A vacuum would be a poor place to store explosives because they'd give off volatile compounds. A high pressure inert gas like argon would probably be a better choice.

The earth's magnetic field averages about 50 microtesla, so 10^5 tesla is 2,000,000,000 times as strong as Earth's. The SI system is based on large units like the meter and kilogram. The result is some derived units, like the pascal, are absurdly tiny while others, like the tesla, are absurdly large.

Your lead illustration suffers from failure to read maps. There's an impressive line of cliffs on the west side of the Hudson - the Palisades. And there are high hills not far to the north. Also, the channel at the north end of Manhattan is extremely narrow. The one direction you would not see a flat water horizon…

This inspires an elegant solution: get a few cheap but realistic stuffed animals, embed nails in them, and leave them on the roadside. Self-punishing sin.

My mother, the one, the only, the inimitable, once celebrated St. Patrick's Day by dyeing everything green: milk to drink and spaghetti for dinner. Bright, Kelly green, spaghetti. With red tomato sauce (only because she couldn't figure out how to dye it, I bet) it was unnerving. My sibs flatly refused to touch it. I…

Bonestell has been commemorated elsewhere, and his painting of Titan, eye-catching as it is, isn't even very accurate. If we named something for Bonestell on every object he painted, he'd be all over the place. Kuiper is more than amply commemorated.

Right on. We should have no rules at all! Instead of Olympus Mons, we'll just refer to "that big-@$$ volcano thingy on Mars." Seriously, if you want to discuss the geology of some feature, what are you going to do? Refer to it by its coordinates? Instead of Taurus-Littrow, we'll discuss the geology of the twisty…

Okay, is the German title also "Hell?" "Hell" in German means "bright," a very appropriate title. Is this a bilingual play on words?

Am I the only one fascinated by the lead image?

If you start with organically grown castor beans, you can be sure your ricin is free of harmful chemicals!

Stupid. On the other hand, so is the fetish of "diversity." I want a nice boring monotonous bunch of people with one attribute: competence. Color and shape of skin immaterial.

Notice how the two color bands converge on the left. Most of these satellites have only a single small row of pixels in each band and use the motion of the satellite plus side-to side sweeping to build up the image. So the satellite first saw the glory at the left edge. The glory doesn't have a physical location but…

The only thing that makes me dubious about this film is that aurochs are basically giant cows. Also they didn't become extinct during the ice age - the last one died in Poland in 1627.

Why do any of you even CARE? If you have friends who can't cope with your being a parent, they're not friends. Dump them like a used diaper. And if you're childless and can't deal with the changes you see once one of your friends becomes a parent, GROW UP.

Onion headline: "Balsamic extremists blow up Hidden Valley Ranch."

Some messages need to come from men. A woman saying perfection isn't important is likely to come across as (a) someone who's so gorgeous she doesn't need to care, (b) someone in the middle of the pack trying to minimize competition or (c) a crone who's rationalizing.

I was never impressed by Sherlock Holmes. His "deduction" is a caricature of science as inerrantly zeroing in on the right conclusion. Holmes completely ignores equally plausible alternative interpretations of evidence and builds long chains of inferences, every link of which has other possible outcomes. It works for…

Want a modern infrastructure? Fine. We let the experts lay it out and then we string the lines through your neighborhood. No litigation allowed. That's why we don't have one yet. The NIMBY's.

For my $40, do I get:

How about making a camera for grownups with a lens permanently in place so it doesn't need extension? One where pressing the button turns it on and takes a picture instantly. Like Instamatics could do 40 years ago?