"When Gene Wolfe wrote what will probably stand as his single greatest (multi-volume) work, he did something extraordinarily sly: Where most science fiction writers invent strange-looking words to indicate exotic things, people, creatures, and concepts, he employed what looked like invented words but were actually legitimate terms taken from the dustier reaches of the dictionary. Heptarchs, margays, naviscaputs, and other heteroclite beings abound."

-- Michael Swanwick

"This result leads, at this stage of analysis, to rather pessimistic conclusions about the allocation of public goods. Samuelson has demonstrated that the equilibrium attained by a market mechanism for public goods will, in general, fail to be an optimum. The analysis here implies that a majority rule political process will fail to reach an equilibrium at all. Thus, in the case of public goods, society can count upon neither the market nor a majority rule political process to be a desirable allocative device."

-- Charles R. Plott, "A Notion of Equilibrium and its Possibility Under Majority Rule," The American Economic Review, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Sep., 1967), pp. 787-806.

"Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States military in 1961 and 1963 to create a ring of 3.5×10⁸ copper dipole antennas (1.78cm long and 25.4μm (1961) and 17.8μm (1963) diameter needles) in orbit which would allow global radio communication."

-- Wikipedia

[I figure the individual needles weighed about 40 micrograms each. If you were wondering.]

"They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose."

-- Anonymous 17th century protest poem

"All cancer agents act by disrupting chemical bonds. In a classic 2001 op-ed LBL physicist Robert Cahn explained that Einstein won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that cell phones can’t cause cancer. The threshold energy of the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won the prize, lies at the extreme blue end of the visible spectrum in the near ultraviolet. The same near-ultraviolet rays can also cause skin cancer. Red light is too weak to cause cancer. Cell-phone radiation is 10,000 times weaker."

-- Bob Park

[Correction: Einstein did not win the 1905 Nobel Prize in physics; he won the 1921 Prize for work published in 1905.]

"But for every accommodating pal, there’s another who feels going under the knife is beyond the duty of bridesmaid. Becky Lee, 39, a Manhattan photographer, declined when a friend asked her — and five other attendants — to have their breasts enhanced. “We’re all Asian and didn’t have a whole lot of cleavage, and she found a doctor in L.A. who was willing to do four for the price of two,” said Ms. Lee, who wore a push-up bra instead."

-- New York Times

“Then, the funniest dumb mistake [in WALL-E]: The ship apparently has a system for generating gravity, because it does not rotate to provide a "down" for the passengers. The gravity generator is presumably located in the bottom of the ship.

So when the navigation goes awry and the ship tilts, the gravity generator still remains in exactly the same position, relative to the rest of the ship. There is simply no way that, from merely tilting the ship, it would cause people to slide along the deck and bunch up along one edge.”

-- Orson Scott Card