The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Michael Phillips:

I am not making any claims as to the reality of this actual product. I just want that to be made clear right up front.

This looks kinda real. How much more do we know, or can we guess? Also, would I be correct in assuming the system throws off oxygen? That could get exciting.

Sadly no. If this is real, what you have is the separation of water into O and H2. The power to run the car would then come from their recombination into H20. Your exhaust will be water vapor, which is actually a very very problematic thing in cases with high vehicle densities.

If it really is a case of lysing water, then it doesn't have to break the laws of thermodynamics. Water is, as all chemicals, in a constant state of equilibrium between various different possible combined state (OH+H, O+H+H, O+H2, and H20 and about a dozen other sets). If they've found a way to catalyze the transition reactions from H2O to the other possible forms and then sequester/capture the H ions or the H2 molecules, then you can run it without an extra (non-environmental) energy source (A catalyst will let you run a reaction further into energetically unfavorable realms than you could do otherwise for a given set of conditions.) It is probably an endothermic reaction series, so you'll need a heat exchanger to keep the water warm enough to produce reasonable amounts of H2, and it wouldn't work in places where the temperature was too low.

I wouldn't be bothered much by my library's putting adult SF in the YA section, though the Chung Kuo books with their fairly explicit torture and sex and torture-sex scenes caused me to raise an eyebrow. The thing that bugs the hell out of me is when a numbered series of books is split between the two sections. (Well that and when books like Scott Lynch's Lock Lamora series aren't in the SF/F section at all.)

It has been a while since I've used desktop based email, but I think that Thunderbird does something like that for your outgoing email. It rates emails with a series of peppers based on perceived incendiary content. (again, I think this happens, but it has been a long while, and even then I was using it as an intermediary to transfer files from one email account to another. This took 2 days, so I didn't really get much use of it even then.)

Before people gripe about how many more posts Cory does about things that Cory is doing, I'd like to point out that, at least from an informal survey of boingboing, I'd like to point out that on the front page at 8:32 EST 11/03/07 Cory had 14 posts, David had 5, Xeni had 1, John had 0, and Joel had 1. It may just appear that Cory has a less favoriable ratio of posts about himself to posts total, because he posts so much more to the site. (I don't recall people jiving Xeni crap about posting about her work.)

I use a similar recipe with just a little bit of vanilla added in.

313

I've been saying that the next 7 books she writes will be a "Potter's Shadow" series, covering the same time span but following Bean... er Neville.

Greg All sorts of posts:
The car didn’t just swoop in and save them at the spiders.
Early in the book it disappeared in the forest.
Later in the book, a little bit before the spiders, they ran into it in the forest, and made a big deal about it going feral. It at this point behaved in an affectionate manner toward Ron and Harry.
While in the car’s presence, they are abducted by spiders and brought to talk to the giant plot device in the clearing. After a minor info dump the car finds them again, saving them from the big scary monsters. (Ron should have been catatonic by this point by the way.)


Mary 205:
Oh yes. I want a forum crawling bot that makes posts from place to place in the general form of:

OhmyGOD! X killed Y in manner Z on page ###.

Where X and Y are complementary lists of names, and Z is a list of setting appropriate manners of demise.

76.
The wand doesn't make you unbeatable in a duel. There are at least two sources about the wand, and one says it makes you invulnerable while the other says that it makes you much harder to beat.

One of those sources is a somewhat gullible man who believes every conspiracy theory in the wizarding world. The fact that he is very occasionally right does not make him right all the time. He is an unreliable source of information. And he makes radish hats.

The other is a wand maker who is the recognized master of wand lore, who seems to find essentially nothing in the world to be as important as wand lore. He probably knows almost nothing outside of his field, but he is a master in his own specialty.

Radish hat man is the source of "this wand makes you invincible."

OCD Wand Guy is the source of "Well it makes you much more powerful, but you can be beaten"

Well, I didn't expect to find [favorite opposition group/spreader of injustice] here.

Most recently Strikethrough 07 (which I suspect will become a new Godwin for certain communities over on livejournal.)

The Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl books might be good. They are caper/adventure stories from the viewpoint of a criminal "mastermind." With magic.

Ooh there are the new Tom Swift books.

And I second the My Teacher books (though definitely not Starwarsish)

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