"Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour. That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, a sun that is the source of all our power. The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day, in an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, of this galaxy we call the Milky Way..."
It's the same legal reasoning that preserved the status of tomatoes as a vegetable, despite being botanically a fruit. Basically, there are legal definitions for various food items for the purpose of assessing taxes or import duties, and which side of a division something falls on affects how and if the government collects those fees.
I am reminded of the classic problem from high-school physics, where you are asked to describe how to measure the height of a building with a barometer.
1.The canonical answer: measure the air pressure at the base of the building, and at the top of the building, and calculate the height based on the difference in air pressure.
2.Climb to the top of the building and drop the barometer off the side of the building, measuring the time it takes to hit the ground, using the formula for distance covered under acceleration to calculate the height.
3.Lower the barometer down the side of the building on a rope, and then measure the rope.
4.Set the barometer on the ground, and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the building's shadow, and use the principle of ratios to calculate the height of the building.
5.Place the barometer on the ground and back up to a point where, looking from the ground, the barometer subtends the same visual angle as the building. Compare the distance from your visual point to the barometer and the building, and again using the principle of ratios, calculate the height of the building.
6.Climb the side of the building, marking your climb in units of the height of the barometer, then multiply the height of the building in barometers by the actual height of the barometer to get the building's height.
7.Knock on the door of the building superintendant, and when he answers, greet him and say, "Sir, if you can tell me the height of this building, I will give you this fine barometer."
I'm certain there are others, but these were the ones that my high-school physics teacher recounted when talking about the problem.
Stories like this are an example of how to sensationalize events by describing them out of context. Yes, the temperature of 100.4°F set a new record... but it beat the previous record, set in 1915, by a mere 0.4°F. Clearly, an increase in record high temperature of 0.4°F over a century is a dire consequence of global warming, and a single day's high temperature is obviously entirely anthropogenic in nature.
'Deers'? Really? 'Deer' is an irregular plural, like 'sheep', 'aircraft', 'swine', 'trout', and many others, for which the singular and plural are identical.
This man is going to have no cred whatsoever in jail. "Oh, yeah, he's the guy who got beat up by the eighty-year-old woman in the house he broke into." "Pathetic."
There is also the fact that smartphones have the potential to short-circuit the plot of many movie genres -- for example, the group of random people encountering the creature out in the woods, and no one believes their story afterward... except they had smartphones, and they've got more than a dozen pictures of it. Or being lost... except that they have a smartphone, and GPS and Google Maps shows them where they need to go. Or they're injured out in the boonies, and have to try to survive with a crippling injury... except that they have a smartphone, and can just call for help. When the characters in a movie have smartphones, the script has to go through gyrations to set things up so that the smartphone is useless, in order to prevent them from derailing the plot.
There's also the issue that Disney faced with the Expanded Universe of having to deal with a forest of separate creators. If the movie rights to the characters created by the various EU authors were not part of their book contracts, Disney would have had to negotiate separately with the authors for inclusion of individual characters, facing the issue of having to write around both the existing EU canon and explaining the absence of a character critical to that canon if an author decided to try to hold Disney up for a bigger payment for the movie rights to a character they created. Declaring the EU to be 'Legends' pushed all of that to the side, allowing Disney to pick and choose which parts of the EU they want to draw back into the core canon while ensuring that none of it is a 'must have' component that could obstruct new production if the author tries to be obstructive.
Manure-pile fires are nothing new; piling up manure, often mixed with hay and sawdust, is part of the composting process to turn it into fertilizer. The composting process generates heat in the pile, and if not turned over regularly, the center of the pile can reach temperatures high enough to ignite. The composting process requires a minimum ambient temperature for the microorganisms responsible to reproduce well, but higher temperatures do not of themselves raise the risk of the pile igniting.
"When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults."