But I wasn't talking about the entire surface of the planet being burned to the ground, just food webs collapsing due to plants not getting enough light in a nuclear winter. Again, the comparison is to the dinosaur extinction, where most of the surface was not thought to have been literally burned, it was the clouds…

"Umm, I don't know, maybe that large squishy organ inside our skull? "

There is a big difference between us and Dinosaurs.

Maybe, but maybe not. If the food webs around the world were sufficiently disrupted I don't think you can count on human survival—you might have expected small populations of dinosaurs to have survived the asteroid version of a nuclear winter, but (aside from birds) they apparently didn't.

The ensuing nuclear winter would very likely lead to mass starvation and the collapse of civilization, even if it didn't drive humans completely extinct.

simulana's (and clew's, and Saiph's) explanation isn't really right, since even if there were no oceans and the Earth was made of a perfectly uniform material, the side facing away from the moon would still bulge outwards. See my comment thread above for a discussion.

"Why" questions are not answerable by physics—at best you can sometimes reduce one phenomena to more fundamental laws or more basic postulates, but the most basic level of your theories is never "explained", just shown to make predictions that agree with empirical observations. Never in the history of physics has…

Right, I realize it's correct that a body of uniform material will get stretched along the axis facing the source (as explained by the differential-force analysis), when I said "this explanation doesn't really make sense to me" I was referring to sloanstrife's idea that it has something to do with the difference…

Incidentally, adding to the verbal confusion is that some sources talk about the "centrifugal force" when they really mean the linear inertial force caused by the acceleration of the Earth's center of mass, which would have the same magnitude and direction for every point on Earth (a true centrifugal force should…

That explanation doesn't really make sense to me either, since the differential-force analysis shows you'd still get those bulges in a sphere of perfectly uniform material.

Centrifugal forces only appear in rotating frames of reference though, and things which are explained in terms of the centrifugal force in that frame will necessarily have a different explanation in a non-rotating frame. I'd also like to know if any textbooks or sites online actually calculate the centrifugal force in…

On #6, about metabolism, there is some evidence that some people can eat rather large amounts without getting fat, even if this is due to something other than "metabolism": see this article on some studies where naturally thin people were instructed to double their normal caloric intake, along with the accompanying…

On #2 (calorie counting), there's a table here showing the results of some research on which foods were most correlated with weight gain (I assume they controlled for calories although it isn't clearly stated).

That analogy isn't right since all parts of the woman's dress will "spin out" due to the centrifugal force, whereas the upper and lower parts of the Earth in the diagram I linked to are pulled in towards the center. The reason for the billowing dress is the "centrifugal force" which exists in rotating reference…

No, it's not centrifugal, it would exist even if the Earth didn't rotate. Do you understand about how subtracting one force vector from another works? (if not look at the "add and subtract" link in my comment) And if so, do you also get the idea that if we want to find how the Earth's shape is distorted, we can…

When I was younger and I used to see explanations like this, I could never quite understand why the side of the Earth facing away from the moon would bulge outwards, as opposed to getting pulled inwards in the direction of the moon. But if you took an intro physics class and remember the basic idea of "force vectors"…

Yup, that was one of the cartoons I've seen, all right. So, uh, metaphor for the nuclear arms race or what?

It seems like they spent way more time on plot elements earlier in the story and then it got super-rushed at the end, I wonder if Deitch misjudged how much he could get done with that style of animation in 30 days...

Aw, the dinos on Terra Nova aren't so bad once you accept the basic premise that there probably would have been a lot of unknown species along with the known ones back then. What they really need is to hire someone who's good at writing characters and plots! (also other non-dino science mistakes sometimes bother me on…

Pretty good for a four year old but just to be a huge dino geek that's actually not quite right, it's true that Brontosaurus bones had already been found and named Apatosaurus earlier so that name got scientific priority, but the fact that the wrong head was used in museum mounts didn't actually have anything to do…