The ideal situation occurs when the things that we regard as beautiful are also regarded by other people as useful.

--Donald Knuth

Oh yes indeed!

  Stacked graphs–geometry & aesthetics - Byron et al 2008

References

Byron, Lee and Wattenberg, Martin (2008) ‘Stacked Graphs – Geometry & Aesthetics’, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 14(6), pp. 1245–1252, [online] Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2008.166 (Accessed 30 April 2013).

Van Horn, John Darrell, Irimia, Andrei, Torgerson, Carinna M., Chambers, Micah C., et al. (2012) ‘Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case of Phineas Gage’, PLoS ONE, 7(5), [online] Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353935/ (Accessed 30 April 2013).

irrealis mood as an excuse to talk bollocks

I received what initially appeared to be a patent trolling email which made interesting use of the following grammatical construction:

"He might wish to know that I have been granted a patent on the invention he is seeking information on and I am happy to discuss licensing opportunities."

The sentence uses a construction referred to as subjunctive mood, the important part being:

"He might wish to know (that) ..."

This technique allows the author to make statements about the imagination ("In a dream I owned a big blue dog"), or opinion ("I think dogs are nice") in the language that we would usually discuss real things in the world ("I own a dog").

patent troll or just troll? I have definitely been trolled.

I got an email earlier, which I assumed was just an automated template from the bowels of some patent trolling machine that I had triggered by my keywords...

"Dear Sirs,

I understand Tom Hodder works for this firm. I believe he posted the following advert on PeoplePerHour:
http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/initial-research-on-the-topic-of-using-eeg-embedded-into-mot-240449

He might wish to know that I have been granted a patent on the invention he is seeking information on and I am happy to discuss licencing opportunities.

Regards,

Jonathan Bishop
Inventor of 'Assisting Human Interaction'
Director, Jonathan Bishop Limited"