A lot of the protection offered by a car depends on the design and construction of the car. Is it mostly metal, with the electrical system well-grounded to the chassis? Then you're probably ok - the skin effect, where electricity passes only over the outer surface of any faraday cage, will keep you safe. If it has…

I suddenly like Lil Wayne quite a bit. :)

3 months? Are you fecking kidding me? When did that happen? I think it used to be 2 week's salary or something, right?

Got sideswiped by lightening when I was standing on the front steps of my apartment building as a kid. It only left a little red mark on my arm that took forever to go away, no exit wound. Blew up the steps, though, and the pavement, and part of a nearby embankment, and the wall casing on the ground-floor apartment…

As a kid with some learning disabilities, I wish I'd had access to a book like this. It might have made me feel bad at first, but it would have educated me about weight and food and the relation between the two - something I wasn't taught until much later in life. I already felt miserable about being fat and poor, and…

Actually, it really does apply to books. I've seen children's books with truly terrible covers and lovely stories inside; I've seen adult books with covers that were works of art and the contents were, well. Best described as something nobody should take grammer lessons from.

Even Galactus will end up as shredded little quarks all going their separate ways, eventually.

For some reason I never thought of colleges as having yearbooks at all. That always seemed a high-school thing. Dunno why.

Is this the one where the theme song was "red red robin"? That damn song was stuck in my head for a month. I hated it.

I have a small scar on one leg from being bitten by a damn fire ant in Georgia.

I remember seeing a traveling display of fancy clothing made from cane toad skin in the local museum. Ugh.

I remember being a little kid, barely able to see over the car windowsill, and being slightly nauseated as we drove over gypsy moth caterpillars that completely coated a road for several hundred meters. Mom telling me that squishing them was a good thing didn't really reassure me.

My gay cats would definitely eat those gay birds. What we need here to really be shocking is interspecies homosexuality that transcends the predator-prey relationship.

Dude, your name is squicky (personal preference and made amusing by the fact that my boss thought my online name was perverse, so I can't judge), but you come up with the *funniest* comments so I have to promote them.

I think maybe the forced nature of the homosexual relationships isn't the point of the research. It's more like inducing cancer in rats: of course the cancer isn't naturally occurring, it was created by the researcher so they could then study ways to treat it. Of course the homosexuality wasn't naturally occurring, it…

If you're a guy, tall is sexy as hell. If you're a woman you're screwed in Asia; try Norway.

Maybe because anyone can learn science we need something that anyone can't learn?

I thought the Dianne Duanne series had a certain selection criteria for wizards, where not just anyone could learn it, but magic itself could choose you through the books or through other methods?

In this case, "closed system" means either you have it or you don't; you can't be born without magic and then acquire it later in life through any effort of your own, you're fated to have it or not from birth.

So I went to the wikipedia page and then to Bob Larson's page and he administers a Demon Test! You can order it for only ... well, it doesn't tell you how much it'll cost, there's just a "buy now" button on the bottom of the screen. 3 pages in, so by the time you get there you're well and truly on the path to purchase…