Memory seems to be an early casualty of stressful situations. A few years ago, my girlfriend had her bag grabbed by the passenger on a motorcycle, fell and was dragged a short distance behind the bike. I chased after the bike and grabbed the passenger, at which point the driver opened the throttle and it was my turn…

Same thing with me. I was told to count '1 ... 2 ... 3 ...' and then look up to check that my chute was open. I got to '1 ...' and the chute was already open. No idea where the missing two seconds went.

I'm the same as you - right-handed, left-eye dominant - and I had the same experience shooting a rifle with iron sights. I infuriated my instructor by continually trying to shoot with what he considered "the wrong eye". I don't think it entirely explains why I can't shoot for shit, but it may be a factor.

"The single most unsurvivable injury that everyone agrees on is a shot to the head"

I recently read what I think may be one of the best defenses of "Alien 3" ... or at least an attempt to explain why, flawed as it was, it still contained important elements of the "Alien 3" that needed to be made. [www.barrettgarese.com]

What killed the dinosaurs? In a word, landing.

I was hoping that Gladiator Ariel's signature attack would be to bitch-slap you with her tail, but if I'm interpreting the images correctly, she has legs. Oh well.

Meanwhile, using material provided in the trailers, I have assembled a complete dubstep soundtrack double album, composed entirely of screams. I call it "Aaa-aah! Aaa-AAAAH! - The sounds of 'Prometheus'" and it's burning up the charts right now.

In a poorly-considered move, Bangladesh changes its name to Orissa, after the Indian state that gets all the disasters that can't be bothered to go all the way to Bangladesh. The situation fails to improve.

I've always thought that Bangladesh must be where disasters go on vacation. Tornadoes? Bangladesh. Catastrophic flooding? Bangladesh. Drought? Bangladesh. Ubiquitous arsenic-contaminated groundwater? Bangladesh. Cholera epidemics? Bangladesh. Famine, earthquakes, tsunamis, ferry sinkings, bus plunges - they're all…

I think if "pretty much zero warning" equates to 500-3000 years, you're really taking the long view here.

"There's another starting to come apart." said Miller. Danby swore, zoomed in on the dying cyborg. The scavenger's bell was beginning to disintegrate, the living tissue liquefying and draining out through tears in the electrostatically-reinforced plastic sac that held it. A long smear of organic matter trailed across…

I sincerely hope not. Because you just know that if anything happens to his wife, she's going to form the basis of his next 'art project', and I for one am _not_ ready to watch that video ...

My Dutch is shaky, but it seems that Orville did indeed die of natural causes. "It's my cat," says the artist ("It _was_ your cat," the interviewer corrects him), before going on to explain that he mourned him for a couple of days before thinking "And now, [I'll do] something fun" ("iets leuks"). He then kept the cat…

Websites should carry appropriate warnings above their comments section:

"Gack! Here be monsters! Back to Antares, warp factor 9!"

I can only conclude that they watched some of our TV programmes and they're now hiding from us.

Shoebills seem to be the closest we can come these days to the 'terror birds' of the Miocene. [en.wikipedia.org]

What's optimism? I once wrote an over-long rant inspired by, I think, a throwaway line in an io9 post about SF writer Peter Watts serving up "bracing doom and gloom". The essence of my rant was that while Watts was pessimistic about the future, he was optimistic about people and their capacity to act humanely towards…

"33" is excellent, and served the crucial function of providing a transition from the miniseries to the full-on series, a way of telling the audience "This is how it's going to be from now on". So you could be right that it was a game-changer. For sheer intensity, however, "Flesh and Bone" would get my vote.