In other news, lawyers acting on behalf of Monsanto filed suit on Tuesday against "the environment" for illegally appropriating and reproducing patented Monsanto technology.

Am I the only one here who thinks that Gauge Boson would make an awesome name for the hard-bitten, strong-jawed hero of a pulp novel?

I didn't really buy the "aliens want our water" theory in 'V', and I'm not sure I buy it here. I would think that a space-faring race would be able to get all the water they want from icy comets without messing with an inhabited planet full of cranky primates. But perhaps it's more convenient to have all your water in…

So, the universe manipulates probability to reduce the likelihood of time-travel paradoxes? I'd think that ensuring that closed timelike curves could only be found in the heart of black holes would be a pretty good way of reducing the probability that any uppity primates could go and violate causality by murdering…

@Dr Emilio Lizardo: "And all the world over, each nation's the same. They've simply no notion of 'Playing the Game'. They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won - and they practice beforehand, which ruins the fun!" ["A Song of Patriotic Prejudice", Michael Flanders & Donald Swann]

The popular wisdom is that Scott doomed himself and his colleagues by bad planning. He certainly seems to have ignored good advice from people who knew more about polar travel than he did. On the other hand, it seems that he may also have had bad luck, in the form of unusually bad weather conditions.

@Dr Emilio Lizardo: the only book that I'm aware of called "The Worst Journey in the World" isn't about Shackleton's expedition. It's an account of the Scott expedition, written by one of the survivors, a young explorer who remained at the base camp and didn't take part in the trip to the Pole.

What's with the ENORMOUS guns in that first screen shot? Who is overcompensating for what?

@lordkyellan: It looks a little like Chenonceaux, in some respects. Although it also looks like an image that I once did, which I always thought looked like Mickey's Castle at Disneyworld. :-)

Great Scott! If that's true, we should be able to reverse the effects of global warming by a vast, ambitious mammoth-breeding program using genetic material recovered from frozen carcasses! Meet me by the gene splicer and let's get busy - there's no time to waste!

"Evidence of life ... keeps piling up". Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "Evidence of _the potential for_ life ..."? As far as I know, there aren't yet any indicators that point to the presence of life on Titan. While I'm a strong believer in the idea that 'Life will find a way', I don't think it's inevitable…

Do you define war by the means or by the ends? If it only counts as 'war' when each side fields massive armies, then what chimps do isn't war. But it's been well documented that groups of chimpanzees may systematically eliminate neighboring groups, killing some members and scattering the survivors. It tends to take…

But we can still have floating cloud cities, giant planet-smashing battle stations, pompous space monks who throw things about by the power of their minds, asteroid-dwelling space worms and ponderous troop-carrying robot camels, right? Right?

Aren't you a little blue for a stormtrooper?

@J_Frank_Parnell: AGW only needs to start the ball rolling. If any kind of positive feedback loop then kicks in ... caused by, say, methane clathrates melting and releasing methane - another greenhouse gas - or increased water vapor in the atmosphere as a result of warming ... then you could end up in a much worse…

PGP Corporation has notified users of their PGP Desktop 9 that it is incompatible with Snow Leopard. Their recommendation: wait for version 10.0, coming sometime in the future.

I don't know if it will work for Gmail - it depends what representation of the message it searches - but I'm able to filter a lot of foreign spam by looking for the character set specifiers. In Eudora, I use rules that look for: