For the same reason it bugs people (including me), that the "prime directive" in Star Trek gets violated all the time. Movies and TV are free to make whatever rules they like. But they have to stick to them.

And the novel is a lot more than just the Victorian-era love story plot, although maybe the movie simplifies it to just that, which would be unfortunate,

Didn't the films of Ed Wood kind of kick it off even earlier though?

I don't think Archer is in any way unfamiliar with porn, just the more obscure varieties. I mean even *I* hadn't heard of preggo-porn, although given rule 34, I suppose it had to exist.

"The Greatest Adventure…is what lies ahead…"

Yeah. It kind of really does matter. The whole reason why incest is such a taboo is the shared genes thing. Until recently it was pretty typical for husbands to be decades older than wives, and in a small village that kind of meant guys saw their future wives grow up while they were adults. While, if true, the…

Read The Gold Bug Variations. That was excellent. I'm not too thrilled about the rest of his output (although I think I gave up two or three books ago), but Gold Bug is awesome. It really makes you wish you were a molecular biologist when it was all starting in the 1950s.

It was the 1980s. And the Midwest. A time and place where not only fish, but chicken as well was often presented as a meatless option…

It sounds more like some kung-fu fans got their feelings hurt more than a serious rebuttal. The two main points that were made in the episode were 1) Qi doesn't exist and 2) Martial arts are impractical as serious self-defense tools. Those are pretty serious objections and are hard to argue with.

No, Perot didn't get elected because it became clear that he was a wacko. And I say this as someone who actually supported Perot early on in 1992.

Well Gorby, anyway. Putin wouldn't have come to power if Yeltsin hadn't let the country go to shit through massive corruption and mafiya appeasement.

I'm not saying Krugman is really the best example, but he knows more than economics and that's what makes him interesting. Ideally such people should be able to see the "big picture" rather than being narrow specialists. Of course the problem is that it is sometimes hard to distinguish people who see the big picture…

As C.P. Snow wrote in "The Two Cultures" fifty years ago, for some reason scientists were no longer considered "intellectuals" even then.

I think the main thing people have against it is Shia The Beef. He's basically the Jar-Jar of the series even though it was clear they were setting him up as Indy's successor for future movies (with Ford presumably taking on the Sean Connery supporting role)

Not purple — the zombie smurfs were black in Peyo's original. It was changed to purple in the US cartoon for obvious reasons. Another example (like the Dutch Zwarte Piet) of how either the US is too sensitive or Europe is frigging racist.

Penicillin is far from being universally effective against Earth bacteria. And I'm not just talking about evolved resistance. It only works if it can get access to the cell wall. And in a lot of bacteria the cell wall isn't accessible. The so-called Gram negative bacteria have an outer membrane blocking access, for…

Why? Do you not like Simon Pegg or something? I am honestly puzzled why Spaced would be hard to get into.

Yeah, a lot of people in the field defend Hauser because they really liked how his primate research supported their theories — unfortunately it looks like that was because he basically made up data to fit the theories.

Half of Ireland has close relatives in America — they must have realized this issue quickly or they would have gone bankrupt.

Sorry if someone has already said this (I can't navigate comments that well in the redesign), but there is an actual artificial language that uses icons similar to this — Blisssymbolics. The creator Charles Bliss was a bit of a nut job, but the language itself actually has been used to communicate with severely…