1 Stoke is a cool word. Perfecting my surfing skills during my university years on the central California coast, I became quite a practitioner of the word stoke, as in "I'm so stoked!" or "That wave was stoken!" The more traditional use of the word, and as I've used it in this case, is to increase the intensity of a fire or some combustible occurrence, as in "I will stoke the fire."

2 PrŽcis de l'art de la guerre, by Antoine-Henri, baron de Jomini; referenced in The Greek And Macedonian Art of War, by F.E. Adcock (University of California Press, 1957; p. 10).

3 For characterizing a sample set average and dispersion (think standard deviation), only a few samples are required. If you are inferring what may happen in the future, then 30 or more samples are desired. For details on sampling for forecasting purposes, see my book, Forecasting Oracle Performance (Apress, 2007; p. 84).