There's less here than meets the eye. Conferences are held to present new and often tentative research and explore speculative lines of inquiry. So the review standards are pretty generous, and some accept pretty much anything. Also, lots of papers are submitted "on spec," meaning the author expects to have solid…

It's about time we smacked down those egotistical birds, always putting themselves above the trees and everyone else.

The smelter complex at Sudbury, Ontario extracts mostly nickel and copper, but once those metals are isolated, it pays to go after trace metals like gold and platinum.

The critters, feathered and otherwise, scatter seeds. Mice burrow under the snow to harvest the seeds. So far my two poms have caught three of them.

I spotted an old Tardis-style Barbie phone booth at a garage scale. Make the top removable, wire the door shut, glue a tray to the bottom and voila, a unique bird/squirrel feeder.

You are a sick, sick person for posting that, and I am too for laughing at it.

+10

I think it's ironic that many people who criticize the state of climate modeling (which I am NOT accusing this poster of) will glibly spout off how much money it will cost the economy and how many jobs will be lost.

Don't get me started on bands. If you want to see intolerance in action, get some twenty-somethings talking about music. "Eww, I hate that. It's neo-hip hop bubble gum country grunge. I only like ska metal neo-classical fusion."

The famous Mars Effect is something like this. Supposedly, more athletes are born when Mars is in certain positions. Later attempts to replicate the results have mostly failed.

I got some folks very angry recently. They were blathering about how we'd have no drug crime if we simply legalized drugs, to which I retorted we wouldn't have a rape problem if we legalized rape. That got them off on the "victimless crime" bit, but it's glaringly obvious from the whole rape culture and the way…

The late, great and sorely underrated Art Hoppe once wrote a column about a guy at a sporting event who refused to stand for the national anthem, calling it an empty exercise. A fight broke out, and he was arrested for disorderly conduct.

Note to these guys and many, many others all the way back to Jose Feliciano 40 years ago:

You could be lactose intolerant.

True, but they could do what all the rovers have done in just a few days, if they had space suits that allowed real freedom of movement.

Note the paucity of green in the diagram. Time zones are systematically skewed to be later than solar time, probably because people prefer more daylight in the afternoon versus early morning.

Who drops paratroops into a city? They'll get hung up on buildings, smack into the sides of buildings, try to land on roofs and fall off, and if they do survive, have one heck of a time assembling. I thought the same thing when I saw the Seattle attack in Red Alert. It's not like they couldn't take McChord AFB a few…

Like Milhouse lamented in the Simpsons, "It started out like Romeo and Juliet but ended up a tragedy."

The line from the trailer, "Tomorrow we fight," sounds like he's channeling Zapp Brannigan.

Anyone else think of "Canticle for Liebowitz" when the monastery came up?