How much may some of our "safe" foods degrade our environment? An almost empty coffee cup with a cigarette butt in it may be an attractive and deadly nuisance to a bee. WOW, what a sweet buzz! Where was I? The odor might get them rejected at the entrance to the hive. Multiply that by the daily output of all the little corner stores and gas stations. Some may develop a tolerance for nicotine and be real grouchy until their first cup every day.

Is it not true that development and delivery effort hit the fan when Netezza changed the computational platform on the drones from IBM to Intel processor architecture to save money?

It should be quite easy to fart rainbows if the positions of the light source, observer and Steve's sphincter are in proper alignment. Have a bag of burritos handy in case there is a need for re-takes. This could be modeled with any reasonable ray-tracing program or the like. I want to see the first free iDevice app with this graphic. To be fair, an Adobe representative should be present to indicate the relative position of the observer. YouTube will gladly convert the display format to Flash for the X.264 impaired.

When I get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I frequently see strange flashes. This happens even when my eyes are closed and I've taken several steps from the bed. My unsubstantiated theory is that this is from a re-equalization of the electrostatic fields around me. The mattress is foam rubber covered with various fabrics and there are coil springs below that. Has anyone ever modeled this electrical environment. Acoustically, the springs are apparently tuned to be resonant at the mean frequency of farts. Can plasmons form and decay within the eye or visual cortex? If this can happen on the surface of rods or cones in the eye, it would be about as brilliant as the things I see.

"But to have a single, double clickable .app that runs on 4 platforms (PPC, Intel / 32, 64bit), naively."

Any app I write has to run on ALL unsophisticated and unsuspecting CPUs from a brief non-debounced contact closure, beginning with the Motorola 6800. ;)

It's only a 10MB disk and everything would fit on a few floppys. If a floppy drive is flaky or absent, use C-Kermit or G-Kermit on a serial port. Here are some instructions. http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/case16.html To get all the bits with the least amount of directory lookup thrashing on the old source drive, copy the entire filesystem partition as a single file. Use the Xenix dfspace or mount command to find the device name for the root and /u and any other filesystems. Then, in Linux, use mount with -t xenix option on copies of the image files of the filesystems you transferred.

This subject line says it all when it comes to efficiently placing things in low earth orbit.

I've been thinking a lot about several varieties of aerogel products lately. Aerogel is 95% air and is hydrophobic, yet will absorb light oils. To the extent that it can de-homogenize oil and water suspensions, it would be useful as a separating agent. Oil-saturated aerogel should be lighter than water and rise to the top. This would also facilitate centrifugal separation of oil-laden mud. The oils can then be removed from the aerogel with moderate heat. Then you get to recycle both the aerogel and the oil. I'd be surprised if there are no patents covering this.

This diagram and description is clearer, but does not mention any of the other ratios found. https://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/aktuell/pr/pm/pm-archiv/2010/quantenwelt_en.html

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0106/1224261733594.html

It doesn't take much speed for an easily re-positionable factory-worker robot to be demonstrably more effective than a stationary robot for many simple tasks outside the reach of the stationary robot. Being slightly slower than a healthy human's capability to dodge harm is advantageous as well. This is a shrewd development for a large manufacturing entity that desperately needs economic agility. A workforce like this could be fabulously competitive. It could release many souls from a life of menial labor and foster effective learning and dreaming. Look at humanity. Our greatest potential remains to be realized. Unemployment statistics are a bad joke. Humanity is over-employed through artificial economics. Because of this, many noble things remain undone.

Maybe they'll get some angel funding from Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

The obvious sudden mental incapacitation is all that is required to confirm that the lady at hand has achieved her desired effect. You must be able to recover quickly. After the initial contact, it rapidly ceases to be desirable response.

Dear Dauntless Decimalists,

I can count to numbers higher than five with one hand by using a natural positional representation. With two hands, I can count from 0 to 1023. The "thumbian issues" had to be resolved via an agreed upon convention very early on. Alas, my toes are insufficiently agile to permit me to easily reach 1,048,575. (Incidentally, the fox at the next table just caused my sign bit to become set.) FWIW, that is not a gesture of disrespect that I am displaying. It is unambiguously the number FOUR. On the other hand, it would be 128, and together they would represent 132 (the number of columns on a page of greenbar paper).

Context is everything. Some words have been overloaded. Learn what they are and move on. Consider "moment". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment

Ambiguity is as intolerable as intolerance itself, and disambiguation comes in many guises. In some situations, the type of a variable is not known until "execution time". Dismiss my diatribe if you will. I'm just an aging manipulator of symbols that switched to using Macs when Apple switched to using BSD.

Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four? ...|. .....