"Their products" refers to maps, announcements, bulletins, etc. Naming winter storms is dumb because they originate in different areas (unlike hurricanes) and affect widely different regions. Why should someone in Idaho care what a storm in New England is called? We have a local weatherman who names storms locally.…

Wow. Phase velocities in wave guides are ALWAYS faster than light. Yawn. Post something when they create a macroscopic device with macroscopic results.

Where's the evidence that you have enough of a scientific background to doubt it?

Oh sheesh, "there food!" Sorry. Fixed.

People have wondered if there's a "Cosmic Filter" that prevents interstellar travel. Most of these would do. But the most likely scenario is somewhat dystopian. A species decides that interstellar travel is too difficult, dangerous, or expensive. So they give up the dream. Sooner or later, they decide there's nothing…

"With horror stories of suppression and fuckery being whispered from Ohio to Florida, many nervous Obama voters braced for the worst yesterday.."

Aww, the universe will die out in maybe 10^30 years. Do you have any idea how freaking LONG that is? Imagine every second since the Big Bang. Replace each second with a trillion years, or 30 times the age of the Universe. You will still not have 10^30 years.

Abortion could have been ended ages ago by barring the courts from reviewing it (Art. 3, Sec. 2 of the Constitution). It hasn't been because it's an easy way for the Right to keep anti-abortionists in their pockets.

I'm still not entirely sure what it was, but it was amazing. Some of the story lines (most) had eminently gratifying endings. I'm disappointed to see it hasn't done that well at the box office.

I've been to Disneyland three times (most recently 1984) but never Disney World. Should someone slip a burlap bag over your head and drag you there, you will have fun.

The only time I ever drove into flooding, the water was quiet and I could see the center line clearly. Even then, at the first sign of the water getting too deep (it never got worse than hubcap deep) I was ready to back out (the road was straight). Having waded through fast-moving streams, I can tell you even a few…

No, it's not fraud to be photoshopped with Steve Jobs and the President, or even Elvis. It is fraud if you try to collect money doing it.

WWII was the first high-tech war in which the outcome depended critically on technology developed during the war. If WWII had gone on a couple of years longer it would have become a very modern war indeed, fought with jet aircraft, missiles, computers and very likely more than two nuclear weapons.

Miscegenation is never a problem with white males having sex with other races. White slaveowners happily impregnated their female slaves. It's only when the other races have sex with white females that it's an issue. Or someone wants to formalize the relationship with marriage.

Since it was mostly smoke that killed people, we can truthfully say that many people did die of the "flue."

The whole Oz series of books was dark. Return to Oz is actually more faithful to the tone than Wizard of Oz is.

This article would make a great literacy test. It's not about whether YOU think something is dystopian, but whether someone from the past would. Can you put yourself in someone else's position? Hint: for a very large fraction of the readership, no. They flunk.

There was a hilarious article years back in the Journal of Irreproducible Results that started off with a note on how the FAA had a catapult to simulate aircraft-bird collisions. It then calculated the kinetic energy of the (dead) bird in electron volts, making the catapult by far the most powerful linear accelerator…

This cliche is an attempt to make moral and physical cowardice sound noble. Brought to you by the people who don't want us to hurt terrorists and who oppose capital punishment. The irony is a deeper cliche. Supposedly, traditional morality is rigid and inflexible, but modern morality is situational. The reality is,…

Or my parrot has many dactyls. A trillion dactyls is a tera-dactyl.