In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%.

Tom was skeptical when Paul told him that he saw Bigfoot.

Kwitny's account of the medical gridlock that has paralyzed Washington during the Bush and Reagan Administrations provides a bleak picture of the indecisiveness and passivity of federal officials, whom many gay activists have described as the bureaucratic instruments of nothing less than a Republican thanatocracy.

We attribute such coalescings of eigenvalues to the presence of a finite barrier (on the either side of x=0 ) which has been linked to a recent study of stokes phenomenon in the complex PT-symmetric potentials..