You know, I work with a lot of engineers, one thing I find is that engineers NEED to fidget if they're not focusing on something technical. Whether it's with a pen, or a piece of plastic, it's this urge to do something with your hands. I'm an engineer myself and I've caught myself doing it.

And how many times are you going to pass on that tin of food in an emergency when you have no alternatives before you'll give this a try? Twice? Three times?

I know, you guy usually do a good job of detecting what may be bogus/hoaxes. I thought I'd supply my opinion on the matter to clarify it. Keep up the good work!

Also, if you WERE to want to extend the range of the remote, there are plenty of examples, but you'll almost certainly end up with something large sticking…

Unfortunately, urban myth. As an electrical engineer, I can tell you that that is not possible. But you don't need to take it from me, Mythbusters busted it

totally bogus hack, you CAN extend the range with a bit of wire, but the wire has to be the right length, and soldered to the right point.Unfortunately the instructable tells you to solder it to something that isn't the antenna, and also implies that you should use "any old bit of wire", which will most likely REDUCE…

In the summer, I use a computer CPU heatsink/fan thrown on top of a block of ice, works great, cuts through the ice (and soaks up the heat) in no time at all. Unfortunately even a relatively large block of ice is unable to reduce the temperature in a room by much. But it works fine for producing a nice cool breeze…

http://xkcd.com/947/

I often find that when I'm procrastinating, I'd get a lot done on things that weren't the most important. So imagine my delight when I find that Professor John Perry was awarded an Ig Nobel prize for describing this phenomena: he writes "The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks,…

I agree completely with Support_jogger. It's silly to go to all this length to generate some random characters, there are plenty of online resources that will produce a random string for you if you're too lazy to do it yourself.

Actually, I don't think these things were designed to be fanned out, I think the ability to fan them out is a happy accident that stems from them being manufactured from paper, which is flat to begin with. Fanning them would be partly undoing the original manufacturing process.

I think you're onto something there, it's quite possible that whatever it is that allows someone to get extremely good at something requiring a great deal of skill and practice, is the same thing that allows those people to "get in the zone". Athletes, Coders, Chess Grandmasters, Doctors etc.

I think I can speak for all programmers in saying that we as a group are proudly amongst the people who are most familiar with "the zone". And I think it might be why non-programmers might consider programmers to be slightly anti-social and obsessive.

I've seen cats drink water from puddles out in the street too, I think compared to where some cats might also drink water from, the toilet tank is probably not so bad.

For those with awkward middle-clicking (laptop touchpads), CTRL-drag also duplicates tabs

Sorry, the whole DHMO thing was a joke. Don't worry too much about it, it's pretty safe.

Oh, I was agreeing with you - SODIS disinfects water, but the exposure may be causing plastics to leach (possibly). But like you said, in situations like this where clean water is short, you either drink it regardless of potentially brain-altering chemicals, or die from diarrhea.

Interestingly, sitting water out in the sun for days is a good form of water disinfection (solar water disinfection/SODIS). But again, where SODIS is useful, you've got the choice of drinking it, or risking some form of horrific illnesses from water-borne organisms.

What? No mention about the high quantities of DHMO present in bottled water? We all know that if DHMO gets into the lungs it can starve the body of oxygen and cause asphyxiation, now studies have shown that DHMO overdose causes hypoatremia, bradycardia, increased intercranial pressure and eventually death. AND WATER…

it could get even more nuts if you told them a story the day before about aliens that grow their stomach, or some similar tale

nothing beats a healthy dose of RadAway for detox