I had to go out in a blizzard once, in a regular car. As I turned onto one street, an idiot in an SUV with enough ground clearance for Frodo to walk under came up the beaten-down center of the street, meaning I had to drive through the deep snow to get around him.

Utopian is right. In one of the later series, there's a terrorist attack on Earth that kills a dozen people, and the reporters are saying it's the worst act of violence on earth in over 100 years.

"They could just as well have set it in an entirely fictional galaxy, and no one would have noticed."

Not only do I not GAF about the critics, IDGAF about Twitter. I don't have an account.

That wall is doing exactly what it's designed to do. Why have it a certain height if it can't hold water to the brim?

This is all great. A few more remarks:

#31. Is anyone really dumb enough to think that a pilot could open the window of a jet flying 500 mph and stick a camera out on a pole? Maybe we should make this the basis of a literacy test for voting.

No, you have NASA confused with our social programs. NASA said it would go to the moon, go to the outer planets, land on Mars, etc., and it did. Our social programs said they'd clean up the slums and end poverty, and....

The huge plus here is that the atmosphere is carbon dioxide (mol. wt. 44) meaning the ship could be filled with nitrogen (mol. wt. 29) at 1 atm. pressure and still have a LOT of buoyancy.

The earth's hydrogen leakage is minuscule. Saying we'd long ago have lost all our water without mantle outgassing is preposterous. Venus is rigid because it has no water, not the other way round.

The Empire can do whatever they like, but in Germany they obey the rules.

They're obviously posted to guard the sensitive materials inside.

May I see your license and proof of insurance?

September 7, 1970 should be remembered as a national day of shame. That was the day NASA announced the last three Apollo missions would be cut. All the people who asked "why aren't we spending all this money here on earth?" got their way. We "spent all that money here on earth." Anyone care to tell me what we got for…

Predatory publications exist because reputable authors can't get their manuscripts into already clogged journals and marginal authors want to pad their resumes. Wanna fix this?

Solid state display, no batteries, what's not to love?

Frequency doubling is also how green lasers work. The laser emits infrared then the IR passes through a crystal that doubles the frequency to green.

When we change the 100, set a time limit for the change and only allow a small amount, say $10,000 to be exchanged without explaining where the money came from. This idea has been around for a long time as a way of cutting the drug dealers off at the knees.

I peeled all the stickers off one Rubik's Cube. I call it Rubik's Cube for Idiots. I have never bothered to solve one (it's just a recipe) but I am fascinated by the variations possible because of the symmetry of different shapes. I have a collection of 3-D geometric puzzles.

Not even Shakespeare and Milton (John or Berle, or both) could fill all the broadcast hours available with quality work. My parents got their first TV in 1953, and the network (we had one channel) was so desperate for content it ran Industry on Parade film shorts.