard lessons in UNIX system administration came the day I typed "rm -rf *" as root in /etc. The second one came about 1 minute later when I asked the other admin where we kept the backups, only be greeted with "what backups?"

The first rule of Seattle Club is: you don't talk about July and August.
The second rule of Seattle Club is: YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT JULY AND AUGUST!
(An exception to rules 1 and 2 is being made for 2011).

Forever more I will be stuck with the image of Bullwinkle in a lab coat, saying "watch me pull a spectrum out of a hat!"

I've seen this problem go both ways in trying create commercial scientific software. For every scientist who can't believe that the code needs to be re-written, there is a software engineer who has read a survey paper and thinks they don't need to consult the domain experts. The reality is somewhere between--both groups have spent years learning their own craft and a little time picking up enough of the other's craft to get by. As I've told many scientists, "I wouldn't let them loose in the lab to do research, why would I think I can write commercial software?" (For background, I'm a former computational/structural biologist turned non-coding software professional.)

It's a feature! I sit with the 1920x1200 laptop up close so I can use the keyboard and have the larger-but-lower-resolution second monitor as far away as it can go. It almost makes up the difference in window size. Why do we claim the OS is "DPI aware" when we are forced to use the same settings for all displays???

That assumes that the test doesn't have a systematic error. If you are systematically biasing the results (and in the case of the lab that did the Tour de France testing, since their procedures and logs aren't published, we'll never know if they are biasing the results), any number of positives is no more remarkable than 1.