"This is simply a resistor that has pretty much no resistance: in effect a bit of wire in a tiny box. It might sound like an absurd component, but they're quite common in modern circuits, because they can be used to bridge the gap between adjacent tracks on a circuit board with a standard-size component. I'd like to apologise both for knowing that and for sharing it with you."

As a work-at-home guy, I wonder about this all the time—especially when I visit Park Slope during the daytime. Doesn't anybody there have a job?

My mind is filled with audio components. I guess that's <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/he2007/051407leland/">what a show does to you</a>.

"The Chinese Exclusion Act and its subsequent extensions altered the legal definition of American citizenship far more than its original drafters could have foreseen."

The long, though not particularly hard, way. Good lessons&mdash;presented realistically for a change.