You must need to be very efficient, running Space Catholicism and all. Sounds like a lot of meetings and paperwork.

Wow, are all Harlequin Romance novels like this? I always imagined them as being more "Yes, Mr. Fabio clone, rip off my elaborate dress and ravish me with your obscure euphemism!!!" and and not so "Your faith in God dives me to invite you to the ice cream social, Miss Greene."

Umm, Ladybugs are predators, they don't eat pine trees. Bark beetles, on the other hand, are major pine tree pests.

That is so beautiful… sniff.

How do you know this?

I read somewhere that Frederique van der Wal has a graduate degree in biochemistry.

Ph.D.s have a tendency towards extreme specialization. I have a MS and a few BS degrees and generally have a much WIDER knowledge base than a typical Ph.D., but usually a less DEEP one as well. In general, my niche in science is translating between pure scientists and engineers.

Well there is the part where they dress her up like Lara Croft instead of having her dress like any scientist would when going to work in a weapons depot.

Buckaroo Banzai is a primitive monkey-boy.

Most of the people I work with are or were field scientists of one flavor or another. Most of them are comparatively fit and go in for outdoor sports, so most of them are reasonably attractive. A few (female and male) are smoking hot. Nearly all of them are interesting, fun to hang around with people. Very few are…

Me too!

I know a guy who did his Ph.D. in ecophisiology in 18 months. Managed to publish five papers in decent journals during the same time. This was during the time when universities started letting candidates bind a set of related papers together as a thesis instead of re-writing them into a single narrative.

"It's a really fun movie but the science is basically just there to move the plot along and help sell the implausible idea that …."
applies to nearly all "Science Fiction" movies and quite a few "Science Fiction" books.

Half-assed research. Crichton's idea of chaos theory is "chaos theory says all complex projects always fail" or "everything is unpredictable" which is complete bullshit.

Nobel, Gatling and Maxim all seriously underestimated the ability of rich and powerful old dudes to sleep well at night while sending young poor dudes off to get killed for fun and profit.

most tourists make the mistake of standing by the "Standing on the Corner" statue in the silly little "Standing on the Corner" park, while all of the girls with flatbed Fords are on the other side of town loading hay bales at the feed store.

actual snuff films?

A few weeks ago I was in the local used book / video store. While browsing the used DVDs, there were two fairly normal looking 20-something guys next to me discussing the "merits" of various torture porn titles in the horror section. The guys and their comments creeped me right the fuck out. Mainly their comments…

Please let them put it on the north coast.Lonely beaches, rain, fog..

Is it worse than Barstow?