Windows 95, ME, 98, XP, Vista, 7 and now 8. And I still can't:

Say what you will about politicians, every day after election day, half of them have to confront the reality that more than half of the voters didn't want them. That can't be easy.

After seeing the trailer, it's only been sixty years since the apocalypse. That makes it doubly dumb. I can see burying NYC in lava flows, but carving a canyon that deep in sixty years?

Photons are massless but they have momentum, which they transfer to whatever they hit, exerting a force.

Sorry, it's a stupid poster. Is the water spilling over a dam? If it's a natural cliff, buildings would never last long enough to be buried like that. Even all the antennas on the top of the ESB are intact!

Most people live by the motto Death Before Discomfort.

So Jimmy Carter, the "worst president the U.S. has ever had," according to the poo-flingers, headed an effort that reduced this scourge by over 99%. Bad president!

Things were going pretty well, so I thought I'd check in for my daily recommended dose of depression.

Creationists are happy to accept people like you when they're tallying the number of people who believe in creation, but in other contexts you're a "theistic evolutionist," and they reject your interpretation utterly.

Brings a whole new meaning to the term "bone china."

A lot of apocalyptic and lost colony (local apocalypse) literature treats women as receptacles, seeking fulfillment in being good breeding stock, enhancing the genetics of the tribe, continuing the dynastic line or swooning for the alpha male. I get somewhat nauseous picturing the people who like (or write) this sort…

You take all the tough courses - math, physics, foreign languages, get A's, and apply to one or two schools. The high fees are specifically to discourage frivolous applications.

Nothing grows forever. Most growth curves follow a sigmoid shape, exponential growth early on followed by a nearly linear middle stretch and then negative exponential at the end, converging toward a limit. Even if there's a lot more growth ahead, our current phase may be entering the inflection point where…

Generally no. Even at our poles, the sun gets 23 degrees above the horizon so apart from deep crevices and canyons, the sun is always visible occasionally. But because of the Sun's tidal force, Mercury's equator points straight at the sun. The sun never does more than graze the horizon at the poles. So any craters…

The reason it took 30 years for a return visit is that the orbital maneuvering to get into orbit around Mercury is fiendishly complex. You can get there for a flyby in a few months, but matching Mercury's speed well enough for orbital insertion took multiple flybys of Earth and Venus, plus passes by Mercury itself. We…

Why did they let him fly? Because the world is down to 10% combat strength. If this doesn't work, they're toast anyway. We have a plane, and a pilot. Why not?

Problem: the story shifts from the mass-energy of Jupiter (Jupiter times c squared) to simple mass. It's not 1600 pounds of mass but the mass-energy of 1600 pounds, and even a thermonuclear device converts only a few grams of matter into energy. Still, if this happens, it will be the coolest thing ever. But getting to…

Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End features a non-corporeal entity called the Overmind, aliens with devices that can see across time, and pretty much every supernatural fixture of religion, yet he specifically mentions that religion mostly died out as the time-viewer devices expose the human origins of religion.…

Doomed? No. We pretty much exhausted the possibilities of aliens attack stories, so that genre faded until Independence Day brought it back. We'll run out of fresh apocalyptic scenarios, an apocalyptic end if you wish. And we'll lose interest for a while. Aliens attack films helped people deal with the anxiety of the…

Emphatically no. The best evidence is 1984, which supposedly made hundreds of successful predictions. Every single "prediction" in 1984 was already known in 1948, when the book was written. Orwell utterly failed to foresee computers. In the Ministry of Culture, pop novels for the proles are written by shuffling blocks…