Wow — I have no great fear of genetically modified plants or foodstuffs, but this is kind of scary. It seems like there's very little to keep this from spreading to almost any plant. Suddenly giving every plant the ability to fix nitrogen could lead to a gigantic modification of the entire planetary biome, with…

I've never seen the show, but what's striking about these photos is that one of them looks like a great actor, and the other looks like a mediocre actor.

Regarding the ongoing Gawker revisions of the commenting system:

The Post Office is "broke" because the Republicans have defunded it. Now they are proposing "solutions" to their own problem which essentially eliminate postal service in two stages: first cut the budget, then blame the budget when you cut the service.

If you float it near the surface, you only need to dip underwater where the shipping lanes are, and for the rest of the path, you get all the easy repair/installation/solar benefits of the surface. You don't evacuate it because mostly it's on the surface, and you can circulate the air relatively easily because air's…

I would rather porn depicting David Cameron be made illegal.

Of these, the water route sounds most reasonable. Alignment issues are not dealbreakers, and breakdown issues are no worse than for boats or planes. No need to plunge deep: just float it near the surface, use solar panels above it to generate some power, and perhaps blow the air in circles as in the speculative…

When I asked my advisor many years ago how long the dissertation should be, he shrugged, clearly not caring in the slightest. "As long as the last page starts with a 2, you're fine," he said.

Seeing both the Waring and Rink designs just shows how much of a genius Olmsted was. While his design is much closer to the au naturel leave-it-alone design of Waring, if you look closely you can see the huge number of major changes Olmsted made to what was already there, all for the purposes of faking the appearance…

So can someone who knows this stuff explain why this can't be done with a soldering iron in more-or-less the way plastic 3D printers work?

As a tech site, you guys have to start talking about CRI. These lights might look indistinguishable from incandescents to a casual glance, but for long-term use it really matters whether skin tones and other colors are all properly illuminated. For instance, do deep reds look properly deep red, or grayish? Wood…

Is there anything that will let me open a few gawker media links at once without grinding my entire browser to a halt? The only site that even gives my browser (various ones, on a recent machine) pause any more is Gizmodo and its sisters. I don't know what the heck you all are doing in the background, but it really…

You realize that if you ignore the ads, the content provider is being hurt anyway, right? The only way advertising works in the long term is if people watch it and then buy stuff. Anything less is equivalent to AdBlock — so if it's your moral duty to not block ads, it's also your moral duty to watch them, and then…

The best recent deconstruction of the Lone Ranger is the last line (post-credits) of Django.

The title of this post should probably be repunctuated as "Designers: Shadows are Totally Fine in a Flat UI". As it is, it sounds like the author is saying that in a flat UI it's nevertheless ok to have both shadows and designers.

Both my phone and my laptop have black backgrounds. I find anything else too busy when combined with all the icons and other info. If I want to look at a picture, I have plenty of other places to look, or apps with photos unobstructed by icons. Plus, on the phone, with the awful 3D dock removed it looks much more…

As with many others, this brought tears to my eyes, particularly since I know someone who recently got the operation.

Given that his hand left a bloody handprint just a few seconds later, why didn't that cow leave a smear of blood as it slid down?

These are aesthetically beautiful, but their price should match their looks. Every bullet should cost, say, $200. There's nothing in the 2nd Amendment that says our right to pay fair market prices shall not be abridged.

Despite appearances, it's actually well organized. Plus Desktopple hides it all during presentations or when it gets on my nerves.