#6. If phones want to be taken seriously as cameras, then when I press the camera button I want the camera on, regardless of whether the phone is on and unlocked, and I want the picture captured within 1/100 second. Like film.

They buried a horde? I didn't know the Mongols got to Germany. Burying a hoard would have been far more likely.

Tiny enclaves for life. Life exists in only one or a few special habitats on an otherwise lifeless world. The problem is that planets change, and if the intervening terrain is inhospitable, life can't find a new refuge. When the last enclave dies, that's the end.

My family moved out of Bangor in 1961 when the station was still standing. When I came back for a visit in 1969 it was gone along with a lot of downtown north of Kenduskeag Stream (convinced I really lived there, now?).

"Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky" -Kansas, Dust in the Wind

The SI system shows that those who can, teach, those who can't, do (think of all the engineering disasters you've ever heard of, and all the engineers who back crank science) and those utterly unqualified for a career in science sit on SI committees. Take the absurdity of defining frequency as 1(no units)/time. In…

Back when astronomical instruments were made by hand, hexadecimal measurement made a lot more sense because dividing a circle into six parts is the easiest division of all. Dividing a circle into five parts can also be done with ruler and compasses. You can get subdivisions down to 3 degrees, but not 1 degree. The old…

Calling it a "diacritical mark" doesn't stop it from being a letter for all practical purposes.

Note that there's a strip of light blue from Texas to North Dakota and the study started before fracking got going big time. I suspect out-migration is removing a lot of the lower income people.

Surprising that Robocop and Rollerball were pretty much silly popcorn flicks at the time, but in retrospect were pretty incisive social commentaries. That the remakes completely miss. Or maybe not. Watch the remakes in 2020 and see.

This can't help but seem offensive from some points of view, but it's not meant to.

Night of the Lepus! I have long dreamed of a "Star Trek - The Lost Years" film festival featuring the dreck Star Trek actors were in between TOS and the revival. Shatner's "White Comanche" would also be included.

It's a slow loris! Run for your lives! Slowly. Okay, walk for your lives.

As somebody once said about the U.S. competing with China: We'll win because our Asians will beat their Asians. Discipline.

Didn't stick the landing. 3.5

You are not a car. When you can keep pace with traffic, you are the equal of a motor vehicle. Until then, yield to automobiles.

Plate tectonics. Thanks to recycling of rocks through plate tectonics, certain elements, called lithophile, tend to concentrate in continental crust. Lithium, beryllium, boron, rare earths, stuff generally on the left end of the periodic table. Also, most of our ores depend on water some way for formation. Some things…

Remember (if you're old enough) the first views of the earth in space? And how we could never again think of the earth the same way? Yeah, how's that been working lately?

Up here in Green Bay, Wisconsin, people usually have to be retrained every winter after the first couple of snowfalls. And ice is dangerous any way you look at it. So I, for one, am not laughing at you.

The B-36 was a cobbled together hybrid to bridge the gap between propeller and jet bombers. Six turnin', four burnin'.