I love that Alan Moore's ego is so huge that he compares Watchmen to Moby Dick.

Is there something about his bitter comments about getting screwed out of the rights to the characters that you think is "crazy" or is this just a general observation unrelated to this story?

We're speaking theoretically and I'm therefore treating the issue as a hypothetical; though that hypothetical status does not lessen the importance or the impact of my arguments.

No, I wasn't implying anything of the sort, since we are not talking about cloning Neanderthals right now (I don't think it would even be possible to synthesize intact Neanderthal chromosomes with present technology, the sequencing of the genome was based on DNA fragments) but at some point in the future. I was just…

Wouldn't there be a fairly good chance that they would happen to pick a type O donor? According to this page, "approximately 45 percent of Caucasians are Type O, but 51 percent of African Americans and 57 percent of Hispanics are Type O". I don't know the exact demographics back then but the majority would have been…

But is there anyone who actually suggests we test cloning technology on Neanderthals before it would be safe enough to use on our own species? It seems like you might be arguing against a hypothetical position that very few of the actual people who favor the idea of cloning Neanderthals would actually endorse.

"First off by cloning them and not allowing the cloning of humans "

There's no reason to think Neanderthals would be any better at figuring out how to survive without culture than modern humans, we don't have a lot of survival skills programmed into us by instinct and they probably didn't either since our common ancestor is pretty recent. What would you think of an experiment that…

Since we have the DNA of numerous Neanderthals, would it be possible to clone a group of genetically distinct Neanderthals rather than a single one? That would help a little with the "no peers" problem, although it'd still be a weird life for them.

Portlandia actually totally makes me wish I could live in Portland!

I don't know if Snow White was going for some kind of retro look or what, but she looks like she belongs in a Robin Sparkles video.

For anyone who doesn't get this reference...

Something linear is something that starts at one set point and ends at another.

But with the Figenbaum fractal the specific position of each point on the graph (and thus the shape of various curves) has mathematical significance, it seems to me a family tree is necessarily going to be purely topological, like a "graph" in graph theory which is defined solely by which vertices are connected to…

I don't understand what you mean by "linear tree", or what an alternative would be to convey ancestry. "Fractal" is just a buzzword unless you have some specific idea of how it would work—if you do, then it should be possible to illustrate it with a simple example like my "offspring of a union between first cousins"…

The thing about substituting "Einstein-Rosen bridge" for "wormhole" in Thor is actually kind of a mistake, since an Einstein-Rosen bridge (otherwise known as a Schwarzschild wormhole) snaps shut so quickly that even light can't get from the region outside one side to the region outside the other side (see this page…

But you wouldn't need to draw it with multiple nodes filled by duplicate versions of the same people, instead the nodes for those people could point to multiple descendants on the tree who are all your ancestors...you end up with a tree where the lines cross at various points, like this one from this blog post about…

I'm not a fan of the Sixth Doctor's era, but it's kind of harsh that BabelColour seems to have intentionally avoided any clips which actually show him! (also no shots showing Eccleston's face, but maybe that wasn't intentional)

Here you go (starts at 1:33)

But an illustration with 25-30 generations would have a huge number of nodes—if there were no ancestors filling multiple slots that would be at least 2^25 nodes, a little over 33 million, and even with distant cousins having children so some ancestors do fill multiple slots, you'd still surely have millions of…