Frank Lloyd Wright. Took his mistress to Europe and left his wife home. Brilliant architect. Thoroughly rotten human being.

I think you have to strain pretty hard to make Idiocracy a call to class warfare. Rather than rich people being smart and poor people being dumb, the future of Idiocracy seems more to be that dumb and lazy people gravitate toward dumb amusements, and the media and food industries cater to those tastes.

Nice. Has the face for it and nails the look.

Look at the pictures. It's tacky beyond words. A huge dome on top of a mis-proportioned base and a colonnade that's big for the sole purpose of being big. St. Peters has its clunky aspects but this church is a fourth-grader's version of it.

Not religious. Personal ego trip.

Superb engineering is always wonderful to see, and that's what this operation has been.

A very large majority of mineral resources on earth require water for their genesis. Bauxite (aluminum ore) is essentially tropical soil. Most other resources are hydrothermal. Most of our iron comes from ancient biogenic sedimentary rocks. A few resources (platinum, nickel) are found in magmatic rocks.

Fake. I can tell by the pixels.

Clicking the original link solves it. The raw graph, with time on the x-axis, shows a bunch of horizontal lines, the result of binning the obscurity data. Overall the data slants up and to the right, since the most obscure songs tend to be oldest. They took the best-fit slope and rotated it horizontal, so the data…

One shows the ranking with time adjustment and one shows the raw ranking.

Did Hitler get to pick out his own sippy cup? Ivan the Terrible? Genghis Khan? Caligula? King Herod? I rest my case.

Something college kids don't want to face: "Rape culture" is "Alcohol culture."

The dark fireballs are actually reasonable, since the heat forms an envelope of brown nitric oxide that you can see in many real films. But I'm puzzled as to why they look like they're illuminated from behind. Give the movie the credit for realizing there are TWO Kansas Cities.

Americans are geniuses at denying the reality of hidden costs. There's a joke about a guy who sat down in an elegant restaurant, ordered a cup of coffee and was shocked at the bill. The manager explained that it was very expensive to run a restaurant with the fine atmosphere of his restaurant. The customer said "I'll…

That, plus they know that they'll be next once you've taxed the rich.

Over my strenuous warnings, one of my sisters once got a pet raccoon. It had not really been socialized so it wasn't very cuddly. But when stressed, it headed to the top of the tallest thing around, which was usually me. You have not lived until you've had a raccoon climb sunburned bare legs.

Old Army story about a recruit named B. N. Jones. He explained to the recruiter that he only had initials. So the recruiter wrote "B(only) N(only) Jones." And at the first roll call, the drill sergrant called "Bonly Nonly Jones."

My middle initial is unusual: "I." I rarely use it because it looks pretentious and sounds odd.

For scientifically literate people, these are superfluous explanations. For the vast majority of Americans they are probably still too advanced.

Well, if any lake could have sharks, it would be Ontario. It would have been easier during the Pleistocene, when ice depressed the crust and the sea invaded Lake Champlain. Lake Ontario was near sea level (now it's 243 feet above) but probably remained fresh because any sea water got flushed out by water coming down…