Serious question: How do you getting a job writing only the titles to porn parody movies? Not the scripts, no "acting" or other involvement in production, just writing the titles.

I'm not sure I have too much to contribute book-wise – there are already a lot of excellent suggestions in this thread. But I would consider not limiting yourself to print media. TV shows like the Battlestar Galactica reboot, movies like Blade Runner, and video games like Mass Effect also have great sci-fi and space…

I was going to post the same thing. Used to be, only greedy assholes understood fast-paced securities trading. Now nobody understands it.

Just to reinforce what others have already posted:

Boom - perfect.

Yup

To be fair, while you can blame European colonialists for most of the decline of Mesoamerican and South American civilizations, there are a number of pre-European collapses that may have contributed to the "once great civilization" trope. The Maya are a notable example - their civilization collapsed between the 8th…

I read the headline and the first paragraph and I immediately thought of the argument in the second-to-last paragraph. These stories have absolutely been supplanted by post-apocalyptic narratives. It's got something to do with the Bomb, environmental awareness, and, more recently, economic instability. These days, we…

Really surprised more people haven't been saying this. 87% of the global population owns a cell phone, and the percentage is only going up.

I'm amazed that nobody has put in a vote for the airplane yet (if we're talking about the 20th century and not the last 100 years, that is). The impact on transportation, shipping, warfare, and research was tremendous. The ability to get across any ocean in a measure of hours rather than weeks changed millions of…

Great pick! There's a fascinating and tragic Radiolab segment about Fritz Haber, for anyone who wants more info: http://www.radiolab.org/story/180132-h…

Really good, really unexpected pick. I worked for an ocean freight company very briefly, and have had occasion to look up the history of shipping for various reasons. The difference in the way we transported goods in 1900 vs 2000 is astounding.

"We're on a mission from God."

Native Scandinavians tend to have pretty good Standard American English accents, in my experience. This makes sense on two counts: 1) American English and Scandinavian languages have a lot of common phonemes and 2) The English accent taught to American news broadcasters originated in the northern Midwest, an area…

And then there's the entrance to Robot Hell, which, as we all know, is in New Jersey.

I had a high school chemistry teacher who would pull the following trick: you'd come into class and there'd be a short candle burning on the lab table at the front of the room. Once everyone had taken their seats, the teacher would walk over to the lit candle, pop the entire thing in his mouth, and swallow it. It was,…

Most of us, I'm afraid:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the…

If Janelle Monae is in the Illuminati, I am now 100 percent okay with the Illuminati.

High art is preferable, but action and adventure is fine. I just have no interest in becoming emotionally invested in a narrative, only to see it driven off the rails because some company won't let well enough alone. I don't know why superhero comic fans put up with it. But your TV/movie analogy is reasonable - I'll…