I liked Darth Maul better when he didn't talk so much. There's nothing like Lucas-style dialog to suck the interest out of a character.

For anyone currently wearing a tinfoil hat, the message is clear: time to upgrade to a complete tinfoil body-suit.

I could have watched the 'slow exploration of an overgrown city' part of that video (i.e. the first 30-45 seconds or so) all day. Once it turned into a bike chase, my interest faded a bit. Not because it wasn't beautifully executed, but because I've seen the motorbikes'n'missiles stuff before. The other stuff was more…

No official President Snow-approved white roses for Valentine's Day?

Some bearded fiddle-heavy folk act has just found their new band name.

"Foreclosure on Elm Street"

I remember seeing a T-shirt once that drew attention to the general V-shape of the continents and proposed the theory of 'Continental Drip'.

The dinosaurs in the banner picture look like they're having an awesome time.

So I should just start the Family Freedom Institute for Consumer Liberty, and then wait for the corporate dollars to roll in?

... And the mad scientist does it by building the Large Hadron Collider, because as everyone knows, when the LHC is switched on, the Earth will be blown apart/sucked into a black hole/eaten by a small dog. And the fact that the LHC has been switched on and the Earth is still here proves that we are in a privileged…

"Center for Consumer Freedom", huh? Am I right in thinking that the appearance of words such as 'Freedom' or 'Liberty' in an organization's name is now typically just shorthand for "Brace yourself, here comes the snow job"?

The seagulls thought they were so clever. And then this happened ... [www.livescience.com]

'Moving spaceward' is a nice idea, except that pretty much anywhere within our reach is a more hostile environment than even a ruined Earth would be.

For some reason, he makes me think of furniture. First company to bring an overstuffed leather Woola foot-stool to market wins.

I don't know about the merits of this particular theory but in general terms, it doesn't seem implausible that a traumatic event (such as getting smacked upside your collective head by an asteroid) might trigger die-offs in some species but not in others. There are critters alive today that are fairly clearly just…

There's a "Winter is coming" joke to be made there somewhere, but I think I'll leave it alone.

So how many parsecs is that?

"Extending my gloved left hands I verified the presence of invisible solid matter - or a tactile illusion of solid matter - ahead of me. Upon moving my hand I found that the barrier was of substantial extent, and of an almost glassy smoothness, with no evidence of the joining of separate blocks."

I remember reading "The Godwhale"; it struck me as fairly mainstream SF, but modestly inventive. (The one odd detail that sticks in my mind is that the protagonist, who has had both legs amputated in an accident, is referred to at one point as "the little hemi-human").

What is it with poets and AI/simulations? There's the John Keats 'cybrid' in Dan Simmons' "Hyperion", the Byron simulacrum in Amanda Prantera's "Conversations With Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship's Death", and now you tell me that poor Poe has been bundled up and injected into a supercomputer.…