Washington and a nineteenth-century painter also named James Nicoll. In recent years however the epigram has also been quoted, with proper attribution, in books by professor of rhetoric and communication design Randy Harris. Amateur linguists Jeremy Smith, Richard Lederer, the Chinese newspaper Ming Pao and Anu Garg have also referenced Nicoll's quote. Professional linguists who have referenced the quotation online include Professor of Linguistics Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania and Language Log; Associate Professor of Linguistics Suzanne Kemmer of Rice University, who also posted her research into the quote at the LINGUIST mailing list; and Second Language Acquisition Ph.D. student Rong Liu. There are also amateur philologists who have used the quote, including journalist Suw Charman and journalist Vale White. "Nicoll events" Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on various science fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events. Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking, fantasy author Jo Walton wrote him a poem in 2002. "Brain eater" A post on soc.history.what-if credits Nicoll with coining the phrase "brain eater" which is supposed to "get" certain writers such as Poul Anderson and James P. Hogan. Nicoll claims the 'brain eater' affected Hogan, because of Hogan's expressions of belief in Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism, and his advocacy of the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV (see AIDS denialism). The term has been adopted by other Usenet posters, as well as elsewhere on the Internet and use of the term within Usenet has been criticised. Nicoll-Dyson Laser Nicoll proposed the Nicoll-Dyson Laser concept where the satellites of a Dyson swarm act as a phased array laser emitter capable of delivering their energy to a planet-sized target at a range of millions of light years. E. E. Smith first used the general idea of concentrating the sun's energy in a weapon in the Lensman series when the Galactic Patrol developed the sunbeam (in Second Stage Lensmen); however, his concept did not extend to the details of the Nicoll-Dyson Laser. The 2012 novel The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross uses the Nicoll-Dyson Laser concept by name as the means by which the Galactic