#!/usr/bin/env perl
sub function { 42 }

Would he have gone nuts anyway because it was a party? Did he go nuts because he has been conditioned (even unconsciously) by adults that candy == go nuts? Did you control by giving artificially sweetened candy to other children at the party? (Even better would be a third group with no candy.)

I think you have failed to eliminate a vast array of confounding factors in your experiment. Not worthy of publication. :)

It is not "hard to find" mercury-free vaccines. Thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in Western nations in decades (with one or two rare exceptions) because better preservatives have been found. It is used in vaccines bought by developing and impoverished nations, because it's cheaper. And it has been proven repeatedly to be safe.

Similarly, I had a Calc professor who gave all the answers on the test, but you had to show all the work on how to get there.

You don't find too many camels in Nevada.

Lighten up, Francis.

One of my favorite classes in college was called Sci-Phi; it was all about philosophical and ethical issues in science fiction. We watched a few movies and some good Star Trek episodes, and also did a lot of reading (both science fiction and philosophers.) There was a lot of work (several essays plus a term paper) so it was not a Mickey-mouse course by any means. Courses like that, which are generally developed for fun by profs who really like their subjects, can be a lot more engaging and interesting than the same old generic "let's analyze The Merchant of Venice to death" courses that fill the majority of one's time as a student.

If some metric X is a statistically reliable method of predicting future success, then X can be defined as a margin of victory. Whether X is a function of the "values" of remaining pieces, or their positions on the board, or the number of moves, or whatever, is immaterial.

It can get a little pricey for huge datasets, but Amazon S3 now has an option where you can ship your data on a big set of disks directly to them, they will import everything into S3, and it will live there forever. The nice thing about S3 is unlike physical disks, it can grow essentially forever, and comes with retention and redundancy guarantees. And once your stuff is in S3, you can recycle the same disks to mail them more data.

As a programmer who knows nothing about graphics algorithms, can somebody explain to me exactly what gamma is? I've been told I should by worrying about it for at least a couple decades, but thus far my lack of knowledge has not caused by any bodily injury. Use small words.

Well if you were using Emacs you could have just done a M-x fight-infection and your thumb would have been better yesterday.

I don't think you quite fully understand how a mountain works.

The amount of electricity that the US gets from burning oil is so small it might as well be zero. More nuclear power at least takes some burden off coal, which is the real environmental problem with power production in the US.