Note that the truck is on a rail so no driver is endangered.

Well, pretty much every complex case has an army of denialists who insist the guy is innocent, so that may be why.

I let my subscription lapse years ago because NatGeo is SO F###ING BANAL. If they HAD done “The Bridges of Madison County,” we’d have gotten a bunch of shots of geezers sitting around playing checkers, and, if we were lucky, ONE shot of a covered bridge. It would be in the far background where the main subject was…

Obviously these people are extremely technically proficient with incredible patience and attention to detail.

What steamed me, even worse than Windows-compatibility and the shield crap, was the President’s wife dying. They have this vast underground complex with labs, and no doctors or facilities for surgery? There were no doctors among the civilian refugees? Out of all those military people, nobody had combat medic training?…

Movie physics: in real life, if you’re in a plane that free falls 500 feet, you’re dead. In the movies, if you’re in an object that falls 500 feet, the object is smashed but you’re not. Case in point: Revenge of the Sith, where Obi-Wan and Anakin are on a structure that falls hundreds of feet into a river of lava, but…

Time to have That Talk with your mommy. Ask her about The Pill, condoms, vasectomies, etc. Cutting the birth rate will do it just as effectively.

Until you factor in the extra time. At any sort of reasonable time cost, automobiles blow away alternatives every time unless you live right on a direct transit route.

Okay. We start by banning cars for people on public assistance. That was proposed after the 1973 oil embargo and provoked howls of outrage.

Somebody explain why this is not a blatant violation of the non-Establishment caluse of the First Amendment. What makes their belief the mountain is sacred more important than our belief that pursuing knowledge is sacred? If fact, what gives them the right to say some site is “sacred” and bar others from using it at…

My bad. Venus Express is ESA, so I’ll probably have people saying that the point isn’t valid. Ignore Curiosity, Endeavor, Cassini, etc.

Well, there’s a weight issue for one thing, plus visibility on Venus sucks, and unlike Titan, there aren’t any IR windows to exploit. But I’m still pissed that the Galileo probe didn’t have a camera. That might have been very interesting. F*** the magnetometers and particle counters. That was one mission where cameras…

Funny, isn’t it? NASA designs missions for limited lifetimes and we repeatedly hear of them lasting many times longer. Other government programs don’t attain their objectives and insist they need more money because the problems they’re dealing with are so “complex.”

I love how typically Soviet everything is. Instead of a fancy telescoping arm, there’s a hinged frame that flops down on the surface. And teeth that extend the diameter of the skirt to help right the lander and also serve as degree marks. I pointed this out and someone said that proved the Russians had very primitive…

Now you’re really getting out into tinfoil hat country.

Reagan in 1994 had more mental capacity than most of the people trashing him here.

Okay, so wanting to eliminate nuclear weapons is a sign of mental deficiency?

There have been a couple of science fiction novels (one predictably titled The Plastic Eaters; another, Ill Wind, posits an oil-eating microbe that starts eating all long-chain polymers) on this theme. Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

I wish Carlin was here, too. I’d post something of his on line flagrantly, then, when he came after me for it, I’d shove one of his rants about “property is theft” in his face. See if he really meant it (no).

Do you have the foggiest conception how long 10^100 years is? There are only 10^80 elementary particles in the Universe. Picture the 10^10 (ten billion, order of magnitude) years of our universe. Now stack ten billion of them on top of each other. Now put one on each particle in the Universe. Now imagine yourself…