It’s cool that some establishments want to be a little different and have a stylized bathroom sign to match the décor of the rest of the bar/club/restaurant, rather than the generic (and, to a degree, sexist) silhouette placards, but making people solve puzzles when they are inebriated and have to urinate (or worse) is just asking for trouble. The next time I have to compare the two bathroom symbols to figure out which door I should enter, I’m just going to pee in the hallway.

Facebook updates have helped Frogger strengthen his third-person writing skills.

Facebook updates have helped Frogger strengthen his third-person writing skills.

It’s cool that some establishments want to be a little different and have a stylized bathroom sign to match the décor of the rest of the bar/club/restaurant, rather than the generic (and, to a degree, sexist) silhouette placards, but making people solve puzzles when they are inebriated and have to urinate (or worse) is just asking for trouble. The next time I have to compare the two bathroom symbols to figure out which door I should enter, I’m just going to pee in the hallway.

People always catch the news, whether they check their favorite news feed on the Internet or just turn on the Nightly News when they get home from work. There are many ways to access the happenings in the world but, until websites like Facebook came along, there were no good ways to keep abreast of all the events in your friends' lives. Now you have a website that broadcasts important (and, more often, not-so-important) goings-on in the world of the people you know but don't necessarily talk to on a regular basis. I think of Facebook as the Friend News Network. And lest you complain that much of the updates on Facebook are inane, wouldn't you rather hear about what someone's having for lunch than another story about Tiger Woods' affairs?

"COPS SAY LEGALIZE DRUGS!

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease!

The stated goals of current U.S.drug policy -- reducing crime, drug addiction, and juvenile drug use -- have not been achieved, even after nearly four decades of a policy of "war on drugs." This policy, fueled by over a trillion of our tax dollars has had little or no effect on the levels of drug addiction among our fellow citizens, but has instead resulted in a tremendous increase in crime and in the numbers of Americans in our prisons and jails. With 4.6% of the world's population, America today has 22.5% of the worlds prisoners. But, after all that time, after all the destroyed lives and after all the wasted resources, prohibited drugs today are cheaper, stronger, and easier to get than they were thirty-five years ago at the beginning of the so-called "war on drugs." - LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) www.leap.cc

Women don't really have a choice, now do they?

If you live with anyone else, I think it's a social necessity. Consider how you would react if you came home and your wife/husband/roommate/trained monkey left a little "surprise" for you in the bowl. "Do unto others," and all that.

If one is worried about the waste of water, all of today's toilets are low flush—1.6 gallons per flush or less. This is sufficient for front-end business, and for most back-end business. If there are some stubborn stragglers who don't realize the party is over, another flush will do the trick. If the courtesy flush is only utilized a quarter of the time, that's still far less water used over time than with an older toilet.

Raditude.

Raditude.

I'm FOR having an indented debate column to go along with any given argument so people can debate a specific part of that point without having to make a separate argument. This way a person can tell why they crudded another's argument, and the original poster has the option of restating or clarifying their argument.

"If there is no victim, how can there be a crime? Drug prohibition breeds police corruption and abuse, for the temptation to make drug profits in the black market is very strong. Almost every major US city has had innocent citizens accidentally killed by police in pursuit of a drug bust. Under current law -- driven by the Drug War -- police need only "probable cause" before they can seize property of a 'suspected' drug dealer. This has become a major source of funds for law enforcement agencies as the value of property seized has soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars." - www.efficacy-online.org

"More Americans are imprisoned on drug charges than what Western Europe (with a bigger population) locks up for all offenses. This unprecedented mass incarceration has imposed an emormous burden on US taxpayers. The federal government faces multi-trillion dollar budget deficits and warns of reductions in social services, education, and the environment. The federal anti-drug budget, however, will increase by 4.7% this fiscal year to $12.468 billion dollars. From 1984 to 1996, California built 21 new prisons, and 1 new university. California state government expenditures on prisons increased 30% from 1987 to 1995, while spending on higher education decreased by 18%. This trend is echoed in every state of the nation." - www.efficacy-online.org

"The vast majority of people who use recreational drugs do not become addicts and do not need treatment. Most convicted criminals have used marijuana, as well as many other substances. There is no truth to the "Gateway Theory", as millions of Americans who admit to smoking pot do not desire harder drugs, and do not have life-ruining habits that began with pot smoking. Research on the efficacy of marijuana use is non-existant in the USA due to a prohibition on research. International research, however, shows that marijuana's medicinal properties are undeniable." - www.efficacy-online.org

"For what American spends on the Drug War, we could have a first-class health care system for everybody. Public health problems like HIV and Hepatitis C are exacerbated by zero tolerance laws that restrict access to clean needles. Millions of people who suffer from AIDs, cancer, and other wasting diseases find relief from smoking marijuana." - www.efficacy-online.org

"The War on Drugs is waged more harshly against the poor and minorities who don't have the resources to fight back. Draconian laws are never applied evenly to all people. African Americans comprise only 12.2% of the population but they make up 38% of those arrested for drug offenses and 59% of those convicted of drug offenses." - www.efficacy-online.org

"Our federal prisons literally are packed with non-violent drug offenders who often have no prior criminal record. People charged with simple drug possession quite often serve more time in jail than violent criminals ... and the violent ones are routinely released to make room for the drug offenders." - www.efficacy-online.org

Every dollar that goes towards the ridiculous War on Drugs is a dollar out of the taxpayers' pockets that could otherwise be spent on worthwhile programs.

The War on Drugs is legislation of morality. People are imprisoned for the purchasing and possession of substances they wish to put into their own bodies. Whether or not it is wise to do so health-wise, people should be allowed to do whatever they wish to themselves, provided it harms no one else.

Laws that protect people from being harmed by others make sense, but laws that protect people from themselves do not. A person should be allowed to choose, even at his own peril, whether or not to engage in risky behavior. Not wearing a helmet is risky behavior in that in the event of a motorcycle crash the person not wearing his helmet is more likely to be injured. So what? It is not the job of the state to act as a nanny. I wear my helmet for my own safety, not because the state tells me to.

Laws that protect people from being harmed by others make sense, but laws that protect people from themselves do not. A person should be allowed to choose, even at his own peril, whether or not to engage in risky behavior. Not wearing a seatbelt is risky behavior in that in the event of an automobile crash the person not wearing his seatbelt is more likely to be injured. So what? It is not the job of the state to act as a nanny. I wear my seatbelt for my own safety, not because the state tells me to.

The very question should sound as ridiculous as if you substituted the word 'interracial' for 'same-sex'. And since there seem to be no good secular objections to gay marriage, there should be no opposition from the states.

Languages are always fluid and changing over time. Dialects can eventually become entirely different languages, unable to be understood by speakers of the root language. While I agree that LOLspeak is largely the result of people who can't spell attempting to write, and though it annoys me to no end, I have to accept that people speak it, seem to understand it even. Besides, it poses no threat to proper English. If convention, over time, forces words like 'ain't' into the lexicon, so be it; it seems unlikely that 'deez' will replace 'these' in the dictionary any time soon.

As far as the irregular schedule of the show, different people have different patterns of podcast listening, no doubt, and my pattern is to listen to a bunch of episodes of any given podcasts in a row. So if there are no 13GNEs available for a few weeks, there are thousands of other podcasts to tie me over in the meantime. Which is not to say that the episodes shouldn't keep coming, but most listeners will understand that it's kind of a difficult job to put out an hour-long episode every week.

The show will get better as time goes by. A return listen to some earlier episodes of other favorite podcasts reveals that they weren't all that great at first compared to what they would later become, much like suffering through early episodes of the Simpsons, which was initially just an animated sitcom with a nice, happy, feel-good ending. 13GNE cannot fairly be judged against other podcasts that have been around for years; it needs to be compared to its own past episodes.

Kicking the ball only requires thinking about two dimensions, versus the three dimensions involved with slugging a baseball or softball, making the game more enjoyable to the less-athletically inclined.

If I'm having guests over, of course I'll make the bed; although saying "it looks like an adult may live there" is begging the question. But if I'm just going to work for the day and returning home, and nobody's coming over, what purpose does making the bed serve, other than appealing to the obsessive-compulsive?

I love pizza, but that doesn't mean I want to eat pizza every day for the rest of my life.

Currently, an animal has to die in order for you to enjoy it. This is not quite the same as "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten," but it's close.

Maglevs.

Children should still be discouraged from engaging in sexual intercourse, but should nonetheless be made aware that there is a such thing as safer sex to combat teen pregnancy and the transmission of STDs.

An idea could also be crudded out of sheer popularity, rather than clear and concise rationale. This helps balance out the equation.

No, because I'm just going to have to unmake the bed when I jump into tonight, and Better Homes and Gardens is not coming over for a photo shoot today.

Some things, like cows, feel pain. Others, like rocks, do not. If, to the best of our knowledge, a thing cannot feel pain, then we have no moral responsibility towards it. On the other hand, if something can experience pain, we ought not hurt it.

If artists want to give their music away, they do so on their websites. People do not have the right to just "share" intellectual property without compensation to the artist. And it's a bullshit argument that there are no lost sales because people who listen and like will buy while those who don't would never have bought the album, movie, TV show anyway. If I would never have bought some other product, like say a car, I don't just get to keep the car. So if you stream a song and like it, much like test driving a car, you then have the option to buy it. If someone were somehow able to give you an instant copy of a vehicle, much like sharing an MP3, whether or not you decided you liked it, you still have an automobile that you didn't pay for. And the more that people file share, the less profit there is for the artist, which in turn might take away a lot of incentive for said artist to make him music, craft, etc., and the higher the price of the product for those who purchase legally.

You don't have a choice when coming into this world, but you definitely have a choice when going out. If you want to end your life and are unable to do so on your own, people should be allowed to help you, provided there are witnesses to attest that you wanted to end your life (to avoid murder under the guise of suicide).

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
— Steven Weinberg

Just because it might feel better to think there is life after death is no reason to live in self-delusion. And while faith might cause some people to do good (which is immoral, since they simply act on a reward/punishment system), it was also responsible for September 11th.

Everyone is born an atheist. They have to be taught about the existence of nonsense like sky gods. Atheism is simply the default.

Legalizing marijuana would be a crucial first step in ending the ridiculous War on Drugs. Over half of the population of federal prisons are drug offenders. Valuable resources that could be used to deter real crime are being spent on arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning drug offenders. And as unhealthy as drugs are to people's health, it should be their choice whether or not they put substances into their bodies.

As a Libertarian, I say that people should be able to do whatever they want, provided it does no harm to others. Smoking weed doesn't hurt anyone but the person doing the smoking.

I think it's possibly good to make people aware that not everyone agrees with your opinion. It would be nice to know why they crud you though.

It enables one to see at night.

There is one addition to the new game that was not present in the last version: Special Ops mode. It's basically a single player or co-op mode where you perform challenges against the clock, like battling successive waves of bad guys trying to kill you, trying to get from point A to point B while bad guys try to kill you, or racing your snow mobile while bad guys try to kill you. But I'll be damned if I can find any friends to play with yet.

It should really be called Modern Warfare 1.5 because, while the graphics have been tweaked from the last version, there's really not much new, it's a "continuation" of the story line from the previous game, the campaign mode is ridiculously short, and the multiplayer just adds new maps.

There is simply no compelling evidence for creationism, intelligent design, or whatever term will be coined in the future to try to force god into schools' science curricula. To say that "we are simply too wonderful to have evolved by chance" is an example of the Appeal to Ignorance. You can't imagine how humanity could possibly have come about any other way, so it must have been your imaginary friend in the sky. The first thing you would have to do is show that evolution could not be true. But the more time that goes by the more evidence is found to support evolution. And where is the definition of a "too wonderful" human body to be found? Even if the human body were perfect, this would not be proof of a creator. It would simply show that nature, over the course of 3.5 billion years, developed a pretty good organism. But there are plenty of design flaws with the human body, including the partial shared pathway our air and food go through, the backward wiring of humans' eyes, and the presence of that great useless organ--the appendix. If you've ever chocked on a piece of food, you should question "intelligent" design.

I support the free market. People complaining about Apple products being too expensive are analogous to people who complain about too much sex and violence on television. In that case, they can simply refrain from watching the objectionable program. In the case of Apple products being too expensive, they can refrain from buying the objectionable hardware. Apple is thriving, so there are obviously plenty of people who feel they're getting quality for their money.

It is as close as you can come to a "fact" in science. It is the basis for modern biology. Science "accepts" evolution because there is no current better explanation for how the varying life forms on Earth came to be.

While reading Eugenie Scott's Evolution Vs. Creationism one day, the section explaining the age of the earth troubled me. Not because I believe that violent little collection of short stories called The Bible is accurate in its claim that the earth is but 6,000 - 10,000 years old; but because I had no practical way of fathoming just how long 4.5 billion years (the true age of the earth) was.

So I came up with a way to imagine this enormous amount of time. Imagine that a year is one inch long. This means that I am 35.9 inches, or almost 3 feet, old. World War II ended 64 inches, or a little over five feet ago. The Declaration of Independence was 233 inches, or almost 19-and-a-half feet ago. You get the idea.

Using this measurement, the Young Earth Creationists believe that the earth is between 500 and 833 feet old. For all of you jocks out there, that's 1.38 - 2.31 football fields. Let's just say 2 for the ease of math.

How long is 4.5 billion inches? It's 375 million feet; 71,022 miles; or 2.85 times around the earth at the equator.

So the difference between the age of the Earth to biblical literalists, and the age of the earth to intelligent people, is the difference between two Soldier Fields and the better part of three-times around the Earth. No wonder they don't buy evolution. Dummies.

I used to complain that Michigan made you pay a deposit on every bottle you purchased, but if it makes you bring the bottles back to the store I'm all for. I do think, however, that there should be better instructions for what goes where. We recycle in our building, but I'm often faced with some choices about which container should go where. A milk carton? It's kind of paper, but it's coated with wax. What about those half-paper, half-plastic containers? Penn & Teller had a Bullshit episode about recycling, talking about how it's a waste of time and how the energy used to recycle a product is greater than the energy used to make a new product; but what about the land fills? What about the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch? I think people should create less garbage when possible, by bringing their own bags to the grocery store for instance, and recycle the garbage they do create.

It's not the greatest zombie movie, and it's not the worst. It's like a pop song that, while you certainly can't respect it, you still can't help but tapping your foot along to while singing along under your breath. There are some neat dispatchings of the undead and there were a few moments that made me chuckle. I didn't find it frightening at all, but I didn't find Shaun of the Dead to be scary either, and I'd give that 9 out of 13 Eds, in part because there were many allusions to Romero zombie flicks. For a zom-rom-com, I'd give Zombieland 8 out of 13 Eds.

There is no such thing as a "bad" word. Words are just words. The fact that you cannot be offended by a foreign "bad" word because you do not know its meaning shows that the mere utterance the sounds are not the problem. The fact that people use alternate words to mean the same thing, such as "crap" for "shit" or "frak" for "fuck," shows that the meaning of the word is also not the problem. So what other reason could there possibly be to avoid the use of a certain set of letters and phonics arranged in a particular order? The only reason I can think of is that society has arbitrarily deemed certain words as vulgar. I blame the Puritans. I'm an equal opportunity linguist and think that every word should be used when appropriate, including "douche bag."

The police are rarely present when a crime is committed, and it is ultimately up to the individual citizen to be able to protect himself in the case of a home invasion.

One can purchase a Nalgene® reusable water bottle or similar product and fill it up in the morning at home or, if one has a water cooler or fountain there, fill it at work.