True that. But in Hergé's defense, he tried to compensate for it afterward — in one of the later books Tintin takes a swing at a bigoted white guy saying racist things, and Tintin and his new friend Chang talk about silly beliefs held by whites about Asians and by Asians about whites.

That sounds all kinds of awesome.

Hope I didn't sound like I thought Japanese was simpler than English; not my intent. Mainly talking about the uniformity of letter pronunciation, which you mentioned, and the fact that most words are broken up into kana (consonant + vowel pairs) which might make word construction easier for a synthesizer. Oh, and verb…

Oh wow, this stuff fascinated me no end when I was younger. It's just like LCL, only real. (It was also the reason my mom refused to sit through this film; she'd have trouble breathing just from watching these scenes.)

I could be wrong, but I think Japanese has a narrower range of sounds than English (each vowel only has one pronunciation, for example), so it'd technically be easier to create a voice synthesizer to tackle spoken Japanese compared to one for English. But that being said, Kirobo's speech sounds more natural (in terms…

I've always thought that sufficiently-advanced AI wouldn't need to engage in any hostile takeover in order to conquer humanity — it could always do something like this, given that it was positioned in a way that made it convenient.

In Japan not a lot of people have the space for pets (why else would things like kitty cafes exist?) so people that do keep cats kind of spoil them. Of course this guy's in New York and not Japan, but the mentality seems to be the same.

One interesting thing — the Japanese (Paro is an example of a Japanese robot) seem a lot more eager and willing to anthropomorphize their robots than many other nations. There's even a name for the phenomenon.

I always wondered why the Taiwanese brands of T-shirts on YesAsia would show a girl AND a guy wearing the same shirt, side by side. I assumed it had to do with proving the shirts were unisex or something, but this makes more sense to me now.

I thought of this movie all the way through Good Omens and I'm very inclined to agree with you.

Y'all need to read JG Ballard's "The Drowned World", because it's essentially this. High heat causes all the polar ice caps to melt. For additional fun, the change in environment causes most of humanity to either go insane or regress to a prehuman state, depending on your reading.

I use a breath-counting/meditation technique whenever I can't sleep. I count every inhale, trying to focus on the sensation of breathing, and after I get to 10 breaths I start over. I find it pretty effective at getting to sleep — also, I was told once (not sure if it's true) that when you have insomnia, you get some…

That scene of Winona Ryder running downstairs bra-less (and in a sheer nightgown) gets me every time.

Yes, but... "before all the horrible stuff happens"? I personally thought all the killing/mutating added to her sex appeal, but that could just be me.

I can lucid dream pretty consistently with a bit of prep and ~9 hours sleep...but yeah, I tend to use it pretty exclusively for banging all the dream-characters I come across. And flying, but I fly all the time in my nonlucid dreams too (though it is one of the best ways to tell I'm dreaming.)

Pan's Labyrinth and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest were vastly superior movies compared to Sucker Punch. I understood the plot and was psyched to see it because I liked the theme, but it was just bad all around. Bad writing, bad acting, gratuitous CG, horrid makeup, etc. I especially "liked" how the lobotomy at the…

See, I liked The Tommyknockers, though that's probably because I really love sci-fi corruption themes. I won't say the ending was a perfect summation but at least it had closure.

This was the only time I have ever heard an entire theaterful of moviegoers all shout "Noooo!" at the same time. Still liked this ending though.

Excellent article; I look forward to these.

The sad thing is that many people really and truly WANT to believe stuff like this. Tea and herbs from some quack may be cheaper than therapies that actually work (often it isn't), but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Bogus treatments like this prey on people's fear of conventional medicine (many people are afraid…