And this pertains to rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy in so many ways that I can't even begin to manage such a massive list.

Read more here.

... with localized slowly evanescent field patterns, for wireless non-radiative energy transfer.

That, my friends, in case you were wondering, is what Aristeidis Karalis, J.D.Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljačić have been up to of late.

What does that mean? Well, possibly less hassle for those of us burdened with too many PDAs, cell phones, mp3 players, and domestic robots that uncomplainingly do all our housecleaning and yardwork when we have stacks of 80 papers to grade. In a presentation this week at the Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, the MIT scientists, taking a leaf from much ballyhooed and maligned Nikola Tesla, outlined a scheme that could make plug-in rechargers a thing of the past.

National Geographic reports that the 2006 Ig Nobels Prize for Literature went to Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, for his research, "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

As National Geographic explains, Oppenheimer's research involves adding

complexity to existing samples of writing, inserting needlessly long words into a chunk of text. His aim was to assess readers' reactions to the excessive prose. "A majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence," Oppenheimer writes in his study. But in the experiment, readers judged the authors of the overwrought texts to be not-so-bright.

Be sure to read more about the Ig Nobels for a good laugh (for instance, see the ZDNet coverage). I didn't realize that the sound Matt shared with us previously which adults have trouble hearing was designed as a teenager repellant. LOL