Do you like your doctors to have useable equipment and user interfaces? Art did that.

As much as I love science, I have to disagree that it can tell us "why" something is beautiful. The examples you site are more phenomological than causal - that is to say, dealing with the mechanism rather than the reason. Obviously humans like horizontal and vertical lines and complementary color pairings, and…

Yup! They recently demolished a whole block of pseudo-brutalist dorms at my alma master, built in the 70s specifically to be riot-proof. All the interior hallways were narrow enough to touch both walls and turned 90 degrees every few yards to prevent large groups of students from congregating inside.

I kind of hate these and love these at the same time?

I really like that distinction - "not joke funny, but people funny."

For anyone interested in getting deeper into the mechanics of tone, I highly recommend the "Managing Audience Expectations" on the excellent screenwriting blog Cockeyed Caravan:

Florida.

Yeah, one of the final scenes is literally a pod of beautiful tree octopi swinging through the trees.

Absolutely yes on Mantis Shrimp. They also have a superpowered vision system - 16-photoreceptor, independently-moving, trinocular eyes - that lets them see ultraviolet and circularly polarized light.

Does anyone remember that Discovery "documentary" from a few years back where they asked scientists to imagine potential future species, then did CG mockups of their behavior on future Earth? It ended with octopuses taking to the trees to become the forerunners of a race of intelligent cephalopods.

This assumes that all political/social positions are equal and equally valid. They are not.

This is very interesting. I read the article, and I've read other articles about the Ender's Game movie, and I've been pretty much content to say "Sometimes awful people make great art, and we just have to deal with that." I'm on board, to a fair degree, with the idea of "the death of the author". I don't feel that a…

Ugh, yeah. I'd forgotten about those guys. Gross.

I'm going to wait for adamantine. I like my metallurgy to be a little more... Fun.

It would be utterly fascinating if droves of right-wing fundamentalists turned out at theaters the way they did during the Chick-Fil-A boycott. Especially because I suspect there's substantial overlap between the religious homophobia crowd and the "sci-fi and fantasy promote satanism" crowd.

Am I a Luddite curmudgeon for really hating overtly "futuristic" clothing? Something like a classic ankle boot or a high-heeled laceup looks so much better to me than these crazy metal things. And I'll take a pair of Chucks over "high-tech" basketball shoes any day.

It was a serotonin deficiency, I believe. He'd been taking an anti-anxiety drug that elevated serotonin and stopped it cold turkey just before the murder, and restoring the drug regimen in prison apparently helped with the Huntington's symptoms.

This was the first thing that came to mind when I read this article. Ronson also did a pretty good radio version of the story for This American Life:

Weirdly enough, the coolest s-word is, in fact, "sword".

I'm rather fond of the root sword, myself: