That scene in the background is one my favourite passages from Left Hand of Darkness! I legit want this stamp...

The solution to bombs is more bombs!

Sundberg's work is always great. This tree looks lovely, and the style makes me feel a little like "Elvish" and "Westron" should be on there somewhere. :P

And the peasants would be living in a world of filth that I don't think has ever been realistically portrayed. Lastly, all the nasty stuff people did...

They use those claws to hang upside-down from a tree all day. Sloths are surprisingly pointy.

This is an exciting time — we just got our first really good look at the surface of a comet, and soon we'll get our first close look at Pluto. The chance to really see an entire new world for the first time ever reminds you just how exciting space exploration is. :)

Yeah, I always feel a little disappointed that this is only a fly-by, and that the probe won't even go into orbit.

The kind of thing that reminds one how big space is. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist...

There's also this weird cargo... thing. It'll be fascinating to see what new designs come into being as shipping companies try to design more energy-efficient and cost-effective craft.

Clearly, someone went on an epic journey to carry this ancient artefact East and toss it into the volcanoes of Kamchatka — the only way to break Ivan the Terrible's dark powers.

I don't know. This strikes me more as poetry than as science. To talk about an amoeba "having" information in some meaningful sense in which a computer does not, and to talk about it "producing meaning," don't seem to me like very hard, solid, objective arguments for an amoeba's intelligence.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett did a pretty convincing job dismantling the Chinese Room analogy a while ago, I think. He pointed out that in order for the room to be able to hold an actual conversation with a human being, the set of instructions used by the person in the room would have to be incredibly complex — in…

I think this is precisely backwards — the actual likelihood of nuclear annihilation has not really decreased much at all; but we perceive it as being less likely. If anything, this lack of concern might contribute to making it more likely.

Oh, the current state of the Internet definitely has issues. Every other website seems to be built by design students obsessed with Flash, and even the simplest pages need to run two dozen scripts of unclear purpose just to function for some reason... It's almost enough to make one yearn for a few random .gifs…

Heck, the most likely design for fusion power plants — if someone ever actually builds one — is basically a glorified steam engine, with the heat from the fusion reaction being used to raise steam and turn turbines.

I don't know about "harmless..." Not that this would stop me from (re-)reading the books, but pop culture does have an impact on politics; conceivably, you could imagine a really popular work that advocates fantasy authoritarianism making people more comfortable with the idea in real life (as long as whoever they…

Can't approve of this re-purposing of the book, but at least you used it to make your washing machine Three Laws - compliant.

I'm not saying that this trickery is okay, but... I really don't think it's the reason why you aren't getting better pay. WalMart is not exactly getting scammed into bankruptcy. It makes billions of dollars in profit annually. If it doesn't pay people more, that's because it chooses not to, not because it can't afford…

I'm more afraid for AI than of it. When thinking about ways to prevent a hypothetical future AI from being a threat to humanity, we should also think of ways to protect that AI from angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.