I like Hellraiser. I'm not sure why you think it is a total piece of shit. It's essentially a love story about Julia and how far she'll go to make Frank whole again. I like Kirsty for her intelligence and ability to deal with the cenobites.

If it's the third one, ironically that would be quite a good place to do this candle experiment.

For me the difference is not in subject matter or possible/impossible. It's whether the author shows they care about science and rationality. Dr Who is fantasy because they writers generally don't give a monkeys about that stuff. A lot of good science fiction takes an impossible idea and then follows it through…

Nobody's saying it's cool. I don't know where you got that from.

But the people from the Indian Space Agency seemed to know who he was, even if they didn't summon him. At least, there's no explanation on-screen.

No; Watson had always been getting death and rape threats. That's part of what she was at the conference to talk about. Nobody has much sympathy for the people who make them; it is (sadly) business as usual online and not what made this incident stand out.

I liked the Avatar theory, partly because while watching the feel it seemed like the most natural interpretation. We see the flying dragon things get mind-raped via their pony-tails. The flying dragon knows what will happen so fights Jake to avoid it, but is too weak. Afterwards it becomes his slave, although it still…

Although I enjoy Gibson's writing style, I never felt (in the early books that I've read) that he really had a handle on the tech. His vision of cyberspace as being full of simple geometric shapes wasn't a compelling or rich place to be. I much preferred Snow Crash, and I consider Stephenson to be a proper nerd.

For me the townspeople were Jex's victims, as was the Gunslinger. The Doctor already confronted the Gunslinger and accepted his logic as to who's brand of justice should apply. He's realised that the Gunslinger is the good guy here. Jex was the bad guy who shouldn't get to choose how he atones.

The Doctor has killed bad people before many times. In one of the Christmas episodes he kills the Sycorax leader while explicitly saying, "No second chances."

The people of Earth still remembered the Doctor in the dinosaur episode. When they invited him to help deal with the spaceship in the first place, they knew exactly who he was.

I think quite a lot will have happened that wasn't reported. She obviously didn't fancy him, so it's quite possible he did contribute to that bar discussion and she just overlooked it. (Similarly we know Dawkins was on a panel with her, so I wonder if more was said then that would help give context.)

Yeah, what happened after is what made it a big deal. In my post I tried to explain why that happened. Namely, that she underestimated the weight her comments would be given. A lot of the firestorm was not due to her original blog post at all, but how she treated people who disagreed with her.

I gather it is not so much the ending as the initial premise. The "basic setup" as the article says. "Closing the loop" is why the film is called "Looper".

I think of myself atheist to distinguish my beliefs from yours. For me, "agnostic" is a good word to reflect the "don't know, don't care" position. However, I don't dare call myself atheist in public because some people think it means I have proof god doesn't exist. Since it's impossible to prove non-existence,…

I once saw a debate about why science flourished more in Europe than in China in which someone gave the credit to glass. There's more to it than that, of course, but it does make you think. Glass is great for science, because you can see through it. In addition to obviously optical instruments like the telescope and…

My question is, why humans?

Why not?

In England we already have similar laws against the sexual abuse of cartoon characters. Really. The law-makers understand that children depicted in cartoons are not real children, and can't suffer. One argument is that child pornography, even when faked, could be used by paedophiles as a tool to help abuse real…

Were you there?