And it came to pass with stunning results.

Every week! For some reason many on this site get rage boners from hating Interstellar because of one scene of a wistful, deluded, lovesick astronaut losing her objective, scientific focus for a moment. I did not know so many expected a graduate level course on astrophysics starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne…

This isn't censorship. It's artistic intent. Entertainment is all about getting the audience to react the way you want. Doctor Who is a light-hearted adventure show (especially this episode about a robot Robin Hood or something). If a scene is going to unintentionally disturb a good portion of the audience because of…

I think they are arguing that anomalocaridids branched off earlier from the ancestors of modern arthropods. I'm not sure where they think trilobites go, but they think chelicerates and mandibulates evolved later than Anomalocaris.

Shortly after I got married, my brother-in-law was helping us move and we had a collection of stone tiles that were a part of a coffee table, and the tiles were wrapped up and packed up. We told him, "hey could you pick up that container of towels?" and he tried with hilarious results. So I think it comes from the…

Thanks for the advice. I tend to put more weight on the opinions of people who aren't hiding behind fake handles, because where I come from grown-ups have the spine to say their piece to someone's face not behind their backs.

Actually, it's an important thing. I don't know about you, but I quite like turning on Scandal and seeing Kerry Washington playing an African-American woman who isn't a sassy domestic servant, a sassy hooker or a not-so-sassy corpse. Because it wasn't that long ago that was the only way she was getting her arse on…

I preferred the Time Machine series myself. They were like Choose Your Own Adventure, but there was only one ending. The worst you could do is get caught in a time loop by repeating previous chapters if you didn't choose carefully. They were a fun way to learn about science and history.

1. You accused Randi of moving the goal post but at no point posted any evidence of that outrageous accusation. The fact that Randi demands that the experimental result have a higher significance (lower p-value threshold) than usual experiments (e.g. 0.05) is not moving the goal post, it's the embodiment of the maxim:…

I'm going to go on record that the idea that the eighties were any sort of golden age of cartoons is horseshit.

So, he'll bravely raid the back issues of Metal Hurlant again...

The problem with Big Bang Theory is that all of their geeky activities and their geeky lifestyle is the punch line of every joke.

Let the cries of "fake!" begin...

I recall thinking at the time that it was a bad explanation since it made it sound like an optical effect, but maybe their phrasing was just poor. The text was Halliday, Resnick and Walker (?) but it was many editions ago since this was in the mid-90's.

To cut her some slack, simultaneity is often explained this way. I think these confusions arise because, historically, relativity was arrived at by considering the behavior of light. But the thing is that relativity is not really about light, it's about causality. Light just happens to be the most obvious phenomena…

That's a Hobo spider and it will make your skin turn black and die. Those are the fraking devil and they are all over the damn place here in Idaho. I came here on the contingency there were no earthquakes or rattlesnakes. No one told me about Hobo spiders (or the Neo-Nazis)

Remember the original Orion concept? Nuclear bombs propelling a spacecraft. Would make one bitchin' ragtop.