So... Dr. Goldberg or anyone - blue-sky this problem with me: Say it's two or three billion years from now, and our-super-robot-descendents (with a couple of billion years of progress beneath their unobtainium hides) wish to stop the impending collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda - purely for aesthetic…

Sophia Loren as... the Eye of Sauron....

For hell's sake.... JJA's first Star Trek film was awful. This one's worse. I had high hopes after Pike's dialogue with Kirk early on - I really did think the film was going to be about Kirk's maturation process into a commander who takes creative risks and usually wins. But no.

The problem is JJA, himself- a…

Oh. My bad. I'd forgotten you had to be one of the io9 kewl kids to get out of the commentary-ghetto on this site. Mod, feel free to remove the above. And may Cthulhu bless you with a tentacular kiss.... (wry wink)

They slept beneath the seas too long, in R'lyeh deeply drowned. The stars weren't right; the star-spawn took flight, on that distant day in May renowned. Off to find Chaos, so they told us, and we will not return. In celebration we took the day off, and hoped our fortunes had turned.

This is not a "surgical amputation kit." This is an army surgeon's field kit, likely either American or British and it was used for for many different things. (The labeling at the Drexel U. site is in error.) Hospital-grade amputation tools were more extensive and substantial; this one was light, portable, and…

Oh, an arcology, I said, looking at the first photo. And the second. And the third.... Isn't there any content editing at io9?

One of the reasons why I enjoy "science" so much is the relative lack of celebrities, celebrity-worship, and celebrity-culture. Sad to see this changing. I blame Carl Sagan, who embodied the best and the worst of the phenomenon, but if I were honest - I'd blame Isaac Newton, the first rock-star physicist....

I have no problem with the development of transhuman potential. I just have problems with transhuman stupidity - the headlong rush into changing temporary biological and/or mind-related balances without thought or reason given to the (often unexpected) consequences. Anyone who has suffered through major medical…

Anxiety, insecurity, and hate - bound up in a weaponized system of mass destruction called "humanity". Come on. Think about it for a moment. (wink)

The issue isn't the relative risks of nuclear power - they're comparatively small; that's been sufficiently demonstrated again and again - doubts? Do the research. The issue is the -image- of nuclear power in popular cultures, and that's what this particular blog is about. The reasons relating to this issue are…

The effects of losing the sun's gravity instantaneously would create all kinds of major geological disturbances as the planet adjusted on its tangential line away from orbit. Factors like compound elasticity, material shear, and core harmonics would be involved. You'd expect to see large areas of the Earth devastated…

So.... Pop culture is for the young and literature is for the ancient - is that what you're implying here? OK, fair enough.

I read Stand on Zanzibar when it was first published. And I talked to John Brunner about the book at an SF convention in Chicago a year later. What Brunner did was to take Heinlein's dictum "if this goes on..." seriously, and extrapolate from circumstances at the end of the 1960s. He did a remarkable job, better than…