What about homophones? To, two, too? They're, their, there? The meaning of these words* in written English is well defined because they are spelled differently, yet in spoken English their meaning can only be inferred from context as they sound the same. There are also words spelled the same but with different pronunciations (e.g. desert, bow).

*I realise they're is a contraction, not a word, but you get the idea.

What about abbreviations? How do you pronounce Mr., for example?

What about dollar values? If I gave you $2, would you give me "dollars two"?

"You are coming to a sad realization, Cancel or Allow?"

I know I've heard that somewhere, but for the life of me I just can't remember where...

Oh come now, Legalese is to English as Pig Latin is to Latin.

As a scientist who has a fair bit of coding experience, including LabVIEW, ++ this.

What particularly annoys me about visual code like LabVIEW is that you can't diff. So change tracking is a pain in the arse, and forget distributed development.

LabVIEW itself is good for setting up a quick UI and connecting things to it, but any serious processing? ...No, thanks. If I could get my hands on something else that had the UI prototyping ease, connectivity to experimental devices (motion controllers, for example), but based on a textual language, I'd be a happy camper. (There are some things that come close, I'm sure, though I've not had the time to properly search. Busy scientist is busy...)

Nice idea, but it's circular. Energy is defined in terms of mass (and distance and time). You need Plank's constant to convert from photon frequency to energy, and unless you already have a definition for the mass unit (kg), Plank's constant becomes essentially arbitrary.

No, he's just wrong, or at the very least severely dumbing down the real picture for the sake of placating the lay audience (which Slashdot is, generally speaking, not). There's a few examples of this already on the first page - I didn't even make it to the second...

That seems to be a problem with a lot of modern science: correct, brief, understandable to the layman. Pick two.

The theory doesn't anthropomorphize the planet. The article describing the theory does, because that makes it more accessible and interesting to general readers.

Remember, not everyone is an emotionless nerd. Some of us like allegories.

So close... Rainbows End. It even points out the curious lack of an apostrophe in the book itself.

Unless you were talking about the album or the amusement park.

Yeah, I'm nitpicking. :-)

On something tangential: "mobile phones" versus "cell phones". Where I live, "mobile phone" is synonymous with the (less common) "cell phone" - this is a well known difference in language that's been around for a long while. Its interesting to see you use the two terms with different meanings, when I would still say both devices are "mobile" phones. Considering that what you call "mobile" phones will gradually supercede "cell" phones, do you suppose we are seeing the convergence of language, here?

I agree about Scott Ludlum (and, to be fair, I also agree with a number of Greens policies), I just wish the Greens would back a more definite (and left-leaning) free speech idealism rather than the half-hearted "it doesn't work, but if it did, we'd consider it" policy they have at the moment.

I don't hold much faith in the Greens in this area when they pull stunts like this: http://www.nointernetcensorship.com/node/54

The distinction between a religion and a cult, to my mind, isn't the quality of their beliefs-- we all believe utterly ridiculous things. (Do you actually believe in the *electron*? Or that we're all actually collections of waves? Quantum mechanics is as ridiculous as the virgin birth-- in fact, quantum mechanics ALLOWS for the virgin birth, since everything is possible (if highly improbable) in quantum mechanics).

The electron model and quantum mechanics both are predictive and thus testable, experimentally observed, and thoroughly verified to be accurate descriptions of reality. Suggesting that belief in them is "ridiculous" is, well, ridiculous. If something accurately describes reality, how can you distinguish it from reality?

You were right to be suspicious. Never seen a Minkowski diagram before? ;-)

Bacteria evolve. A bacterium doesn't.

I know you didn't start this, but I have to say:

2k10... 2k08...

What the hell? Are these supposed to be short for 2010 and 2008? What's the freaking point of writing them like that?