I think it's an age thing. One of the common drugs that interact with grapefruits are statins, and people usually get hit with The Talk By Their Doctor in their late thirties or early forties. Since I grew up with a very sweet grapefruit tree in the back yard, let me warn those hipsters and foodistas: you like…

Nope. Replacing predation with disease and parasitism is not necessarily a way to end suffering. To the contrary, it can greatly prolong suffering. And don't think that technology can defeat disease—we routinely see that diseases, parasites, and pests can evolve faster than can our technology for controlling them.…

Sorry folks, Selaginella isn't a moss, it's a spike-moss. The difference is that mosses don't have a vascular system, while spike-mosses do, just as do ferns, conifers, and flowering plants. Spike-mosses also have roots and true leaves. Spike-mosses are relatives of the Lepidodendron trees that inhabited the coal…

Actually, since:

I'd also point out that life has been around for around four billion years. Modern humans have been around for 80,000, and our current western European desire to radically reshape the world to suit our own purposes is less than 600 years old.

I'm not a hunter. I'm pro hunting. I've killed animals, including a jack rabbit that jumped out in front of a vehicle I was driving. The collision broke its back and eviscerated it, and I killed it as an act of mercy, rather than watching it suffer.

You may be well be right. I'll admit that I'm also trying to shock people. It's natural to feel sympathetic for the suffering of others, and to see predation as a horrible bloody mess to be avoided at all costs. Indeed, it can be a horrible, bloody mess. On the scale of suffering, though, I'm not sure that…

So David Pearce thinks that disease, parasites, parasitoids, and dying of starvation are more humane than predators? Obviously he's insane or deluded, but why are you giving space to him? Predation happens in a few minutes. These other processes are much more drawn out. If he wants to minimize suffering, he should…

You know, people (like the US State Department) have been saying this since 2008. I blogged about it awhile ago. This isn't news. The thing is that drought and upriver damming by Turkey created a potential disaster for Syria and western Iraq, Assad's mismanagement turned it into a real disaster, and now the most…

I think you missed the reason why personalized horoscopes work. Here's an experiment I actually ran, many years ago:

Skeleton grows back into human? The arrow is problematic too.

James Schmitz had a whole series of Sci Fi stories set in the Hub, a globular cluster. Great to see the sky he described. Fun stories too, if you want to know where the trope of the kickass heroine came from.

I can't tell if these are absolute growth or relative growth, but I'm guessing it's the latter, because the most rapid growth and shrinkage has been in the less densely settled counties.

I'd suggest that science fiction's ability to predict the future is largely illusory.

I think this is a great surgical technique, and I hope it saves a lot of lives.

Oh good grief. Here are two more possibilities that are much more likely:

Nope, I live here (a lot closer to San Marcos than you are) and grew up in So. Cal, and I cleared brush every spring where I grew up. I've also lived elsewhere in the US, where the norm is that the winters are relatively dry (10 inches of snow=1 inch of rain, water-wise), while most of precipitation falls as rain in…

Desert? No! It's a Mediterranean climate: wet winters, dry summers. We've got the same fire issues in California that Spain and Greece do, not that the Sahara (or Arizona) do.

There are two huge problems here. Well, three.

Actually, guideline #1 allows murder by bot, because I replaced "must" with "should." Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's a difference between good design and rules for action. In the case of these three guidelines, I'm thinking more of good design, like in a scissors or a car, than just…