The film claimed that killing people in the future, and disposing of their bodies, was hard. I don't see how to reconcile that with the casual way they killed Bruce Willis' wife. Indeed, it seemed murder was pretty commonplace in the future. The Rainmaker surely killed a bunch of gangsters; he didn't just close loops.…

That's something JGL suspects, and puts to Blunt, but as I recall she doesn't confirm it, and it doesn't fit with what the boy himself says. He says he wasn't able to prevent men from harming his mum because "I wasn't strong enough". At the time we think he's a normal child, but later it becomes clear he must have…

The breeding test stopped being a defining attribute of different species long ago. It wasn't practical with extinct species like dinosaurs.

Presumably sonic booms also happen in water, but you must be travelling roughly 4 times faster than in air, which is hard to do in water. Or maybe they don't happen the same way because they have to do with the air getting compressed, and water is incompressible?

Bank's Culture series being an exception. They having advanced past the whole warfare thing into a post-scarcity society where there is no need to fight. The machines keep the humans as (willing) pets. It's only when they interact with less advance societies that they need weapons, and then it is mostly AIs that do…

Niven's "Protector" has a pretty good dramatisation of that style.

Thinking on this further, any kind of observation of the past must involve an interaction with it. If you are adsorbing its photos, a scientist in the past could probably detect you doing so. Then you can figure out a code and use it to communicate with them, and then you start risking causality violations.

For most of these you don't need to travel to the past. You just need to observe it. Doing so would not seem to cause gross violations any basic laws of physics, or causality (although I suppose there might be implications to your removing photons from the past).

I see it as a kind of get-out clause. If it turns out that life couldn't have started here, maybe it started somewhere else and travelled here. The possibility massively increases the range of environments in which life may have first arose.

It probably wasn't Earth. It's made clear they used that process on many planets. They didn't develop the technology and then use it only once.

I thought it needed more dates.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/883/

I guess Primeval didn't get much coverage in America. I'm not saying its the best, but it deserves a mention for its sparkly things:

Pollyanna Woodward, The Gadget Show World Tour, ep 5 Dubai, segment about a camel race. This ought to be the video, but it doesn't play for me: http://gadgetshow.channel5.com/gadget-show/videos/other/dubai-robot-build

The story of System Shock 2 is largely told through emails and diaries that you find while exploring the ships. I expect the same is true of SS1, but I've not played that.

Revolution... The second episode of any show is arguably more important than the first - in my experience, second episodes are usually a bit rubbish. It takes roughly four episodes for writers, directors and cast to figure out their voice.

I tended to overlook the sex because it was rarely erotic, or even trying to be. For example, there's a fair bit of sex in Varely's Titan series, or in Niven's Ringworld, but it was there because it was an unavoidable part of the world rather than as fan-service. (Often it was weird and cross-species, which is hardly…

Me too. The Gadget Show did a piece on the ears. Of course they put it on the young woman presenter. I couldn't avoid the feeling that she was doing it because she had no choice. Three other presenters had recently been sacked, and she was the only female left, and this series seemed to delight in putting her in…

Brains have electrons in, sure: but a pulse travelling down a nerve is more like a fuse burning than a current flowing down a wire. (It's a lot slower, for example.)

Suppose someone the other side of the Earth dropped a rock at the same time. So rock, Earth, rock all long a straight line. If the rocks are the same mass and height, they'll cancel out and the Earth won't move at all - but the rocks still will, and by about the same amount. We can make the rocks different sizes…