Thanks - I definitely didn't properly remember or understand the DNA recombination aspect; I was thinking it was potentially possible, if unlikely, to have, say, a Chinese great-grandparent but carry no East Asian DNA. (JUST LIKE EMMA STONE.)

(1) As Motard indicates, the genetic science is very real. The applications to which you refer are, as far as I can tell, bullshit. The stuff about identifying your ancestral haplogroups is real and corresponds to stuff you can look at on interesting maps that chart human spread and diversification. But you're not a…

Which is part of why the "just asking questions" / "can't we have a reasonable debate free from emotion and invective" types, where the subject up for question and debate is "other people's humanity", make me see red.

You mean the Hitler Youth haircut.

Yup.

This one weird Legend of Zelda trick will help you date Natalie Dormer!

The secret is: someone else has already written all the words for him to say! He doesn't have to think them up on his own at all. Then, when they call "action", he just pretends to be a wizard! That's his process.

Well, the Sparrow movement gets to be as big or small in the show as the writers want it to be. I don't think the Sparrow movement in the books could be snuffed out by the destruction of the Sept, which by itself would also be an outrage. There's a history of peasant uprisings, both in the real world and in Martin's…

Except for the part where he tacitly cosigned (and came to regret) attempted CIA interventions into every country where they thought the merest glimmer of liberal democracy signified a Soviet plot.

Yeah, what somebody else dubbed (and I immediately stole the line) the "President of the Galactic Federation" look. After decades of being subjected to ludicrous scrutiny because of her wardrobe, Clinton landed on a look that, I hope, she enjoyed, that people mostly didn't comment on, and which also managed to…

I take it you've seen the full Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants?

My year listed AIDS and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome separately; perhaps the shorthand "C-section" is what properly dates to '73. The term "Caesarian" to describe the procedure has been around for centuries, I believe, and the procedure itself is ancient, though the mother living through it is a more recent…

My grandfather had his identity stolen around that time, started officially going by "Junior" even though strictly speaking he wasn't a Junior* to differentiate himself from the tanked credit history.

well, that sort of presumes we're in agreement that the first usage in an English language text is the first usage "in English". I guess I'm not up on the state of the linguistics profession's opinion on questions like when a foreign word becomes "part" of the language that borrowed it.

1982 and aside from the scientific/computing stuff holy shit, it's a smorgasboard of buzzwords for the modern condition:

I mean, when they decided it was time to wipe Stannis off the board they just had everything go to shit for him in, like, one episode.

I don't watch the show anymore, but I read somewhere it was the High Septon, and also, septons are the ones who do marriage anyway, not maesters.

Also if the implication is that in the early stages of a massive civil war the High Septon just fucked off from King's Landing for a few weeks at least to run way the hell south and do a secret annulment/marriage deal with massive implications for said civil war, head back to King's Landing, and never tell anybody…

Weiss and Benioff think that if the Queen murdered a thousand people, including some very popular political figures, AND ALSO THEIR EQUIVALENT OF THE FUCKING POPE, important not only for his office but because he personally was the leader of a massive popular religious movement, the smallfolk will basically shrug and…

I've also noticed that putting pressure on the area I just smacked into a table helps alleviate the localized pain, I just haven't worked up a pseudoscientific reason why the pressure needs to be created by the object that caused pain, and started charging people money for the revelation.