I was kind of hoping that the big twist was that the mopey teen boy is actually a serial killer who stores his dad's remains in the basement, and takes out the bully by infecting the hamster with the Black Death, and allowing the rodent to bite the bully (or maybe let the fleas jump on him? hmm…)

The problem is that at age 5 you can't know what it is you don't know — heck, that's true of anyone. If you want to be a scientist for instance, you have to know calculus exists before you can learn it.

Leaving aside musical genres for he moment, I was just noting that in a strictly mathematical sense there is only a finite number of note combinations, and that number can be calculated. Which means that in principle you'd use them all up at some point.

Actuallly, strictly speaking, while it's true that I can combine any sequnce of say, six notes on a piano (there being 88 of them) in billions of ways (464,404,086,784 to be exact) only very specific combinations sound melodic to the ear. So yeah, that cuts down your ability to come up with anything "original"…

Re: Starfire. Anything would be better than the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue soft-porn version.

Nobody said it was a crime either. The problem is when such works buy into retrograde ideas and by their very nature as mass media have a megaphone.

I'll take "excluded middle" for $300, Alex.

That whole thing kind'a misses the point. Nobody serious suggests violent movies or video games have some kind of one to one relationship with violent acts. But we do suggest that when certain tropes and narratives become ubiquitous (and largely that's because the producers want a buck and aren't going to go out on a…

It hurts people in the way that a movie like "Birth of a Nation" with it's racist tropes, or for a more modern example, th stupid Asian accent played for laughs hurts people. It's insulting.

300 might qualify.

There is a huge, honking, blue-whale-sized difference between what you are taking about and rape, and women can be into all kinds of things and it says NOTHING about either one.

This isn't quite the case. Without getting too far into the math, think of it like this: the gravitational pull of a piece of a sphere of material on you if you are inside disproportional to the mass and how far away you are, right? So let's say you consider a chunk of the sphere as pulling on you. Say it's 5 feet…

Actually no, it wouldn't. The major planets don't really affect each other's orbits all that much. They DO affect the orbits of comets and asteroids (which are a lot less massive) and fling them around all over the place, usually out to interstellar space. And Jupiter is one reason that the asteroid belt exists at…

For those that are into the, I actually wrote a blog post as to why a Dyson sphere is not possible (or at least a lot harder to see then you might think).

One of the better treatments of this idea was Pastwatch by none other than Orson Scott Card. (Before he went off the deep end he was a borderline humanist).

Well, he toned down the racist caricature. That put it up a notch for me, but it's a low bar.

The prequels demonstrated that Lucas needs limitations to make good movies. Give him an unlimited budget and his worst instincts take over. Tell him "Do this on $5 million" and he can crank out something good. Star Wars is a good example of this. He had a limited amount of money and time, and actors who were willing…

That's just it though; the genre has come a long way since the days of Asimov (who basically wrote mysteries in sci fi drag a lot) and Heinlein (who couldn't create a convincing female character, like, ever) or Arthur C. Clarke. Alan Steele is a good example of hard SF that character wise works. So is William Barton.…

I haven't seen much of this — I occasionally catch bits and pieces on cable, but…

Yeah but she and Gisele, Alessandra Ambroso, Ana Beatriz Barros, Fernanda Taveras — look at them. See anyone of visibly African descent? No. They all still fall into visibly "white" beauty standards. Christ, most even dye their hair to be blond-ish.