...and this lady in her car is rounding the corner and yells from the window, "How much?"

...or that the existence of this supernatural being is proven by the contents of this religious work, the content of which is stated to be — in the work itself — a direct revelation from this same supernatural being.

I don't want to see anything that cranks headlights up brighter than they are until there are laws in place that a) set a maximum height-above-road for headlights for vehicles that are street-legal, and b) mandate regular inspections to ensure that they're aimed correctly. I already have enough problems with idiots…

Ahh, yes... dragging 'regulated' out and interpreting it as 'controlled' or 'restricted'. It's an archaic usage now, except for double-barreled weapons like shotguns, but to 'regulate' a firearm means to adjust it so that it shoots where the sights are pointed. A more modern form of the practice was adjusting the…

If you knew anything about Christianity at all you would know that God forgives.

The WWI rotary aircraft engines took power off a shaft mounted on the front of the engine. Where do you take power off of this? Both ends of the crankshaft have an offset mount that's feeding air/fuel into the engine and taking exhaust out, and none of it rotates, so you're going to have to have a pretty sizeable gear…

Ahh, the carbon-fiber version of high-density fiberboard.

The "if you have a gun in your house, you are more likely to be killed by it" claim is a mis-citation of Kellerman's study "Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home," New England Journal of Medicine, October 7, 1993, Vol. 329 No. 15, pp. 1084-91. Analysis of Kellermann's ICPSR dataset shows that just…

There's an article over on the History Today website discussing the Sacred Band of Thebes and Phillip's connection with it.

Also in the 'humanoid' category, but rather nebulous in the good/evil axis, is everyone on Earth in H. Beam Piper's 'Paratime' fiction, where the different levels of technological development in the crosstime worlds are grouped by how successful the migration of the Martians from their dying planet to Earth was — on…

That's one of the things that only comes up as a sidenote in H. Beam Piper's stories, but the future history he created had a nuclear war that pounded most of the northern-hemisphere countries, which resulted in 'Lingua Terra' being mostly Spanish, with a sizeable leavening of loan words from other languages, mostly…

That was my thought, too. Either using mortar with too much sand in it, or they didn't let give the wall time to cure, or both. And it's going to be mostly useless on earthquake-rated walls with the steel reinforcement that's required by law — you may crumble some cinderblocks or a section of concrete, but the web of…

That's something that I get a chuckle out of from time to time; I've picked up the habit of watching the light on the cross-street, so when I wind up at a stoplight next to one of the "if horsepower were Viagra I'd have dents in my cabin roof" idiots, I'll use watching the cross light to get moving right as the light…

either that or "Mother Earth..." and "unsustainable populations..."

I would suggest a different solution that would do away with the need for term limits. You simply impose one flat restriction: no person holding an elected office, regardless of how they assumed that office, may campaign for or be elected to any elected office during the term of the office they hold. This makes it real…

That was my thought too — "Some new tracks for Re-Volt; looks like the same gameplay, though."

Just in case someone honestly doesn't know, 'kosher salt' is named that because it's used in the koshering process to help draw the blood out of meat, not because it is itself kosher. Rather than the small crystals you see in table salt, it come in larger flakes.

Seems to me that this design could use some input from the pneumatic arm researchers (article over on Gizmodo) to incorporate more flexible joints; that would make it considerably less spastic.

But when would we get to see it in action?

Technical and reference books suffer badly on the Kindle because there is no way to easily jump back and forth an arbitrary block of pages, the way you'd thumb back and forth in a reference book. The Kindle app I have on my Motorola Xoom is much better for that, with a slider at the bottom of the page I can use to…