Quite. "If while entering this test chamber you meet your future self leaving it, and your future self advises you not to take this test, pay no attention."

I was going to mention the second one. What I take from it is also expressed in a maxim from King's book, Firestarter: Nothing's happened that can't be fixed.

Shame about the sound effects, though.

No, the problem with evolutionary psychology is that it tends to come up with "Just So" stories that are not falsifiable. Pushing a problem into the past may be necessary, but it doesn't solve it and often makes it harder, because conditions back then are obscure, and we can't easily run experiments on them. There is…

I think it must be hard to tell what a cow is doing, just from looking at its picture from Google Earth.

"Spontaneous human combustion? I thought that only affected fat people who fall asleep next to a fire." — South Park (from memory)

People who write vampire stories, pick and choose what parts of the tradition to use. For example, in Being Human they can walk in sunlight, in True Blood they can't. As I recall, in True Blood they have reflections and aren't bothered by religious symbols, in Being Human it's the other way about. So the question…

My memories of Sundiver are vague; it's not nearly as good and didn't make much impression on me. It may indeed be flawed.

Humans treat dolphins and chimps better than most other patrons for several reason. The first is that we uplifted them before we joined galactic society, so we didn't know about the rule about 100,000 years of servitude. Every non-wolfling race had that as their incentive for uplifting in the first place. The second…

As I recall, we found the ghost fleet because we were poking around in an area the galactics ignored. So it's not coincidence, but it's not an objective conspiracy either. I do see it as just luck; I don't see any strong belief that humans will set the galaxy to rights. Some alien species may believe that - they have…

We only see a handful of humans, those sent on the mission, who are intended to guide and be an example to the fin. They aren't intended to be typical. It's like considering only Apollo astronauts and being surprised they are all heroic.

Gerald Scarfe did the animations. [www.geraldscarfe.com]

Agreed.

"Epitaph One" is chock-full of spoilers and I think would make series 1 unbearable to watch. It has much more impact in its proper place, after you've seen some of the hints in the previous episodes. It is also rather untypical.

If you got that "drowning is pleasant" thing from watching The Prestige, you should have watched to the end.

No. She's killed, and her dead body is thrown into a pit on top of many previous dead clones. Since she's already dead when it happens, she never has the horror of recognising her predecessors or realising how unlikely to survive she is.

Um, the scouring of the sky was mentioned in the first film, not the second. One of the reasons the second film was superior to the first (in my view) is that it also didn't mention the "humans as batteries" nonsense.

The two experiments don't mean much independently. It's the correlation between them that's interesting. The babies might have given up the toy they initially preferred because they had become bored with it, but then you have to explain why that correlates with being surprised by unfairness.

"Front porch" doesn't really work for me as a euphemism for breasts. To me a "porch" signifies an entrance of some kind, and "front" is to contrast with "rear", so I would expect it to mean another part of anatomy: that sometimes called a front bottom.

Although it's not quite the question asked, I don't think you've explained why fake vaginas are gross but porn isn't. Both are designed to help men masturbate.