The Gall-Peters projection is a pretentious POS. There are a huge number of equal-area projections that shown continents in their true relative sizes without the absurd north-south stretching of the Gall-Peters. And Peters himself refused to admit that he had merely rediscovered a projection actually invented by Gall.

Millennia-long? Colonial presence in Africa was mostly trading posts in 1800, and almost all of Africa was independent by 1970.

1. The time-lapse nature stuff with the camera on a dolly is getting old.

I don't believe it. Water waves, which ARE two-dimensional, attenuate with distance. The circumference of the wave increases with distance, so the amplitude of the wave must decrease. Either that or the wave continually adds new material from somewhere.

I find it fascinating that green plants reject the most abundant wavelengths in sunlight and absorb the ends of the spectrum where the amount of incoming radiation is much less. I've never heard a really good explanation for it. Two theories I have heard:

"If you transported a load of 16th century peasants to an Occupy Wall Street rally, there would be a lot of toothless, plague-ridden giggling."

Remember Monty Python's flying sheep? "You will obsairve they do not so much fly, as ploomet."

I seriously doubt there's a re-entry phase for such short-range rockets.

"Great and unnecessary expense." You're telling me they don't already have a complete digital mockup of Kings Landing?

Since I remember Sputnik I, this is unusual only because we've forgotten how common it used to be. The Air Force Discoverer series, the prototype spy satellites that have been given credit for keeping the lid on the Cold War, had thirteen successive failures before they finally got it right. "Getting it right" turned…

The cure for that is hire a high school kid who knows BASIC to fix it.

Real incident: I'm driving to work and someone comes up the exit ramp. I called 911 and got "What color was the car?"

Get yourself some sheet metal and make a big array of corner reflectors. Anything entering a corner reflector exits along exactly the same path. Cheap crude ones are used in bicycle reflectors and expensive ones are used in, for example, the laser reflectors on the moon. I'd bet that getting much of its energy…

My mother, who had a weird sense of humor, once served GREEN spaghetti on St. Patrick's Day. Not health food spinach pasta green, bright Kelly green. Looked really festive with red tomato sauce. Also green milk. My siblings took one look and bolted. I said "meh, it's just food coloring." Later that evening, my toes…

Austin is one of the few creationists who try to play by the rules of mainstream science. A sudden debris flow is consistent with a flood, but with other origins as well. In any case, limestones that are involved in mudflows tend to be breccias of partly-lithified sediment and mud. But if cephalopod shells were…

No, the "drive-by" model was the Tidal Hypothesis. The Planetismal Hypothesis was the idea that the planets were built from the accretion of small grains, which were the planetismals. We now recognize that the later stages of accretion are extremely violent, involving planetary scale collisions, but the initial phases…

I like the way he gave the comet a bluish cast and reduced the contrast to simulate daylight illumination at a distance. This is the first object in fifty years of space exploration that actually has the jagged appearance special effects artists like so much.

That's what Tyson said in the Cosmos re-boot, and I've found other sources that say so, but I'm skeptical because too high oxygen content would make things wildly combustible. I read somewhere that 25% or so would allow even wet biomass to burn, but I can't find an on-line reference. I suspect at 30% any lightning…

Because it is SO useful to drive across the U.S. and have no idea what state comes next. Or hear that we're sending troops to Carjackistan and have no idea where it is.

Why does Chekhov say "wessel?" "V" is a common sound in Russian and lost of common words begin with it. It is perfectly possible (vozmozhno) for a Russian to pronounce an initial "v."