It's good, but I prefered the earlier, far more bizarre attempt to overcome the problem of harvesting spider webs by splicing spider genes into goats and creating goats that produced spider silk when you milked them instead of milk. ;-) ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/889951.stm[^]

Ahh... I've always wondered what the difference between Great Britain and United Kingdom were. The main difference is that "United Kingdom" is a political entity and "Great Britain" is a geographical entity (the largest island in the the British Isles) Steve T.

Hi, You will very easiliy see where this goes wrong if you try to initialize your array to something other than zero, for example change it to 'A' and the result becomes "CLEANED PIPE" "AAAAtesttesttest" Steve T.

...For example, look at your eye. It has several distinct parts which work together to give vision. How is it possible for something to evolve into this state ? Until it functioned, the body has no way of knowing what vision IS, and for an eye to spontaneously mutate in one generate and thus give it's owner a competitive edge is as ludicrous as to suggest that my next child may have wings or breathe fire... Of course it is ludicrous to suggest that aan eye can "spontaneously mutate" - as is the suggestion that that is how evolutionists propose that complex organs like the eyes came to be. There is nothing ludicrous about the gradual generation of a patch of light sensitive cells giving an andvantage to some organism, and why not a simple thickened translucent epidermis over that patch confering a a rudimentary focusing ability ... etc, etc. I think the biggest barrier to most people's ability to accept evolution (other than religion conviction) is that as a relatively short lived creature we have tremendous difficulty comprehending the vast time scales over which, according to the theories, evolotion works. Steve T.

I'm blaming it on my mouse, ... Definitely mouse-dependant ... I was getting .22 pretty consistently (pre-press only) with the occasional .17/.18 when I relaxed my finger almost to the point of releasing while waiting for the color change. Then I tuned my mouse to have a "hair trigger" - I wedged a couple of layers of paper into the crack under the button until I could just barely press it. Then I could get .18 consistantly with an occasional .11 ;) Steve T.

:) Good joke - but you shouldn't put the punch line in caps ... It spoils the surprize because the reader can't help noticing how the joke is going to end before he's even halfway through. Steve T.

...I hope you didn't drink a lot of water before entering the office... N ...I hope he did! It's better to have to pee in your trash-can than to die of thirst ;-) Steve T.

...When I've been using a computer for a while my right hand [the one I use the mouse with] always gets very cold. My other hand always is fine...Does anybodyelse have this problem??? I used to have this problem ... I solved it by making a slight adjustment to the vanes in the air-con vent over my cubicle to divert the cold air to the left hand side of the desk :) cool. i typed this without looking at the keyboard... dwmn. i itred ti tupe thids wopthout loopinh at thr ketbioet :( Steve T.

I think I'm having a mid-life crisis; I'm nearly fifty and I've wasted my life searching for excitement: moving to different countries a number of times and changing careers on a whim, climbing mountains, kitesurfing, snowboarding ... dating younger girls and experimenting with psychadelic drugs and alternative sexual lifestyles, pioneering hanggliding and paragliding... Now I'm wondering was it all worthwhile ... wishing I was married with a couple of kids, a nice nine-to-five job and a retirement plan ... ;-) Steve T.

Mary had a little lamb, she put it in a bucket, and every time the lamb got out her bulldog tried to put it back in again ;) Steve T.

zhoujun, In European language cultures some poets seem to take great delight in writing "poetry" that seems to be complete nonsense. E.E. Cummings is one such poet. The really weird thing is that some of them receive high critical acclaim - although no one offering the high praise ever seems to be able to expain what the poetry is about. Maybe some of them do have soem deeper meaning - liker the stream-of-consciousness writings of the beat era, but I think a lot of it is pretensious junk. It's a bit like so-called modern "art" .. someone puts up a transparent trash-basket full of normal bedroom trash .. tissues, tampon wrappers, etc in the Tate Gallery (true case) and it is hailed as art. Personally I think this piece is self describing (trash). Do you have similar "weird" art, poetry, prose, etc. in China that seems to make no sense to the general population, but receives critical acclaim from those "in-the-know"? Steve T. I don't know whether you have

... they're both from poetry by E.E. Cummings ... http://www.fandelem.com/eecummings.html it's marginally easier to understand than my code :) Steve T.

it probably means something like ... when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the color of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. ;) Steve T.

"What about captain pugwash ? Seaman Stains, Roger the cabin boy ... who was the other one ?? " You're probably thinking of "Master Bates" but all three of those "double entendre" characters are urban legend. The "real" crew of the Black Pig were Master Mate, Tom the cabin boy, and Pirates Barnabas and Willy. And there was no character called "Seaman" anything. The Magic Roundabout, on the other hand, was chock-full of double entendres ;-) Steve T.

...Most of the time I cannot get the correct tone. Like when watching TV, cannot laugh when a joke was told. Don't worry Lucy, if the comedy on TV up there in Canada is as bad here in the USA then the problem is the jokes ... not your sense of humor :) Steve T.

Yep, them. And you're not old - you just have good taste. I'm not really much of a music collector - in fact I hadn't bought a CD in about ten years - until last week when, while ordering a Shonen Knife CD (which didn't really want) on amazon.com to fulfil the "terms of use" of a "shonenware" app I'd downloaded, I decided to buy a few "blasts from the past" ... one of them was ELP's Brain Salad Surgery. .... BTW thanks for the compliment - but unfortunately having good taste and getting old are not mutually exclusive ;) Steve T. Welcome back my friends to a show that never ends ... ;)

An elderly man in Phoenix called his son in New York and said, "John, I hate to ruin your day but your mother and I are getting divorced. Forty years of misery is enough... we can't stand the sight of each other any more." "What!" the son exclaimed, "You can't, dad I ... " "Shut up, son. There's nothing you can say will change our minds. I'm sick of your mother and she's sick of me ... and I'm sick of talking about it. You can phone your sister in Chicago and tell her for me. It's over!", said the old man, and slammed down the phone. The son phoned his sister in Chicago. She was enraged. "No way! We can't let this happen! John, I'm calling Dad and putting a stop to this right now!" She phoned her father, and before he could speak she exploded, "Dad, you absolutely cannot divorce mom. I won't let this happen. I'm phoning John back right now and we'll be on the next available flights down there. Don't do a thing until we... " The phone went dead as her father hung up on her. In Phoenix the father turned to his wife and said, "Okay, they're coming for the Memorial Day weekend and paying their own fares. What are we going to tell them for Thanksgiving? Steve T.

Paragliding in the Sierras near Yosemite - trying to beat the 60-mile flight my buddy did there two weeks ago.:) Steve T.

?? ELP == Extended Long Play? Or am I just really old? I first thought Emerson Lake and Palmer ... guess I'm old too;) Steve T.

...I also consistentally misspell "misspel" and "behavouir". Do you only misspell "consistently" occaisionally? :) I ocassionaly get "occasionally" correct. Steve T.