Point taken, D'oh!

Maybe unpopular opinion/ unusual reaction. But the scene with Gregor Sandor Clegane burying the dead man and his daughter nearly brought me to tears.

It's ok quantum is a bit weird and conterintuitive.

To use your letter analogy, it would be as though you couldn't know what the letter would say until you looked at it — and then the letter on the other end says the same thing (or I guess if you want to be accurate, insofar as an analogy can be, it would be a kind of mirror image). But since you can't know the…

Not to be That Guy but…

I remember seeing that scene with the guy lobotomized and that was the single scariest point in the movie, for <10 y.o me (I saw it on TV).

I must say I don't know that the showrunners and writers thought that through this deeply — i hope so. (TIL about 19th century dress custom!)

I'm sort of curious, seeing that a few people have met other people on dating apps, which post-date me.

Well, algorithms can "lie" in the sense that they aren't unbiased. It all depends on what you design your algorithm to do. The issue with modern streaming services is that algorithmic criteria will be different from human criteria and probably be geared to maximizing revenue, which a) may or may not mean much to the…

This might surprise people, but there's a great piece here on the relative diversity of music over time.

hm. I had a lot of Piers Anthony Xanth books and he was always sort of coy about sex (though re-reading some of it now, his take on women generally is pretty dire).

I didn't see Hardy as a natural asshole, really. Just a guy who couldn't connect with other people in a constructive way, after dealing with several traumas and realizing he wasn't the man he thought he was. And now he just lashes out at everyone and everything around him because the job - being decent at it - was all…

Isn't that his native accent as well? (He's Scottish, right?)

You bring up something interesting that this show — and others like it — touch on. The issue for many lefty people (myself included) with genetic engineering isn't the "designer babies" thing and competition per se, it's that one's genetic heritage might be a shorthand for discrimination. That's already the case, with…

What always interested me was that the Mongols — and perhaps this reflects Chinggis Khan's origins — were relatively egalitarian, and that was part of the reason they well in battle. Simply put, they didn't do as much hereditary succession for military rank; unlike Europeans (or for that matter a lot of surrounding…

I have to agree with @megarajusticemachine:disqus — I saw The Black Hole and I remember it, and I was thinking of that movie when I saw the body-horror they were introducing. In The Black Hole the evil Reinhardt (who has taken over the long-lost ship near the titular black hole) has lobotomized the crew. (Though it's…

Well, the relative days would be at the end that's closer — that is, time slows down the closer you are to a black hole. (Or deeper in any gravity field, really). That said, if you wanted to never be detected you'd just set up whatever you were doing inside the radius where the speed of a "stable" orbit is that of…

Science nerd here.

In 2,000 comments I am sure someone has brought this up but as a Cold War kid who was a teen in the 80s I'd put (along with Mexican Radio, and yes, my Sharona) 99 Luftballons is a favorite. Especially given how high anxiety levels were circa 1983-4.

Wait what? (I admit I should check if I ripped it from a CD but I could swear I downloaded it years ago — maybe the rights changed? )