Sorry Mark. My reply wasn't totally straight, but I missed your humour.

Trouble is, if you post on a topic that has recently had seriously heated discussion, who is to know that you are not being serious, unless you make that clear in a preamble or epilogue to your post, or by using a few smilies? Without that, you are at risk of having your sarcasm and wit overlooked, ironical as that may be!

I've seen too many flames where at some later point, one of the ignitors said "I was only trying to be funny". Sometimes I believe them... (If your post was meant to be humorous, why did you respond seriously to the improperly-serious responses? Maybe Flame would have been a better place to post, too, than Space Science?)

The written word is a tricky thing. If you're being flippant, you have to be very obviously so, otherwise people WILL take you the wrong way - Murphy's Law of Internet Comprehension.

If a comment can be seen as innocuous, or funny, or just possibly might offend or annoy someone who perversely doesn't read it the way you meant it, you can bet your **** that someone will take it the way you didn't mean it and start a flame war against you right there and then!

Anyway, I stick by my "non-scientific" response that people, even scientists, have trouble with more categories or items than they can easily count on their fingers. We're just jumped-up monkeys after all!