Hallelujah! It's the Red-Winged Blackbird Rapture! The Blackbird God is calling home His own! (Apparently red-winged blackbirds and drum fish are actually the chosen species, notwithstanding anything any ape-descended humanoids may try to tell you to the contrary).

So the "Predator" movies are actually plausible: they don't want anything we have, and they don't have any reason to wipe us out wholesale, but they drop in from time to time because we're moderately fun to hunt. Humanity is basically just one big practice level for nerdy teenage aliens.

@vorlich: Much of Moorcock's most popular work was unashamed pulp: he's quite open about the fact that he was churning them out at high speed (I once heard someone ask him why he'd written a series of 'John Carter of Mars' stories. Without a second's hesitation, he answered: "Simple. I needed the money."). Their…

About eight million New Yorkers could answer "yes" to question 3: "someone comes up to you on the street, points at you, gibbers something inarticulate, and runs away". Does that mean we're the Chosen City?

I've already had a couple of pieces of spam sent to the address that was compromised via the Gawker exploit (I use disposable/tagged addresses for signups). However, they were both Nigerian 419 spams, and I don't think "Mrs Mariam Abacha" is frightened by the CAN-SPAM Act.

One thing that concerns me slightly about 'about.me' is that the OAuth authorizations it asks for seem to go beyond what I'd expect for a simple vanity page. For example, it asks you to allow it not just to fetch your Twitter feed, but to send tweets in your name as well; for Flickr, it wants you to authorize it not…

I wonder if you'd see similar results if you looked at rat populations, or other creatures that live in close proximity to us and benefit from our leftovers.

When our cat is exposed to a vacuum, she usually runs and hides under the sofa, but does not exhibit any other adverse effects.

@BobDeNatale: If alien planet movers are anything like terrestrial movers, our asteroid belt was probably formed when they dropped one and broke it.

Someone should make a movie about this just so they can call it "Arsenic and Old Lakes".

More and more I have the impression that the universe is continuously saying "So, you think _that's_ weird? Well, wait till you see _this_!"

Does this mean I can get hourly Farmville updates from all my friends in my email inbox as well? Sweet. Because that's what I've really been waiting for.

What this list illustrates is that Rowling consciously imitated a whole class of children's literature (a rather dated one: it always vaguely surprised me that children and adults across the world responded so positively to the hoary "jolly hockey sticks boarding school adventure" paradigm that, even in its heyday,…

Multiple paternity might be advantageous for small, isolated populations, because it would lead to greater genetic mixing than you'd get from single paternity. If you had a harmful trait linked to a recessive gene, multiple paternity might lead to it being expressed less often than single paternity.

The fact that my job doesn't offer me opportunities to put people in a noisy steel tube and scatter giant spiders on their feet in the name of science just convinces me more than ever that I chose the wrong career.

"But moving on, if you'd be kind enough to study my next slide ..."

It seems that for everyone who's had a bad experience with GoDaddy, there's someone else who swears by them. Personally, I've been pleased with them: for me, they've always been reliable and customer support has been helpful and efficient the few times I've needed them. That said, I don't care for their rather…

Her right leg appears to be somehow inside the guy's arm. Or perhaps she's had her leg amputated about mid-calf. Actually, now that I look more closely, it looks as if her right hand could also be grafted to his shoulder. My guess is that the picture shows some kind of teleportation accident, but I may be way off. I'm…

"Your Stubby-Fingered Sex Maniac Ancestors: a Discovery Channel special"

Two words: President Palin.