This is one reason why I keep being tempted to get a turkey fryer. Not to use to deep-fry turkeys, but to get a burner with enough BTU output to get a proper wok hei; I've never been able to get a wok to a proper temperature on a stove burner — and in any case, I've got an electric range now, which makes things worse.

For some reason, probably going back to a patent by Edison to make sure that you could only use his light bulbs in the sockets he sold, the bayonet design is commonly seen only in automotive lamps.

I still remember reading through the owner's manual for the Austin America my mother owned, and coming across the instructions for doing an oil change, which included the instruction "Remove the old oil filter, using whatever force may be necessary." It also explicitly described the last-ditch trick of driving a…

"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."

It is the story of Pocahontas all over again...but with blue people.

3D offers the possibility of dropping the 'wet shot' to an entirely new nadir of disgusting, too...

This or similar presentations available on shirts, mugs, and other frippery with a short Google search.

When something is set in a 'real' world, you automatically extend what you already know about the real world into it. When the plot starts taking liberties, it's more jarring to you because it conflicts with how you know the real world works. in an SF world, you don't have to push past all that linkage with your own…

Many years ago I bought a Kaissa set at a convention. Although I suppose that a variation on chess would be sufficiently off the wall that recreating it would be something a 'lunatic' would do, as it doesn't have the potential for accidental injury that something like hussade has.

Someone is trying... Although the field looks much too small compared to the descriptions in the novel.

I was thinking British racing green myself... it's already polished clean, ready to be primed and painted...

Already happened with the Royal Navy — their SMCS-NG platform, dubbed 'Windows for Warships' because it was a port of their SMCS software to Windows 2000, locked up and kept several ships in harbor a couple of years ago while the problems with the software were worked out.

"Aswan area at the down (sic) of Egyptian History"? Proof that academics are no better at proofreading than the rest of us.

If my brain doesn't get height, why is it so scared of it?

Not so much that they impose a reference horizontal, but that they rely on the environment to have one. Take Skylab — most astronauts didn't like the large workroom, which didn't have a single 'preferred' vertical, which the other, smaller rooms did, and would preferentially spend time in those rooms when they didn't…

Snickering while watching it, remembering the parody "Star Spats" from the 12/77 issue of Playboy magazine:

If there were a thousand cups, your chance of being right is one in a thousand. What you're missing is that your 'opponent' has knowledge you don't — he always knows where the prize is, and can always show you losing choices. No matter whether your one pick is right or wrong, he can show you 998 other choices that are…

Aaargh. No it isn't, because the position of the reward isn't randomized after one cup is removed. Diagram it out. There are three ways the cups can be arranged with the pardon under one:

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and…

You also have to consider the ability of the troops wearing that armor to carry out their primary mission, and "heavy ceramics" have drawbacks with a long history — the line by Shakespeare, for example, in Henry IV: "Like a rich armour worn in heat of day, that scalds with safety."