It's always been part of Star Trek lore that the ships have both shields and "inertial dampers" (to keep them from being squashed during accelerations), I don't see why either one of these couldn't work as an explanation for why it isn't crushed. (not to mention that Scotty talked about how a thin sheet of…

Yeah, like I said in a response to a different comment, Tron is different because the BRAAM was part of a techno song rather than being isolated, and there's at least one techno song that did this before Inception: Navras from Matrix Revolutions (the BRAAAAMs start about 16 seconds in)

There was never any consensus that the asteroid was clearly the sole cause, the Deccan traps were always understood as a possibly significant contributing factor (try searching google books using the words "deccan trap" and "extinction", restricting the date range however you like). As for global warming, I'm sure you…

Anyone can edit IMDB, it's like wikipedia.

Not really the same—that has a double "Dum-DUUUM" rhythm, not the periodic single "BRAAAAM" of Inception and all the later imitators. The comparison someone else made to the "Terminator" theme doesn't really work for the same reason.

What time in that clip are you talking about? There aren't any repetitive foghorn sounds in the opening credits.

"if people choose randomly, 50% of the time they would be right"—only if the set of photos they were looking at consisted of 50% cheaters and 50% non-cheaters! The fact that men got only 23% accuracy suggests the experimenters didn't use this type of sample.

What was the whole point? Obviously the creators of the video knew that Sagan's comments were about that photo, but it may not have occurred to them that not everyone watching their animation would be familiar with this context. I'm just saying that for that audience, the video would probably work a little better if…

I liked the graphics, but I feel like it loses a bit of effectiveness if you don't know that Sagan was talking about an actual photo of the Earth taken from such a huge distance that it looked like a little blue dot (with a streak of light in the photo that inspired the "suspended in a sunbeam" comment). If you don't…

I doubt you were banned for expressing controversial opinions, unless they were pro-genocide or something (I wonder why you don't even mention what those opinions were, considering this is a burner profile which you probably expect to get banned anyway). Case in point, despite the pointlessness of your comment…

I wonder, who's the blonde woman who shows up in a few shots? Her haircut and outfit do resemble those of Elizabeth Dehner from the Gary Mitchell episode, although I doubt Cumberbatch is Mitchell (especially since Mitchell didn't have a British accent).

It's not really true that people "in general" have rejected it. See the comment here:

I think that site just recolored the image of the person with chimerism shown at http://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask75 (linked in the io9 article) to make it look like it was taken under a UV lamp. If you compare the two images carefully the pattern of dark and light seems to be exactly the same. So, I don't think…

I'd like to see all the seasons of Dexter's Laboratory out—they released season 1 in 2010, but there were three more seasons that may never see a release.

I think the novel sets up as Lerner and Sylvester as failing to produce testable scientific theories, but I disagree that there is anything in Hogarth's response that suggests that his criticism (particularly his criticism of Sylvester's variant) amounts to something "more than just untestable", i.e. I don't see…

Yes, that's how it's described in this story: 'Nevertheless, the most current cause of excitement began when Curiosity mission lead scientist John Grotzninger began receiving data on his computer from the rover's on-board chemistry lab, called SAM, while he was with a reporter from National Public Radio. The…

The article says "The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White's sense of plausibility", but I believe that calculation, like the earlier one of needing a negative mass the size of Jupiter, was for a bubble big enough to carry a "starship" or…

I was just pointing out that to use the Casimir Effect to create the negative energy densities needed for Alcubierre's warp is far too energy intensive and geometrically difficult. You'd need charged plates the size of galaxies.

But because of mass-energy equivalence in relativity, "negative energy" is negative mass; there is no difference between the two phrases for a physicist. One question I had about the Casimir effect was whether, even though the energy densities were less than the vacuum energy, they might still not be less than zero…

Ch. 17 of His Master's Voice definitely raises "design" as a possibility, although it suggests that our universe was designed by unimaginably advanced beings in an earlier universe, rather than by an omnipotent God. If you have the book handy, see Sylvester's variation on Lerner's cyclic cosmology theory there—Lerner…