I’m not sure that’s true, the arguments here against it being a mere scar seem pretty good (although if the argument is right, then perhaps the belly button does have some adaptive purpose and is not purely ‘vestigial’ in developmental sense):
Hypnosifl
Hypnosifl
I don’t think Mackenzie Phillips accused Jagger of rape, this article quotes her memoir saying “We went into Jerry Hall’s bedroom and had sex in their bed” with no mention of the sex being non-consensual (the article also mentions she was 18 at the time, and says that “Miss Phillips is quick to point out that the…
I only described my definition of “terrorism”, not “terrorists”. Someone who tries to commit an act of terrorism as I defined it, but is thwarted, would still be a “terrorist” in my book. But I don’t see that these guys’ dumb plan to take over a federal building was done with the primary intent of killing or hurting…
To me, terrorism is killing (or seriously injuring) people to inspire terror, period. Overly broad definitions lump really horrible things in with fairly harmless things, like “eco-terrorists” who are solely interested in property damage to things like logging equipment. I don’t see these guys as really much worse…
You’re on Foxtrot Alpha, a subsection of jalopnik that deals with military tech, not cars. Gawker media has consolidated a lot of different blogs, for example the science fiction blog io9 is now folded into gizmodo.
Ben Franklin would be totally into learning about computers, check out this story about how he once actually wrote that he wished he could see how science technology had advanced 300 years in the future. Washington might be more of an old fogey, but maybe if we brought them both Franklin could help show him the ropes.
That latency can be made pretty tiny, no? If you can get your drone pilot within a 10 km radius of the drone, the time for a signal traveling at the speed of light to reach the drone is only about 30 microseconds (3 times 1/100000 of a second), whereas human reaction time to new stimuli can never go below about 1/10…
The definition has changed since the 19th and early 20th century. For example, the textbook Politics: An Introduction to the Modern Democratic State says here that:
Some questions are designed to clarify ambiguities in what the other person is actually arguing though—even if neither person’s opinion is actually going to change, questions can nevertheless lead people to realize they don’t actually disagree about some issue they thought they were disagreeing about, I’ve seen this…
So is this some kind of “women be nagging” joke, or would you have made the same joke about a realistic male character?
What do you mean by “core of pure goodness”? He had some remaining good urges mixed with the bad, and they won out in his final actions, but that doesn’t mean he was somehow an essentially good person who just made some mistakes in life. And as I mentioned in this comment, the idea that there was still some good in…
Yes, and the fact that this shook up Vader was shown at the end of ESB when he spared the life of Admiral Piett, who had failed to permanently disable the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive as promised, in contrast to two earlier sequences where Vader force-choked other Star Destroyer commanders to death for failing him.
In Phantom Menace Anakin was supposed to be 9, Padme was supposed to be 14 (apparently Naboo likes electing female teenage leaders for whatever reason). The movie was filmed in June through September of 1997, and Natalie Portman had just turned 16 in June of that year. So this isn’t really stupid in terms of the age…
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In your discussion of the scene with Vader and Luke in Return of the Jedi, I think you’re forgetting that Vader’s “softening” had already begun at the end of The Empire Strikes Back—after two memorable scenes earlier in the movie him force-choking two Star Destroyer commanders to death (Admiral Ozzel and Captain…
But for a minute, just stop and take in the scene of these morons reverse-engineering a pencil and paper, and getting something that costs $1,300 and very likely works only barely.
Are you sure it’s always on a track, as opposed to them just plating the whole skate part with metal underneath the layer of concrete (or whatever that surface is) and having it float freely in any direction? The Hendo hoverboard was moving freely on a metal surface, it worked by creating eddy currents in the…
For some reason I can’t edit my own post now (time limit?), but I see now that both the article and the video do mention that it needs to ride above a magnetic surface.
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There are videos of people doing this with very small magnets so what Lexus and their scientific partners did was scale up the concept.
Yes, I know. My point was that "vestigial" is usually defined exclusively in terms of remains of features that had a useful function earlier in our evolution but not in us, rather than remains of features that had a use earlier in our own personal development (as an embryo) but not currently, with the bellybutton…