"It's not Hedy, it's Hedley. Hedley Lamarr."

I'm reminded of the joke about the guy who goes into the department store and asks a clerk "Can you tell me where the overcoats are at?" to which the clerk replies "Do you always end your sentences with a preposition?", and the guy responds, "Okay, can you tell me where the overcoats are at, jerk?"

If you want pretty, there's always the Intellicast Storm Track for Hurricane Irene; all the currently active tropical storms are linked off their hurricane page.

At least I did my research when I went out and bought a tub freezer; I made a point of measuring the space I had, so that when I bought a 5cf tub freezer at Sears, I was able to not only slide it into the back of my '97 Accord wagon — still in the packing crate — but close the hatch as well. The Sears employee who…

Take all the scenes where Yoda is onscreen and not bouncing around like a Superball™ (i.e., not the duel with Dooku) and build a sketchy set sized to allow someone like Andy Serkis to do motion and expression capture, then animate Yoda from that; you'd get a character with enormously more life in them than what they…

The other side, of course, is more pulp garbage as publishers look to churn out more stuff, which is fine with me, actually.

Also, while it's not useful at night, when it's overcast, or to those people who only have a digital watch, but if you take a watch face showing the local time and point the hour hand at the sun, halfway between the hour hand and 12 is due south (at least for the northern hemisphere; it's due north for the southern…

The First World War was an industrial-age war fought with pre-industrial-age tactics; the Gatling gun did not play a significant role in the Civil War, and the use of the Maxim gun in the colonial wars suffered from unreliability — while 50 soldiers with four Maxim guns held off 5000 warriors at the Battle of Shangani…

If you try to push more power through the propellor, or get the revolutions too high, you start getting cavitation, where the water flow separates from the back of the propellor blade, leaving a vapor cavity. This causes several problems — thrust drops significantly, and the collapse of the cavitation bubbles erodes…

Personally, I think the most useful feature is that 10 years later, it doesn't maim farmers and their children.

Until they start making biodegradable detonators, though, the benefit is going to be partial; a detonator doesn't contain enough explosive to, say, blow off a foot and avulse the calf, but it can be enough to cause significant foot trauma. To make ground safe after it had been mined with Astrolite, you'd need to do…

I bet that spoiler makes awesome downforce.

I don't get hives and breathing problems, I just toss my cookies (or maybe I would if I kept it down) — but like you, I get a 'mouth feel' when I'm eating something that has small amounts of spinach in it. I found out when I was fairly young; it was part of the first solid food I got after my tonsillectomy. Which…

I would think that Rowling would want to take extra precautions to make sure that ads for "increasing the size of your wand" would never be part of the site, as part of the suppression of the inevitable innuendos.

That picture suggests the movie has/will have all the necessary schlock to make it a B-movie success... That 'Viking quest' must have gone pretty far for him to be wearing a do-maru, sode, and kabuto — or he's the most white-bread samurai I've ever seen...

Lastly, the USPTO would be well funded enough to hire subject matter experts and additional researches for patents.

...all this stuff stays locked up as trade secrets as long as it offers a competitive advantage, ...

And when you think about all the ships getting their fresh water from the evaporators that suck in sea water, boil off part of it, then condense the steam into fresh water for drinking water and feed water for the boilers while returning the concentrated brine to the ocean, with everything that voids into the ocean —…

"I leak, you give confidential briefings, he has been charged under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act." There's always a slippery slope somewhere...

The RIAA is not taking this threat to their livelihood lying down; they are claiming that music albums are "works for hire" and that they, not the musicians, hold the rights to them. The RIAA has filed suit to prevent musicians from regaining their rights to their music, which means that it's going to court, and the…