Brangdon
Brangdon
Brangdon

You won't feel like utter shit. That feeling comes more from shows like whose endings did not fulfil their early potential. I don't think you will find anyone who watched Firefly and now regret doing so, apart from those who just didn't like it at all.

It partly depends on the details. For example, if it uses the same system of DNA as us, then that makes it more plausible that it is in fact the same old life we already knew about, but on a different planet. Earth might even have been seeded from Mars, making us distant cousins.

Spartacus had great characters and plots, and their depiction of ancient Roman was very good too. So I have high hopes for this.

I'd hardly call the original Total Recall dilute. I love how the fake character wins out over the real one, and the "Blue Sky on Mars" thing.

I like the original for many reasons. Especially the story and the ideas. For example, the scene where the doctor offers Quaid a pill that will wake him up, was done long before The Matrix and done better, too, with more layers of meaning. I especially like that the PK ideas of "what is human, what is real" survive

My impression with LotR is that it was Fran and Philipa who were the Tolkien geeks, and Peter mostly saw it as a monster movie.

Why can't you use the time machine to hide the body in the past?

I'm not a huge fan of the show. I did like Daryl. It sounds like Merle's return will turn him into someone I don't like.

Agreed; whether or not the result is correct, this experiment was flawed because it didn't reflect the hypothesis.

It was good, but not really deserving the level of praise io9 gives it. It's not a work of genius. It is a cut above most other recent films, much as Avengers was a cut above Prometheus (but still very much a big-budget summer-blockbuster). The bar is pretty low, frankly.

It's been noticed before. There's an article about it at http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201.

Yes, quite likely you are using a different Google. Google personalises search results. See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Personalized_Search for more info. It's fairly controversial because it can increase confirmation bias. You can, and probably should, switch it off.

The article says "falling or jumping", and links to a video which I think makes clear how they are thinking. You'd start to warm up on the way down, but you could easily be killed quicker by the fall than the heat, if you landed on your head.

I don't think you'd go under. Molten rock is much denser than human flesh.

"nearly pain-free". It actually bothered me more that death by lava was described as "instantaneous" without qualifiers, as I'm fairly sure it would take a little time to cook.

Arguably, if we're going to correct at all, we should do so more frequently rather than less. Jumping by an hour is going to cause more problems than jumping by a second, partly because it is a bigger jump, and partly because, being more rare, systems are less likely to have planned and tested for it adequately.

Does this mean coal isn't a renewable resource? I always thought it was (given enough time).

Without leap seconds, atomic time would get out of step with sidereal time. After a while, if you read that something historical happened at 8am, you wouldn't know if that was at the dawn end of the day, more towards dusk, or the middle of the night.

For some reason the bullying of Meg in Family Guy bothers me, and the bullying of Butters in South Park doesn't. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps its because Butters remains irrepressible.

It was quick for simple prokaryotic life, and may have happened almost as soon as conditions made it possible. (The fossil record from back then is the least complete.) The jump from prokaryotic to eukaryotic was slow, and the jump from that to multi-cellular life was also slow, and the jump from that to human-level