Whoo-hoo! I get to boast that I recognized Barbara McClintock from the image on Neatorama, without peeking at the answer. I did a report on her in college. She was amazing!

Her Wikipedia article, alas, slants more towards her published results and is staid and boring. Did you know she enjoyed tennis? Not from the article. Compare it to John von Neumann's article, where we learn "Von Neumann liked to eat and drink; his wife, Klara, said that he could count everything except calories. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks).[12] He was a non-smoker.". Oy vey - what a difference!

Or, the WP entry for McClintock says only "She successfully described the number of chromosomes, or karyotype, of N. crassa and described the entire life cycle of the species." From http://old.weedtowonder.org/files/pdf/McClintocks_World.pdf we learn the more powerful comment "Barbara, in two months at Stanford, did more to clean up the cytology of Neurospora than all other cytological geneticists had done in all previous time on all forms of mold.”

I'm dismayed to read the talk comments at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Barbara_McClintock . The phrase "the current picture is so sexy" reeks of the misogyny which dogged her life. More power to you Temple-Wood!

Now ask me or another American where County Cork is. Is it a long way to Tipperary?

It's what happens when IKEA decides to make a music box synthesizer!

I saw Victory as a kid when it was in the theaters. I remember it as one of the rare films where people applauded at the end.

I don't think you should look at the fraction of the litter due to containers but the overall amount of litter. As it points out on page 17, there appears to be a correlation between introducing a bottle bill and the reduction of other types of litter, though the reason isn't known. I can conjecture that if you throw the can you just finished out the window then it might be easier to toss out other trash. But you are right, that isn't persuasive evidence. The strict numbers look like about an 8% reduction in litter (geometric mean of 4% and 21%, with 90% success rate at 10 cent deposit.) At this point I'm arguing the difference between "small" and "slight", so I concede.

Quoting p26, "The cost-versus-revenue bottom line for recycling programs is a hotly debated topic, due in part to whether the analysis is strictly fiscal or includes externalities such as reductions in air pollution, energy use, and environmental degradation." :)

I remember a scene in John Christopher's Tripods series with a similar premise. If the convicted prisoner could outrun a Tripod over a stretch the he was free.

The "don't get in the car while fueling up because you may cause a fire" suggesting is very close to its own myth. See http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/static.asp . Only a few dozen such fires have happened out of billions of fuelings per year, *and* of the few reported cases of static electricity causing a fire, almost as many take place before the refueling begins as during. If you're really worried about, then get leather seats ("Leather Seats Are The Best is myth #1").

That was frightening!

To set the stage, New Mexico's views towards Texas started a long time ago. The Republic of Texas laid claim to part of northern NM, and in 1841 sent a force to try and secure the land and gain control of the Santa Fe Trail. Then during the Civil War, Confederate troops - mostly Texans - tried to take over the state, and briefly held Albuquerque and Santa Fe. (Arizona Territory, which had split a few years earlier from NM, side with the Confederates.) US was also suspicious about New Mexican statehood, in part because of the long Spanish culture dating back to the 1600s. There were many questions about if the NM population had "assimilated" enough to be US state. Imagine the resentment which might occur when a New Mexican-born American, who can trace their local family ancestry back to Imperial Spanish colonization in the 1600s, and who grew up in a Spanish speaking household, is called an immigrant. Texans seem to go out of their way to prove they are more American than the rest of Americans, and that cultural difference might help antagonize things. And there are still problems by the US breaking its treaty obligations to honor Spanish land grants. Quoting the 'Milagro Beanfield War' - “The war never ended in 1848”.

Not quite as long running is the Illinois Long-term Selection Experiment, which started in 1896. It's the "longest running continuous genetics experiment in higher plants".

Heretics! Those of us in the Old True Faith know that God created the Internet in 1969, then populated it with all manner of Protocols - telnet, ftp, nntp, smtp, ntp, and so many more. Online discussions started, and flamewars and spam soon followed, tempered only be the anger of the SysAdmin (praise be the SysAdmin) and the distant frowns of the ARPANET overlords. This was a time of purity, before the worms and viruses came. But this was also a time of soundless darkness, for images, sound, and movies could only be found in the corners of the world. Archie, Veronica, and Gopher sustained us in that net until Mosaic brought us to the new land of HTTP and HTML that the prophet Berners-Lee created. Now, alas, our old faith is crumbling, forgotten, overwhelmed.

A place to enact one's inner Saruman! Practically speaking, the winds on that balcony will make it mostly unusable. Few plants survive on high-rise balconies because of the wind (which also dries things out faster) and temperature extremes. Outdoor furniture will need to be fastened - don't want lawn chairs falling down 500 feet.

The researcher says "seeing actual human bodies may set a more realistic point of comparison than photoshopped bodies presented in mass media". I can't find the paper to see if it factored in that some of the people in the drawing class might have a good idea of what 'actual human bodies' look like. For examples, the beach, the changing room at a gym or pool, or someone who works as a massage therapist or nurse/caretaker. I would also like to know how the anxiety of being a new student in a new subject, knowing there would be a nude model, vs. the relief and pleasure of having succeeded in doing the class, was a factor.

d³ᓬx² ? At least I can remember it, unlike 0118 999 881 999 119 7253.