Yes! Chuka Ichiban was the first thing I thought of as well. Seriously this was a strange little show (like Dragonball, but with cooking). My Taiwanese friends all thought it was hilarious.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Much of science fiction is really about the unintended consequences (of a new technology, of alien contact, of the apocalypse, etc.) for which the main characters can't be completely prepared — this necessitates a certain amount of irony.

Right around the late 18 and early 1900s there was a flood of non-satirical utopian fiction being written, so if you have any interest in historical SF you might want to check out some of the classics. Several books from around this time were popular enough that people founded communes based on their principles — it…

Great article.

This was an interesting article, though I agree with other posters that we're much closer to chimpanzees than baboons (and I wish we behaved more like bonobos rather than common chimpanzees, really.) I believe something in our neurochemical makeup makes misogyny a durable element of many human cultures, but it's not…

The other day I was in a Korean kids' stationery store and found a pencil eraser shaped like a naked baby boy, complete with the tiniest little weenie. (And yes there were girl erasers too, also naked but without details.) After laughing about it I realized you'd be hard-pressed find anything like this in an American…

These are great; I laughed out loud at the Arthur Jermyn one. Rereading his stories now, I'm reminded of just how many Lovecraft stories involved racial degeneration or race-mixing as a "creepy" element.

I don't know of any links to the present-day matriarchal Chinese cultures, but I've heard it from a good authority that many ancient agrarian Chinese tribes were matriarchies as well. Supposedly they maintained power by controlling information — only the women could read and write, relegating men to mostly manual…

This sounds suspiciously like evo-psych to me, but I've heard people suggest that certain human behavioral traits (submission to authority, for example) can be explained if you assume that female ancestors were taken against their will into other tribes. Those who stayed with their captors and made babies would have…

The handicapping principle mentioned in this article is a really fascinating idea in its own right. As the wiki page explains, you can use it to explain a wide range of human behaviors as well — specifically things like conspicuous consumption. In essence, animals are thought to advertise their "fitness" to potential…

I've never signed up for Facebook. Near as I can determine from watching others browsing it, the content is about 90% composed of A) photos of things people have either bought, eaten or visited, B) Complaints about their lives, and C) Recycled memes. None of these really seem worth caring about.

I came here to post this, but I see this job has been done already. Bravo.

Back when I was a teenager I wrote an (entirely satirical) article about a non-hormonal, non-surgical, non-abstinence-based contraceptive method that guaranteed 100% effectiveness against pregnancy. After hyping it up for a few paragraphs I explained that the "method" was homosexuality. I went on to say that this…

I've found that I can do call/response with certain local bird species. I also once got a mockingbird to pick up a specific kind of whistle I was repeating, which was neat. Still doesn't hold a candle to my aunt — one time at the zoo she imitated the baby gorillas so convincingly they came over to "talk" to her.

When I took Prozac years ago I noted that the bottle said "Warning: May cause visual disturbances." It probably should have said "Warning: The blurry objects in your peripheral vision might resolve into recognizable images, including Samara from The Ring." Also, pairs of shoes tended to morph into my cat the moment I…

This reminds me a bit of the old, old Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios, though with a headset rather than a simple video screen in front of the car. I also just recently tried a rollercoaster VR app for Google Cardboard, and that impressed me a lot more than I anticipated — if even a smartphone + cardboard…

I stand corrected then, thanks :)

There's a much greater prevalence of Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews, I believe, and the risk increases if both parents are carriers of the gene. I doubt that's the only thing tested for but it's one of the major diseases.

Here's the text of Sultana's Dream online. Read it — it's short and really pretty interesting.

Of course if you read the text below the short you know what it's about, but that was still marvelous all the same.