There is no such thing as the "Sierra Nevada Mountains," since "Sierra" means "mountain range." Also there's no such thing as the "Rio Grande River."

What does a 500 pound canary say?

Tourist class "with all the comfort and space to have a pleasant flight" is an oxymoron. Cram in 21-inch seats with 18 inches of leg room and you can get a lot more people down there in steerage.

Before a transcontinental road trip, I told my kids to keep their hands inside or the freeway bears would get them. "There's no freeway bears ..... are there?" They are both in their 30's and that is still a running gag in our family.

Instead of talking about God, let's talk about a problem that can, in principle, be answered scientifically. Is there some extremely advanced intelligence influencing human affairs using natural means far beyond our knowledge?

He was at a Trek convention in my town and in an interview, he praised the conventions for being so accepting. He said he'd seen elderly people and handicapped people being accepted like everyone else. And I thought "Q cares about the elderly and the handicapped. IS NOTHING SACRED?"

Meteora is on my bucket list. I've been all over southern Greece, but not the north. It featured in the Bond film "For Your Eyes Only."

The weak spot in all ID schemes is using birth certificates. They are absolutely worthless for identification because there is no way at all to verify that the person presenting it is the person on the birth certificate. How many crime and spy plots revolve around someone using the birth certificate of a dead person…

I was reading an article on social interaction and the author described practicing pickup lines as "field work." To me, "field work" is standing in a swamp in the rain swatting deer flies. It occurred to me I had definitely picked the wrong branch of science.

The Cassini Mission made brilliant use of Titan's negative greenhouse effect by imaging Titan in the infrared wavelengths that penetrate its photochemical haze.

THE most brilliant piece of humor I ever saw was in a performance of Iolanthe. A guest tenor, a black man, had a key role, and in one song he was meditating on the vagaries of life. He mentioned he could have been a sailor and did a little sailor jig, or he could have been an actor. Then he turned and said "Lawsy, Miz…

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, affiliated with Columbia, is in Palisades, and that's where virtually all the geoscience faculty spend their time.

The only problem with that approach is that no religion "believes" in things either. No Muslim considers it a matter of subjective opinion whether Mohammed received the Koran from God. No conservative Christian considers it a matter of personal preference whether Christ is the Son of God (some liberal Christians are…

I think it was Dennis Miller who said that your radical fashions that challenge the Establishment will be your kids' Trick or Treat costumes in twenty years.

The original root is "kybernetos," which means a helmsman. I have asked several linguists how the c/k conflation came about but nobody seems to know. Anyway, it went into Latin as "gubernator," from which we get the adjective "gubernatorial," as in "Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign." The French mutated it in…

"Who's Next?" and "So Long Mom" would be worthy additions.

I hate to interrupt the speculation on Romans versus Mongols, but I followed the link to the original and was struck with how utterly superficial it is. And wrong about a slew of things. The Roman emperors were not deposed after natural disasters, and those that were deposed rarely complained as the document says,…

For the first thirty years of its existence, Harvard (founded 1636) taught that the Sun went around the earth. (fact)

I picture cats as self-domesticating* very quickly. Once we started storing grain, we'd have rodents, and local wild cats would start hunting them. Kids and kittens being what they are, a mutually satisfactory arrangement was probably worked out very quickly.

The Roche limit only applies to bodies with no cohesive strength. Otherwise there could never be any large impacts because the impacting body would fragment once it got inside the Roche limit.