Having worked in labs with both mice and rats, I'll take a nice Sprague-Dawley any day. They're like little dogs: they hang out, they like to be petted, they're clean and smell nice.

On the other hand, as soon as you lift the lid off the mouse cage, one of those little buggers levitates three feet in the air and rockets off in a random direction, probably sinking their teeth into someone's earlobe. No thanks.

No, I am not a fan of Lysol or Purell to decontaminate drinking water. "Acceptable" residual bacterial counts in drinking water are not the same thing as acceptable residual counts after washing your hands.

Filtering out "99%" of harmful bacteria may be like filtering out 99% of bullets fired at you....

I suspect that if you read the EULA you clicked through, not only did you agree not to hold them liable for their crappy software, you also gave them permission to burn down your house and shoot your dog.

This was a retrospective study. Additionally, it depended upon the accurate long-term memory of people already diagnosed with a disease of the central nervous system. In other words: http://xkcd.com/552/

The Elements of Computing Systems is a great book if he really wants to get a grasp of computers from the level of logic gates on up.

Working through the exercises in each chapter, you use HDL to design your own logic gates, build them into more advanced circuits (DFF, adder, ALU, etc.), and then a full-fledged Von Neumann computer.

After that, you move into software mode, starting with machine language, then assembly, and finally a high-level Java-like language. Along the way your write your own symbolic assembler and compiler!

It's really unique - kind of like Petzold's Code, except you really create the stuff you're learning about.

I found this challenging too. I think (caveat: filtered by my middle-American interpretation of English) the "it" refers to the Crown Court.

As in, "The Crown Court made a decision it had no objective reason to make."

It made a decision that was not open to it.

Corrections from across the pond?

I hope that binder doesn't have metal rings:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question698.htm

Any word on whether a new DX is on the horizon? The Amazon website almost acts like it doesn't exist any more!

I really like reading on the larger screen, but when I compare the weight to my SO's regular Kindle, the DX feels like a brick.

The Fire doesn't really appeal to me, I'd rather stick with eInk.

Note that this was an observational study, not an experimental study, and so the risk of counfounders is high. For example, it is conceivable that people who develop prostate cancer then lose their taste for coffee even before being diagnosed. For years, the cigarette industry took advantage of the limitations of observational studies by arguing that an unidentified genetic factor made people want to smoke, and also put them at risk for developing lung cancer, but that the smoking and the cancer weren't related. A well-designed experimental study could randomly assign people to drink or not drink coffee, and then determine the incidence of prostate cancer in each group. Obviously, designing a similar study for cigarettes would be unethical given the weight of evidence that smoking is bad for you.