djansing,

While I think that your idea of going back to two divisions in each league has merit, I don't think that you can assume that each teams record would stay the same. In particular, Detroit came out of the toughest division in baseball this year, yet they were only two games behind the Yankees at the end of the season. My guess is they would have ended up in first place over the Yankees in a two division AL, since they likely wouldn't have had to play as many games against the tough Twins and White Sox.

Andrew,

I don't think you were really all that wrong to begin with. Google has been protecting their trademark for a while. And people have been making fun of them when they do. See for example http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/02/25/1943247.shtml?tid=133 and http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/14/1159243 . So Google has been sending cease and desist letters of this sort for at least 3 years.

The only way they have a chance to win this battle is if they have to win this battle in the long run is to have their name become less synonymous with searching. The only ways I can see that happening is some other search engine becomes bigger than Google or Google's other business's growing enough, so that search becomes a small part of what they do. neither seems too likely to me in the near future, though other trademarks have avoided permanent "verbing". For example I hardly ever hear anyone say "xerox this for me" anymore.

I have a couple of minor corrections. First, EOS is not a journal. It is AGU's weekly newsletter.

The link you have to the phrase "Letters by" actually links the AMQUA's denunciation of the award given to Crichton by AAPG. That denunctiation was printed in the September 5 issue of EOS.

The letters in response were in the October 24 issue of EOS. I don't think that there is a freely available copy of the letters on the EOS site yet. AGU members can get the issue at

http://www.agu.org/journals/eo/eo0643/2006EO43_tabloid.pdf . The letters themselves and AGU's response make for interesting reading.

Also, Corbett and Steig are sparring at http://www.agu.org/fora/eos/2006/10/23/test-post-with-a-figure.html#comments

Ignore most of my previous letter. I see now that the link you posted includes the AMQUA letter, the climate skeptic responses, and EOS's editors response to the letters. (There ia also another related piece by an AGU official on the front page which is not included.)

The dates are as I posted them above, though.

I like a good Bush bashing as much as the next guy, but the logic behind this one seems more than a little bit strained.

The Republicans sent Bush to places where they thought he would be helpful to candidates. Those were typically races that were close before GWB got there, that they thought they should be able to win. Just because the Republicans lost most of those races doesn't mean it that those visits were a net negative factor in those elections. For all we know the Republicans could have lost by more if Bush hadn't visited. There was too much else in play to separate out the determining factor in those races.

The same holds true for the other McCain making visits or Michael J. Fox's commercials.

King,

I admittedly fall on the Bob Knight apologist side of this, but nonetheless I can't see how you can call that a "punch". Knight pulled the player chin up or he jerked it up, but he didn't punch it up.

Should Knight have done it? Probably not, but hard and fast rules suggested by some to not touch kids do not work in coaching. Basketball is a contact sport. To show someone how to box out or shoot a jump shot at times require contact. Of course what Knight did here doesn't fall in that context, but that doesn't make a "no touching" rule any less ridiculous.

It is much too soon to call this generation, Generation Dem. Not only are the results of one election far from conclusive, every survey I have seen has had current college students the much more conservative than college students one, two or three generations ago.

Part of this shift might be due to a higher fraction of young people going to college, but that makes the results of this election even more suspect. The Democrats support from young people in this election is probably more due to the war in Iraq than their support from any other group. The war is not a stable issue on which to build a majority party.

Finally, the article says "These political conditions, assuming they are stable or augmented through 2008, set up the Democrats to dominate the redistricting that will follow the 2010 census." The Democrats will have to hold power through at least two elections in most

states - 2008 and 2010 - since redistricting doesn't start till 2011, with the new districts being used in 2012.

Another error in this article is the numerous times it says "beta gamma" decay or activity. Beta decay and gamma decay are two different types of radioactive decay. They are grouped here because the radiation is more penetrating, and thus easier to detect in this context. If you want to combine you should write something like "beta and gamma activity" or "beta/gamma activity".

I would also like to add my voice to those asking for better fact checking. This article should have had at least two technical sources, and you should have shown the finished product to either one of the sources or another person with the technical background necessary to catch these errors. This article is not up to Salon's standards.