Instead of scholarly definitions, the starting point ought to be what intelligence means in everyday speech. Prediction is the only criterion mentioned here that would be part of it, and that invalidates the Chinese Room experiment, because an intelligent human, thrust into China, would not only figure out the rules…

Meteor showers, along with comets, are the most irresponsibly hyped cosmic phenomena. The Goldpaint photo captured roughly three dozen meteors in HOURS. One meteor a minute would be a very rich shower, so to simulate, THERE'S ONE! one, two, three .... fifty-nine, sixty, THERE'S ONE! except you missed it because it was…

It's one thing to see faces where they aren't. The skull flower is amazing, the Scream picture is scary and the drunk octopus is witty. It's a whole different thing to find significance there. The virgin in the tree trunk vaguely matches the silhouette of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Gathering around it and placing…

Although they're not the horror genre, the Drakian alternative history by S.M. Stirling is some of the most horrifying stuff I've ever read.

Every time you find an evolutionary link, you create TWO "missing links." If you find species B between A and C, now the missing links are AB and BC. Unless we find every single individual in the chain, we'll never convince the cultists.

The more precisely targeted weapons become and the less directly lethal, the more certain people oppose them. It almost seems like they don't WANT us to have effective weapons against terrorists and criminals.

Put Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco in charge. They'll be ready with a plan like, Wednesday. Then blame it on Bush.

Companies engage in a manic quest to dominate everything, releasing useless products rather than admit that someone else does it better. Good example: Google won the search engine battle, but we have inferior imitators like Bing, Ask.com and an irritating piece of crapware that I got off a Firefox add-on that took…

There is no tool so dull it can't cut human flesh (well, maybe a ball-peen hammer). That's why the somewhat counter-intuitive maxim that sharp tools are safer. Dull tools can still cut, but they result in poor control. Sharp tools can cut more easily, but they can be controlled better.

Rape used to be a capital offense until the Supreme Court outlawed it in 1977 in Coker vs. Georgia. Don't tell us how offended by rape you are as long as you tolerate that idiotic ruling.

ensuing.

95% of all patents are trivially obvious to anyone skilled in the field and should never be issued. Rounded corners? Really? Weren't those on the Star Trek view screen, like, 40 years ago?

Point #1: No headache at all. You think these guys will sanction vigorous collection of child support?

I've had a number of cases where a picture looks OK in the viewfinder but there was blurring in the final product. And for digitized film pictures where economy often limited the number of frames you took, it's obvious. Also, pictures from moving vehicles often have foreground blurring.

Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Never-Ending Story were good on their own terms, LOTR was phenomenal and the omissions (especially the anti-climactic Cleansing of the Shire) were reasonable. Dune is the most turgid and pretentious piece of pseudo-philosphical crap I ever read, about on the level of Star Trek V. When the…

The Democrats supported slavery and the Republicans abolished it. And that's about as relevant to today's political alignment as refusing to shop Ikea because your ancestral village was sacked by the Vikings. Even in Teddy Roosevelt's time, the parties were exchanging positions. The Republicans were always patrician…

The volatile element abundance pattern on the moon is widely believed to indicate the proto-Moon formed in a hotter part of the Solar System.

I can't say I ever thought of women as meaner than men, but just watching women in the abortion controversy go at it should dispel the notion that we'd have a kinder, gentler world with women running things.

Is Ted Yoho, the "large animal veterinarian," a veterinarian who treats large animals or a large animal who is also a veterinarian? I confused.

Actually Rand once said "A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations." So by that standard, a group, like a corporation, that violates…