Right. It's worth distinguishing the things that are unlikely or impossible for physics reasons (and thus require a more difficult suspension of disbelief) and those things that are just historical differences, which can be remedied by a fairly simple assumption (as is quite clear from the first scenes) that their…

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.

This is just another (very long and very jumbled) assertion that because it reminds him of low-class video, it feels bad. The concrete claims were that it was too clear, too smooth, too realistic. The subjective claims were that this broke the immersive spell. But that's just the same old argument that it's not…

I'll second the guy down below who nominated Kinja, Gawker's new commenting system. However, just as no one saw that guy's post, no one will see this one either. It used to be that about 50% of my comments garnered a reply and brief conversation of some sort; now about 5% do. The new commenting system has been a…

Just got back from an Atmos screening of the Hobbit. Before the movie, they had a brief Atmos ad touting its stuff, with various sounds all around you. We were really impressed, particularly with a realistic baby sound behind and to the right of us. Alas, when the movie started, we discovered it was an actual baby…

So advertisements have no effect, war propaganda has no effect, what bible or religious stories you grow up with have no effect, legends and folklore have no effect, history and historical narratives have no effect, Fox news has no effect, etc? Or is it only movies, books, and videogames that, despite amounting to…

How about we have a vote — either pass a law saying no one gets guns, or a law saying everyone has to carry one, including children. The latter seems to be the world the gun advocates would like to live in, so let's all vote on which society we want. The nice thing is, if we pass the second, I doubt it will be very…

I was just reading Brain Evenson's "The Brotherhood of Mutilation" (in the VanderMeers' "Weird" anthology) the other day. A great story, though oddly oblivious to the real-world versions and the complex identity politics underneath it. Or if not oblivious, very oblique anyway, and unlikely to win many friends in the…

So what's to stop them from passing this kind of law for our cell phones too? I'm sure all sorts of safety benefits could be found from requiring us all to keep permanent records of our daily activities. Safety can justify all manner of civil liberty violations. Just because it's a car doesn't make it fundamentally…

One solution might just be to spend more time working on simple.wikipedia.org. Or perhaps create expert.wikipedia.org as well, for those who want the most precision and jargon. It doesn't have to be the case that a single article should serve the needs of all ranges of existing knowledge on a topic.

You can take my nerd rapture when you pry it from my cold dead hands!

"Lifetime fitness" is a strictly evolutionary concept, though biologists are happy to finesse that point when advertising their results. From the point of view of the *individual*, you may be quite a bit happier with fewer children had later in life. So this says nothing about whether younger siblings are worse off…

What I'm gathering is that the youth of today doesn't own any of their media, just rents it; doesn't create much, just consumes; and doesn't have any sense of privacy, and thus has no qualms handing all their data over to the corporate cloud for backup. For us old fogies though, being able to backup all of my stuff…

So I am the only person who holds his phone less than a foot from my face on a regular basis? When I read books or watch movies on my little screen, it's regularly about a foot away, which seems about right. Why hold it farther way when you can hold it closer and make everything bigger?

He should the sound input as a fourth data stream. It might help get a bit more resolution for those hard-to-distinguish letters ("the" vs "end", for instance).

So by this logic, it's a toss-up whether I prefer the iPhone screen to the iPad 2, since they both display about the same number of pixels?

So is my all-aluminum MacBook Pro not a faraday cage? I guess the wifi needs to get out somewhere, but I wonder how much the rest of it being aluminum reduces the vulnerability to emp's.

You could not easily write something as good as Harry Potter. It's full of very specific ideas, ideas that are not just due to a broad knowledge of the genre. Either these are specific ideas that she invented on her own, or they are specific ideas she borrowed from specific books. There is much evidence of the…

Either she makes claims for originality, or she just says her books are generic stories about wizards. I think she usually claims the former. But when you examine the specific claims for originality, you tend to find quite specific precedents. I'm not saying she isn't as original as anyone else, but to claim that…

If she doesn't read books about magic, the only other explanation is that she herself is magic. One or the other; there's no other way her books could have lifted so much from earlier fantasists.