I kind of agree with Scott, even though I watch superhero movies. Blade Runner is about a future Los Angeles in which corporate capitalism and genetic engineering have run amok, to the extent of reintroducing slavery using engineered beings. Some of these engineered beings are stronger and smarter than us, but only…

Regarding your second footnote, from about midway through the wikipedia article:

Getting married and having kids because you want companionship and the experience of raising kids isn’t selfish, because it results in kids being raised by people who want and love them.

Christmas is presented as a time for peace, brotherhood and good cheer to an extent that gets eye-rolling at times, especially for people who are disillusioned with commercialism or stressed out by holiday expectations. Now that hipsters and scifi/horror nerds know that there is a mythological character who subverts…

If everybody in this thread really understood these bigots and their place in the zeitgeist as well as they insist they do, November 8 wouldn’t have come as a surprise, and may even have been preventable. Regarding this particular documentary though, paying for interviews is shady.

That’s an interesting perspective. What level of convincingness would you want from the robot to make it worthwhile? What sort of conversations would you want it to be able to take part in?

This makes me wonder whether she likes robots because she specifically doesn’t like having a partner with intelligence and personality, or because she just doesn’t like the way squooshy human flesh feels. If it’s the former, it’s kind of creepy, but if it’s the latter, maybe she could have a real person tele-operate…

Because gene drives do mess with natural selection, in an unprecedented way. Scientists may distinguish between natural and artificial selection when they’re specifically contrasting evolution in the wild to selective breeding and need to distinguish them, but they’re both selection. And artificial selection is…

Because “artificial” or “natural,” it’s all just selection, whereas gene drives cause changes directly contrary to selection. If I breed a german shepherd with hip dysplasia, it will be less able to survive in the wild than regular wolves. If I release it into the wild, it may manage to mate with some wolves, and its…

Some animals survive and reproduce better than others in certain environments. If an animal has genes that make it more likely to survive and reproduce, it will have more offspring than the animals that don’t, and as a result those genes will become more common in the population. If an animal has a gene that makes it…

The show runs on nothing but characterization, mood and symbolism, which probably plays to his strengths. He can avoid writing an overarching purposeful plot with a resolution, and have it be a bold, postmodern statement instead of just bad writing.

I think the Great Man theory works, but only as applied to negative developments. The things leaders have to do to be good leaders are pretty consistent; you can disagree about policy, but in the broad strokes there will usually be a set of actions that can/must be taken to improve the world that are pretty obvious to…

He probably learned about it from that Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode.

The Day After Tomorrow, The Colony, Snowpiercer and now Imago; because global warming is real, but snow is fun and deserts are boring.

I think people need to realize that the main casts of shows are pretty small, and that some of their complaints about stereotypical behaviour could just be due to discretization. If I’m a writer, and I have like, 10 characters that the show follows and explores in detail, and I want to have representation of a…

She was also a very successful businesswoman selling beauty products and beautician training specifically for black women.

The point is, in this case it turns out the US didn’t necessarily win. There’s no credible legal framework that requires one nation to forever respect the “right-of-conquest” of another more powerful nation to take its territory. The Moors once conquered Spain, and the fact that they “won” didn’t convince the…

Have you ever read Stephen King’s It? Because I’m reading the wikipedia page on Waco...

It also had a famous lynching in 1916, and got hit by a tornado in 1953 that tied for the deadliest in Texas history. If you’ve ever read Stephen King’s It, Waco seems basically like a real-life Derry.

When one of the sites posts an article about gay people being denied service in stores, and says something like “gay people have the right to be served like anyone else,” I wonder if these people pop up and say “Not if they don’t have shoes or shirts!” in the comments.