In some ways, paradoxically, atheists understand the Bible better than Christians. Atheists will see something like the massacre of Jericho and say it's evil. Christians are so blinded by false piety that they rationalize that it must be all right. Not only do they look like fools when they talk about the Bible, but…

Or as the USGS says, "earthquakes don't kill people, buildings kill people." Not totally true. The legends of the last Cascadia event in 1700 tell of villages buried by landslides, and you can always get killed by a fall or falling rocks and branches. Still, I'd bet all the pre-Columbian fatalities from earthquakes in…

In 1964, few people had movie cameras, and they weren't things most people carried everywhere. So the only movies we have - very few - were by people who happened to have a loaded movie camera handy. Nowadays, every camera and most phones have video capability, and there are surveillance cameras everywhere. Compare…

There are tons of suboptimal technologies out there. Much as I admire what Kodak did to preserve our history, the Carousel projector was a carnival of suckage, using clunky and overly expensive trays to hold slides that the Bell and Howell cubes held far more compactly.

In the time it took to master the rules of D&D, you could have learned calculus, coding or French and had a real permanent addition to your skills. What can you show for the time you spent honing your skills in D&D?

Starting the compilation at the '80's leaves out two key films. Star Wars was the most lavish special effects ever done up to that point, and 2001, dated as the effects seem now, made modern special effects possible. It raised the bar for space films so high there would be no going back to papier mache rocks and…

Any program that can subject people to the intensive screening that NASA does, and end up with people who drive across the U.S. in a diaper to attack a love rival, or go to Mount Ararat seriously looking for Noah's Ark, is doing something fundamentally wrong.

After every disaster like this, some relative of a victim solemnly intones "We have a RIGHT to answers." Well, you don't have a right to what cannot be done, and if the plane went down and all the debris sank by the time we figured out what happened, there may NEVER be an answer. There are planes that have never been…

Okay, now you scan all the imagery for those golf balls. Be sure not to confuse them with sea foam, or resting birds, or random stuff that fell off ships.

Red Dawn, 1984 was filmed in Las Vegas, NM (not NV!). Dante's Peak (town scenes) was filmed in Wallace, ID. Actually, IMDB has all the filming locations, for anyone who wants extra credit.

The biggest fallacy about driving is "speed kills." Yeah, if you plow into something at 90 mph you probably will die. That's mighty fine police work, Lou. I take one or more long road trips per year. I rarely see hazards created by speeders but I can't get 100 miles before I lose count of dangerous situations created…

How is this anyone else's business but CrossFit's? If person A's sexuality is none of anyone's business, how B responds, apart from the normal prohibitions against assault or other crimes, is also none of anyone's business.

Plus ripples on the lake scatter a great deal of the light.

#22: $300,000 a year sounds outrageous until you figure it means maybe 5 people doing that activity, and that's probably not full time.

That's because access was limited to technically informed people. You had to know what you were doing to go on line.

If aliens are as good as we are at cracking codes, and - no brag, just fact - we are very, very good, they will sort all this out. There may not be enough text to decode the English letters, but they will at least have a sample of our writing.

Decades ago there was a story in Analog about a guy who invented a vortex that he sold as a garbage disposal. It went great until stuff started flying back out. Eventually it became a means of contacting an alien race.

You're right, but the confusion with "eu-topia" has led to the coined antonym "dystopia."

Dogs probably acclimatized to humans by hovering around the edges of kill sites and villages, and humans acclimatized to the presence of dogs. All our domesticated animals have a hierarchy, and we've co-opted the alpha position. Except one.

If you're driving in a -er, driving rain, it's very common to see droplets skitter across the water film on the hood of your car instead of simply merging with it. A long time ago Scientific American did an article on this in their Amateur Scientist column. I suspect there's more going on than mere trapped air.