Bullet-Block Science Video Puzzle

A science video blog,1 which has gone viral, shows a wooden block shot by a vertically aimed rifle. The video2 shows that the block hit dead center goes exactly as high as the one shot off-center. (Fig. 1). The puzzle is that the block shot off-center carries rotational kinetic energy in addition to the gravitational potential energy. This leads a majority of the bloggers to claim that the block shot off-center should not go as high as the one shot dead center. Others have claimed that the energy tied up as rotational energy is insignificant and the two blocks should rise to the same height within experimental error.