The second link doesn't go to a login page for me.

All of Matematica, Maple, and MathCAD have had their own worksheet/document formats since the mid-90s at least. They have gone through many incarnations but I believe all of them now support embedding code, graphics, marked-up text, etc. Maple's Document format certainly does.

Exactly what is new about this, other than a new name and, well, further grist for Stephen Wolfram's publicity mill?

Is the idea simply to have a thin-client reader and offload most of the computation to remote servers? Because if so then that is the innovation, not some new document format.

I guess people like the chance of getting lucky occasionally, even at the cost of utility (average wait time) and fairness?

Yes, people, and monkeys too!

I find it hard to believe no one is asking exactly why the defendants son is creeping around looking up jurors from his father's trial on Facebook.

For all we know the juror in question mentioned the defendant's name in her FB post and it came up when the kid was Googling the defendant's name.

While the rest of the bird kingdom in NZ devolved their wings, the world's biggest eagle, The Haast Eagle enjoyed the easy life, often making short work of the Moa from time to time.

I read something once where a scientist was conjecturing about what the first interaction between a human and a Haast Eagle, a raptor adapted to carry off and eviscerate 2-meter tall bipeds, must have been like.

[Proto-Maori guy stepping out of seafaring canoe]
Wow, nice island. Hey, what the hell is that?

(was it 1953? don't feel like looking it up)

1955. Don't ask me why I remember that.

Because for all those years student have not noticed that he or she is lactose-intolerant. Yeah, sure.

Frequently you only develop lactose intolerance later in life, though the eventual onset of that intolerance can be inferred from your DNA.

Replacing the vowel in profanity with some other character doesn't fool anyone. Everyone knows still you're swearing.

Back in the late 90s there was a play out called Shopping and Fucking. I remember an article in the Globe and Mail summarizing all the various ways the name of this play was rendered in newpapers around the world. Some were bold enough to print the title in full, some resorted to "Shopping and F*cking" or "Shopping and F***ing", and one very delicately never gave to the play's name explicitly but described its name as combining "shopping and a profane expression".

My favourite was some Australian newspaper which gave the title as "Sh***ing and F***ing".

The beauty of these meaningless abbreviations is that people can think you're swearing when you're not. :)

From the very link you provided:

The letters C (sé, [sj]), Q (kú, [ku]) and W (tvöfalt vaff, [tvoefalt vaf]) are only used in Icelandic in words of foreign origin and some proper names that are also of foreign origin.

Carne Adovada, right here in New Mexico.

Isn't "carne adovada" Spanish for "marinated meat"? If I understand correctly from the Wikipedia article it's mostly an American dish by virtue of the Mexican-American War and continuing Mexican cultural influence.

If in this food contest the British got to claim any random dish from territory their conquered over the years, I'm sure they would have a lot more to draw from (e.g. all Indian food).