I'm sorry, I don't see him listed anywhere. Are you sure he's under "super villains"? I'll keep looking...

I had an interesting relationship with that movie. I saw it with only the vaguest memory of the old cartoon, and found it a blandly enjoyable Hollywood product.

Eight deadly words:

Pile it Higher and Deeper

uh... are we talking about "love" here, or are we talking about "wuv"?

This one has been bugging the shit out of me for a long time. "Modern" humans and Neanderthals INTERBRED! That makes them the SAME SPECIES! OUR SPECIES! THE NEANDERTHALS ARE OUR ANCESTORS AND ARE THEREFORE NOT EXTINCT!

This entire question is based on a faulty assumption: that language derives from the anatomy of vocalization. Language is the act of symbolic communication, which originates in the brain and makes use of whatever anatomy is available.

And I quite liked it. I'm talking more about the received wisdom from professional critics (see OP, above) who keep citing it as a "failure." I suspect this outsized critic hate on that film is because of Tom Cruise, who is an overexposed actor with a limited range. That's the kind of actor who develops an unfan…

I am convinced that he is the reason for Oblivion's failure. Every negative review of that movie that I've encountered has indicated a discomfort with Tom Cruise. The whole story is told with a strictly defined POV character, and when that character is played by someone who alienates a segment of the audience it…

Well, of course not; they're writing fiction. They take the conceit of the story at hand and run with it until the job is done. Then go back to reality.

But what is the boundary of "actual" Latin? Often a language is nothing more than a dialect with an army and a navy, and this would seem to describe most of the Romance languages.

It contradicts the nature of science, but it is the essence of science fiction: pick a plausible future, assume that it is a certainty and start telling stories with it. Futurists are religiously inclined science fiction fans who are too atheistic to follow a conventional religion (and so invent a Cult of Tomorrow)…

And with that, I am finally convinced that Futurists are no more than religious fanatics of a different stripe, convinced beyond the reach of reason that the future will conform to some sci-fi vision or another.

I don't get it. Pound for pound, birds are at least twice as dangerous as reptiles. Why does everyone think a birdlike dinosaur is less scary? Is it lack of experience with animals? General fear of reptiles?

I'm guessing you haven't seen this. As a science fiction movie it's forgettable cheese, but as soft core porn it is top notch.

They may have done "a good deal of research," but NASA spent 30 years using the reusable launch vehicle / reentry vehicle combo. The the shuttle never got past being the most expensive way out of Earth's gravity well. It's a reasonable idea on paper, and it can work if you don't care how much it costs, but as a…

I'm not especially concerned with what happens to a moribund franchise. (Is it moribund? Please let it be moribund.) That's just a label on the next release.

This is based on the assumption that neurons are merely switches and intelligence is purely an emergent property of the network. The problem is, neurons are alive. A human brain, in addition to being a complex network of synapses, is a symbiotic community of 100,000,000,000 cells that specialize in cognition. Each…

That's just us. Who else?

I have always suspected that it went something like this: