The only part of the patent actually mentioning phone calls assumes that the caller is using the now-defunct "1-800-GOOG-411" service; Essentially, you've called Google for information, and are talking to a computer. You aren't discussing private matters with the poolboy.

One page of whatever I happen to be looking at during my Software Update Hour on saturday morning. Done to keep the nozzles flowing so that I don't have to go buy new cartridges on the day I have to print something and time is limited.

My own process is to put water in a teakettle on the stove, wait for the whistle, get the eggs from the fridge and put them in the pot, pour the boiling water over them and place the pot on the burner, boil for 8 minutes, then icewater and peel.

About a year ago, I used Yahoo Pipes to create a Pipe that could aggregate all the Gawker sites that had a full-text RSS feed, strip out the duplicated articles, and return the result as a single feed.

I imagine what's being done by recommending specific numbers is reducing the chance you'll have to share the jackpot with another winner, who isn't analytically choosing his numbers.

Assuming that the only possibilities are "Survive the first three months" or "Die in the first three months", and Married people are three times more likely to survive than singles, best case scenario: 100% of Married people survive, and 33% of singles do.

If Married people are three times more likely to survive, that means that at least 66% of Single people who get heart surgery die in the first three months.

If it's something like Twitter's application tags (e.g. "Posted 2/23/12 using Twitter for ClayTablet") rather than a simple text signature, It's more understandable.

Alternatively, release the Oil Slick. If you're out of oil, try to maneuver behind the car and use the machine guns.

Huh. Weird. Don't kow why the ellipsis was inserted. Guess I'll have to shortlink it.

I wrote a program that goes to Heavens Above, fetches the pages for my location for Iridum Flares, ISS passes, and Tiangong-1 passes, parses the information into a .iCal feed, and saves it into the public folder of my Dropbox, from which I subscribe to the result in Google Calendar.

Indeed. What prevents Jerkwad Jones from getting you to pay half of his month's Netflix subscription, then changing the password on you?

When the old soap gets thin, I just score both pieces of of soap with my thumb a few times, press the scored edges together, and they're strongly bonded in a day or two.

Arg. Guess I slipped the -0.7 under the radical by accident. The desmos graph I linked uses

Your version of the equation has mismatched parentheses.

Is the "Dogfood Settings" option new, or have I just never noticed it before?

E. Coli's bloody everywhere. Of course it's on phones.

"To use those prepaid credit/debit cards I got for Christmas, I simply bought myself Amazon gift cards"

The Gibson.

It's hard to tell. Last I checked, Virgin Mobile doesn't show you usage stats if you're on their unlimited plans.