Not to mention the "a economist' in front of the name. "...that economist Herakles Polemarchakis..." would read better. But I nitpick.

Does that include the obligation to knock up your brother's widow if they didn't have any kids, so that she'll have someone to take care of her in her old age? Because that's what got Onan slapped down; he pulled out and "spilt his seed upon the ground", getting off with his brother's widow while failing to carry out…

Steaking them only works for vegetarian vampires; for regular bloodsuckers, you have to use a wooden stake.

I have to call bullshit on the 'fewer births on Halloween' study. It's only data from a single hospital, but running a query on 15 years of live births from 1/1/1995 through 12/31/2010, I get an average of 10.46 births a day, with Halloween averaging 10.07 and Valentine's Day averaging 10.33 — hardly a significant…

I have to call bullshit on the 'fewer births on Halloween' study. It's only data from a single hospital, but running a query on 15 years of live births from 1/1/1995 through 12/31/2010, I get an average of 10.46 births a day, with Halloween averaging 10.07 and Valentine's Day averaging 10.33 — hardly a significant…

Why would being more visible to bus drivers in low-light conditions be a trait to select for? It just tells the bus drivers where to aim...

The aircraft will be at a relatively low throttle setting during the landing, specifically to keep the landing speed down to something the arresting gear can absorb. When the plane hits the deck, though, the pilot will shove the throttle(s) to full military power, so that if for any reason they miss all the wires,…

The Air Force uses arresting gear, particularly for short runways (the Thunderbirds support manual, for example, specifies that an airfield with arresting gear must be available if the longest runway at an exhibition area is less than 10,000 feet in length). However, the Air Force standard for a 'short runway' is…

Unfortunately, I think this is going to run afoul of Ubersoft's patent, Patent Number 4773910-224-9996, "Process for including painfully obvious functionality in a smartphone".

Either 'cps' (cycles per second) or Hertz (frequency unit, again cycles per second).

The Kindle app on my Motorola Xoom has one feature that addresses a fundamental flaw in the Amazon Kindle device itself — a slider that lets you drag your position back and forth in your e-book, rather than being limited to page forward/page back, or relying on the e-book designer to have put chapter segmentation into…

And switching over to rebuses won't work for the same reason that SQLGuru brings up — they're not accessible for people who don't [b]see[/b] the page.

I got it right off Wikipedia, trying to find a suitable translation for kreuzungsfreie Straße,

It's the Magic Roundabout in, IIRC, Swindon.

"Plus, they ensure that if you're hood latch fails, the hood won't come flying open at high speeds."

72 days — Isn't that 45 years in media time?

A minor datum that stuck with me from seeing my sister's birth certificate many years ago: There is a box on the certificate labeled 'Fetal deaths' and the number '3' typed inside. If the pro-life movement is out pushing their 'abortion is murder' screed, why aren't they pushing for mandatory police investigation of…

Don't forget all of the commercials whose message boils down to "you have [unpleasant physical condition], but if you use our product you will either a) be completely free of that condition or b) become irresistable to the opposite sex".

It's not one of these running at you that's scary, it's forty of them running at you.

The original design philosophy behind the F-15 was "Not a Pound for Air-to-Ground"; that didn't prevent it from getting used for ground-attack missions, nor redesigned into the two-seat F-15E 'Strike Eagle' with additional hardware specifically for the air-to-ground role.