There was some horrible cop movie called Lethal Instinct or some such thing (I've tried to find it on IMDB without success). It features an unstoppable sadistic killer who, at one point, infiltrates a police briefing. Even though he was way in the back, he stood out like OMG THEY'RE KIDDING! He had a bald wig on that…

Re the slap:

Not just the locomotive, but the half mile or so of stuff behind it.

Texting may be the salvation of English, as more and more people spel fonetikly. Poor Caxton introduced his printing press at exactly the worst time, as English was going through The Great Vowel Shift and losing the guttural "gh." Once upon a time, English "Light" and German "Licht" would have been very similar, as…

All it needs is "Free Candy" and Pedobear.

I hope he scrambled the prints, lest they turn up at crime scenes from here to Timbuktu.

Everyone loves to hate on "In the Year 2525" but the final verse captures this perfectly:

So do you think it's okay for the government to police whether or not you serve certain classes of people? Is it okay for them to require you to get a permit to modify your house? Is it okay for them to regulate how you sort your trash, or what kind of toilet you can buy, or what kind of light bulbs? Is it okay for…

C.S. Lewis once observed that, if you want to ask silly questions about what happens to mosquitoes in the hereafter, that one could very conveniently combine a hell for humans and a heaven for mosquitoes.

Every canal in California is teeming with Gambusia affinis, AKA "mosquitofish," introduced for the express purpose of eating mosquitoes. The difference between those and carp and tilapia is that mosquitofish are about an inch long and not commercially useful. So I doubt if mosquito control was the highest priority in…

Nobody likes a show-off.

A heliosynchronous orbit would match the Sun's rotation, taking about 28 days to orbit the Sun. That would be well inside the orbit of Mercury. I think you mean independent orbits around the Sun.

Every so often you steer a star of about 0.1 solar mass into the sun. But eventually the core gets massive enough that helium fuses to carbon and then heavier elements. Eventually the core accumulates iron, which is the bottom of the pit. It doesn't produce energy by fusion or fission. So it builds up. Eventually the…

In fifty years we have sent about 500 individuals into space, several thousand if you count individual trips. Even a space ship miles in diameter would be incredibly confining after a few years. And the $100 billion ISS is about as long as a football field. And if that toroidal space ship in the last picture is…

You, sir, win today's Internet.

First a correction. It isn't specifically water molecules, because microwaves aren't tuned to any specific frequency of water molecules. Microwave ovens use a portion of the spectrum that didn't have any other important uses. What really happens is that polar molecules oscillate in the alternating fields of the…

WWZ the novel doesn't even remotely try to play fair with the science. The zombies can stay alive for years without food, water or oxygen? What powers their metabolism? How can anything move in their body if their blood is gummy sludge? Nobody in any research lab has captured a few and done experiments on them? Nobody…

I'd put Enterprise and DS9 on the bottom. I like Scott Bakula, but never really took to his version. The opening graphics were nice, but the theme music utterly sucked.

There's also a parhelic circle extending right from the sun dog. Sun dogs are merely the brightest parts of the parhelic circle.

Even I was impressed at how precisely the stone tracked the line.