I think Watson posted in her blog treating it as a personal thing. Like many blogs it started as a kind of newsletter for friends, where she would talk about her new furniture or whatever. Where-as she actually has a huge readership. Dawkins saw it as a platform, and as such gave what she wrote a lot more weight, and…

Yep. I would have posted that if you hadn't.

The Paralympics have rules about the ratio of artificial leg length to natural height. The suggestion is that an athlete broke those rules by switching blades between races. If true, it would be simple cheating. There's nothing deeper in this incident.

Another 20-year study in the same species got the opposite result. The jury is still out.

Note that the Wisconsin long-term study gave opposite results. Here's an article http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/severe-calorie-restrictions-probably-dont-prolong-life/ that compares the studies.

Yes. What I've not yet found out is what happened to the IGF-1 levels in the monkeys. Either the fasting regime failed to raise IGF-1, or it did but IGF-1 doesn't have the effect we thought it did.

Two points. The first is that Doctor Who differs from most other shows in that it's been running for a long time. It's entirely possible that Moffat has been planning what he'd do with it since he was eight years old.

It's not the premise but the way it was handled. I've only seen the trailer for Revolution, but the plane falling out of the sky seemed like one example of something that wouldn't happen. The laws of aerodynamics wouldn't change. The timing of the individual failures was also off. They wanted things to fall in waves,…

The key safety point, as I understand it, is that the retina doesn't have pain receptors so you can be doing damage without realising it. It's not like touching a hot stove.

On holiday in the Galapagos Islands, I got a chance to swim with sharks. I had no prior irrational fear and was confident that they wouldn't let tourists do it if wasn't safe. If anything, the guides were more concerned about the sea lions. I got into the water (from a boat) about 20 yards from where the sharks were…

I don't see that living forever would make you rich. Presumably you aren't the only one, and if society reaches some steady state then everyone has to work for food. So if you have a crappy life today, being immortal just extends that crappiness forever. It doesn't automatically make it better.

And computers. As I recall, the Yorkshire Ripper would have been caught sooner had not one person removed a suspect's filing card while another person was checking some correlations.

It's part of the story; it's stuff that happened in the story, so we, the audience, get to see it, even if Quaid didn't. We know the movie cannot be literal because, eg, it ignores the light speed delay between Earth and Mars, it gets Mars gravity wrong; not to mention myriad implausibilities. You can't really turn a…

No, the coincidence of "Blue sky on Mars?" is too great. When we see things outside of Quaid's knowledge, that's just dramatic licence.

My favourite Onion article, about attacks on Suri Cruise, seems relevant here. (Shame the posting system means no-one will ever see it.)

It depends on how it works. Time travel may be possible, but only back to the time where the first time machine was built. Hawking isn't so smart.

Except that it doesn't mention the butterfly effect, and I think it needs to. Everything is so interconnected I think any change is liable to effect everything, after not very much time.

I will be curious how London turns out. Going in, I was most concerned about the opportunity costs of all the resources devoted to the games. A lot of funding for Arts got cut across the nation, over 7 years. However, the games themselves seem to be going well, to the point that if there is any value at all in…

This landing is close to a mountain that has lots of exposed geological layers. They hope to sample rocks that span a wide range of geological times. They hope to establish whether conditions were right for life at some point in the past.

We know it wasn't Earth because the film gives us no reason to think it is Earth and there is plenty of reason to think it isn't. Including part of your own argument about "billions of years". You have noticed it doesn't make sense. Your conclusion seems to be that the film is stupid, when actually it's your…