The anthropic principle is not a prediction about the properties a theory of quantum gravity will have; the chronology protection conjecture is, so it's a well-defined scientific conjecture. And see my reply to justvisiting for details on some of the calculations from semiclassical gravity (an approximate way of…

Also, can I take your non-response to the question about whether they regularly handed out Nietzsche at campaign rallies, whether Hitler or Mussolini carried his book around, etc., as an indication that you were just going on vague memories and can't provide evidence to support these claims?

"Not at all. IF atheism is defined as a lack of belief THEN anyone who lacks belief MUST be an atheist. You really don't have a firm grasp on this logic thing do you?"

"Wall of text is hard to read. "

FALSE. Fascism is a political ideology based on the writings of Nietzsche.

What's obsessive about any of the premises I mentioned? If your significant other was kidnapped to a parallel universe as in one of my premises, are you saying you'd just give them up even if you had a chance to get them back? Would it be any different if they were kidnapped to another country? Seems "emotionally…

The description is unclear, it might be that his wife was always from another dimension (ie he only met her after some dimension-bridging experiment), or that he only thought she was dead when she'd actually been kidnapped and taken to another dimension, or that his wife is dead but that during some dimensional…

It's possible he had it off in another earlier scene (though I don't remember him taking it off), but in the scene where he was reaching out to the "snake", he definitely had it on.

Was the pain because it was too cutesy, or would you have been fine with "tiny exhaust port thingie"?

Criticisms like "the only interesting character was the AI" and "the movie never really answered the grand questions it raised or explained the aliens' motivations" could be leveled against 2001: A Space Odyssey...I'm not saying Prometheus was in the same league, its main failure was that it tried to do more…

"Including a biologist afraid of dead aliens but totally cool with petting an obviously pissed off living one."

If you're willing to wait a few centuries for the probe to reach its destination, it's not so inconceivable that we could build probes that could reach a small percentage of the speed of light within the next century or two. I think the most realistic interestellar travel idea is either a sail pushed by a giant laser…

One thing I noticed is that although higher frame rate is supposed to reduce strobing (the effect where things move in a jittery way rather than motion looking totally smooth), I actually noticed plenty of strobing whenever the camera panned around quickly, it actually seemed more obvious than in "normal" 24 fps…

It would have been better if the article had included the figure, but saying it doesn't have "any meaning at all" is hyperbole, it's not like the figures on "sudden cardiac death" (the type of unexpected death they said they were looking at in the abstract) for nonsmokers in the U.S. would be that hard to find, and…

"[The researchers] found the women who smoked were twice as likely to die suddenly even if they smoked "light-to-moderate" amounts - between one and 14 cigarettes a day."

Pretty sure sound waves from people talking would degenerate into thermal energy (random vibrations of air molecules with no collective direction) long before traveling from central park to Hong Kong, so no possible sound detector no matter how large could get any information about sounds (from things at everyday…

So even though all those later "BRAAAMs" are pretty obviously inspired by Inception, on another site I saw someone link to the District 9 trailer from a year earlier, which may be the first example of a trailer that uses repeated BRAAMing without any other rhythm (like in the Altered States trailer), and without any…

"I would have accepted the response that a Constitution Class was not rated for atmospheric flight for more than a short while in emergency situations."