@ #2 - Hey, Cory and Crew: Maybe a change to the engine, so that when a comment is deleted, it keeps its number, but just shows the word "deleted"? Or maybe it doesn't show up at all?

But considering how many people respond to other comments by comment #, it's confusing to renumber the rest of them.

But, re: the patent application proposal: Original ideas are getting harder and harder to come by! No matter how silly this guy's plan is, you gotta give him props for that.

I agree, Treepour. Thanks for expressing it more clearly than I'd have been able to.

You know, I took a course on Epistemology back in college... We spent, like, three weeks proving to our professor that we weren't all figments of his imagination. I understood what he was getting at, but that sort of thinking always felt vaguely dirty... like something you should only do while locked in the bathroom with a copy of "Critique of Pure Reason"

It's just word games. The poor guy was genuinely mentally ill, and we don't even get to hear whether they cured him!

Same thing as those people who habitually contest traffic tickets, because the odds are quite good that either the "witness" (cop) won't show, or won't have the paperwork filled out right, or won't have sufficient proof...

Their bureaucracy looks mighty from the outside, but it doesn't have the muscle to back up its claims.

I still think the people who contest traffic tickets would be more morally superior if they focused on changing laws instead of dodging ones they disapprove of, but that rationale doesn't even apply here. Yeah, Joe Lents is a thief, and he's robbing a faceless corporation who will have a hard time finding sympathy.

@10 - I was about to write your exact post. I get this whenever I run more than a couple degrees of fever. I remember one time I was sweating in my twin bed, and I felt like I was in between two wrinkles of the sheets, and that the edges of the bed were waaay out of reach.

And I remember being unable to picture anybody I knew without seeing their head the size of a basketball goal. When I looked at people with my eyes open, the effect was still there, but less pronounced.

It's the only hallucination I've ever had (err... or so I hope), and I remember it was actually kind of fun, except for the other symptoms that came with it.

@2, I think you're pretty much correct... Pilots have rare and incredibly useful skills, but planes are evolving pretty quickly, too. Of course there will always be a manual override, and there will always be situations where a brave and skilled pilot saved a plane-load of people from certain doom... But that's happening less and less often.

Currently, I don't think takeoffs and landings are completely automated. I think a computer voice tells the pilot what to do and when to do it, but he retains discretion and control.

@1, sensoz - I know what you mean. Once, I downloaded a pirate PDF of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", and I read all 500+ pages of that damn thing... then, 2 years later, I was discussing with my friend why I thought the series had gone downhill and I wouldn't be reading it anymore, and I talked about how awful that book was, and he kept saying "Uh, dude, I'm pretty sure that didn't happen in the book."

Anyway, loooooong novel short, I had accidentally read a full-length fanfic by a chinese guy who was showing off his (admittedly impressive) english Skillz. And the sheer length of the book disabled my internal "bullshit detector"...

I've never been so humiliated. My friends mocked me about that for months.

Before thinking that "Xmas" is a subversive way to refer to the holiday, keep in mind that the term was coined by medieval monks who routinely abbreviated "Christ" with the greek letter Chi, aka "X".

#32 takuan - Yes, it's possible to soak your clothes in liquid explosives, but as far as I know they all stink, so a detector should be pretty easy to build. However, as of 1 month ago (last time I flew...), I can confirm they are NOT screenging out stinky passengers. (I admit, it was me. I reeked.)

And I suppose you could impregnate your clothes with gunpowder too, but from what I understand, they'd be prone to vanishing in a bright flash and puff of smoke. A simple test would be to have a spot welder working above the x-ray machine, raining sparks down on those below. Unfortunately, there are very few terrorists who I would like to see after their clothes had just burned off, which is probably why this hasn't been rolled out yet.

Back in 8th grade, the police did a random early-morning weapons sweep; They huddled every student in the school into the gym, and ran us through metal detectors one-by-one and sent us to the cafeteria.

At the end of the day, there were three violations; one girl had a metal nailfile with a point on the end, another girl had nail clippers with a fold-out sharp file, and I had a 1.5" swiss army knife (keychain variety).

As the most serious offender, they called held me in the principal's office, called my mother over, and told her "We don't think this is a big deal, but if we didn't call you here, we could get sued. Tell your son not to bring his knife to school anymore." Then he sent me home early as "punishment".

Up until that point, I was sure I was going to get expelled and grounded, but my mom laughed about it later and the principal apologized for the fuss.

Should I be happy that everybody involved was so rational? Or angry that they were forced to follow rules that they knew were irrational?

Reminds me of this strip from Penny Arcade!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/24

It may sound nice to shock people who annoy you, but how would you REALLY feel if this happened?

I was taught in college that this was called "A.C.H.O.O. syndrome", standing for Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Opthalmic Outburst.

I'm disappointed that this name isn't mentioned in any of the official literature. :-(

I love Anu Garg, and I've been on his mailing list for years, but I gotta say, I think things like this are sort of a crock.

In German, there's a word for "The big white automobile". It will never appear in any dictionary, though, because they already defined the words for "big", "white", and "car". It's a feature of the language that you can chain modifiers onto nouns.

Likewise greek, you can mix all sorts of root words together a variety of ways... So what is Anu's justification of what makes a particular combination a "word"? It's certainly not based on common usage. I'm betting it's just "someone used it in print". So what?

I imagine that when the word "deipnosophist" was used for the first time, the guy who said it didn't realize he was coining a word, and the people he said it to didn't need a definition.

Sorry I'm rambling- my point is this: If we just wanted a list of funny greekish words that nobody's ever heard of, we'd just write a simple algorithm.

Geez, can we just assume every story Cory ever wrote will eventually be published in every language ever spoken? We get it, dude! You're popular! That is AWESOME for you!

Why don't you start a blog called "Cory's Linguibation"? I dunno, I'm no author, you can probably come up with a snazzier name...

I love boing boing, and I'm sure you get tons of comments like "stop doing stories about X, they're stupid!" And I know you can't please everybody, and I'm vastly pleased with most of your blog.

But c'mon already!

hey guys: I find the kind of page layout used for this story to be annoying, so if your preferences run like mine, paste this into your address bar, all on one line:

javascript:document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML = document.getElementById('pagetext').innerHTML

Hey Cory, good to see I'm not the only one who posts to their blog using a plaintext editor. However, I always check my links to make sure they're valid HTML. ;-) You misspelled "href" in that link to Amazon.

Keep up the otherwise good work! Love the blog!

Wow, what an amazing story. I've got a couple of weird stories, but telling them now would be like performing after the Beatles.

I'm glad that at least some of the truly weird shit in this world happens to people who really know how to write!

Truth is stranger than fiction, and in this case it's just as entertaining and well-spoken.

"Forget Photoshop - I'd like to tattoo a permanent red bullseye on this creep's forehead."

Oh no! India's full of child molesters!

Haha, well, I bet I can guess why nobody has figured it out yet- It's really, really hard!

Spam is not quite a "solved problem" yet, and it's waaaay easier than trying to decide whether you intend to go to dinner with some friends based on other emails that include travel plans....

They're probably just trying to nail the most achievable goal first, before they move on to that blue-sky AI stuff.