If you're going to spoil the death of a major character in that series, for god's sake put it in a reply! Seriously, putting 'SPOILERS BELOW' or something when you can see the spoiler clear as day whilst still looking at the bloody 'SPOILERS BELOW' is not helpful at all.

Why would he want to put himself out of a job?

"I like how you think of Christopher Columbus as a "good guy" ;p."

"They've never done anything quite as drastic as killing Washington would be in these stories, and they wouldn't. They twist historical events to fit the narrative, much like other popular culture stories have done (Da Vinci Code immediately springs to mind), but they're not going to suddenly have aliens invade…

"Julius Caesar is a villain now? Hmmm, I don't know if I agree, although I suppose that's just subjective interpretation. "

Oh, I wasn't suggesting that it be a part of the plot, just as a convenient example as to how certain quarters would view the game if it depicted their chosen political idols as villains or as anything less than the image they want to see.

"Weren't the Founding Fathers revealed to be Templars in AC 2? I could have sworn they were."

'Following the history books'? This is a universe where Julius Caesar was a member of an ancient cabal of villains that seek to exploit alien technology For The Evulz, after all. Historical accuracy plays second to the plot of the games.

Should we seek to minimize *unnecessary* pain and/or suffering? Absolutely. That's been one of the goals of medicine since day one, after all. But pain in and of itself is as much part of our sensory experience as eyesight or smell, and losing it, in my mind, would very much be a detriment to the human experience.

"The answer, say two biologists, may actually have to do with their intended function. "

I like to think that the circumstances around the development of evolution made the timescale of its broad acceptance what it was. The rate of information transfer between academia and the general public was much, much slower than it is today, and people simply weren't educated enough in broad swathes of the 1859-2012…

"Right, but don't you think that there will always be the "why" question? Most truths of this nature come from a place of Assumption+Data=Truth. But people will always question the assumption part, and place God in the gap. "

@VitorRufino: I'm terribly sorry, but could you translate that into English please? It seems you've put a lot of effort into writing this out, but I'm afraid the process of feeding it into Google Translate will strip out a lot of the nuance out of it, if not make it unintelligible entirely, which would, of course,…

@Matt McC: True. Though, in my mind, science doesn't necessarily have to be limitless to disprove any particularly cohesive meanings of 'God', it just has to get far enough so as to make the existence of God or gods a matter of philosophy and, in effect, personal preference alone - making the notion of the empirical…

w/ regards to the question 'Is there a God?', while we may not be able to empirically disprove all definitions of said deity, we can disprove entire classes of definitions, including most of the active deities (ie Old Testament Yahweh, Zeus, Ra, etc), since, by definition, they *do* make testable predictions about…

As mentioned below (Or above? Sideways maybe? Oh god, I don't even know with Kinja anymore), it's a quote from the Scott Pilgrim movie/comic book.

Err, no, the blog actually agree with what I said; mice are indeed good models, but they're not *perfect* models for human biology - no one organism is. They're a stepping stone to more detailed research, and scientists have to (And broadly do) keep in mind their limitations.

"Rats are simpler organisms than humans, so hypothetical carcinogen effects of GM food may be less severe in humans."

Why would they get killed or be in hiding, though? One would think that they (Presumably engineers and such?) would be one of the most important, well-protected classes of people on the planet, given that they're the only ones that can build said technology. Same with the doctors, nurses, other educated professionals…

Right, I think I remember reading about this in class (Either that or it was in the 'This Week in Microbiology' podcast I listen to); people generally just get flu-like symptoms (fever, lethargy, aches and pains, etc) early in the infection, and most disregard it as a normal 'flu' and carry on. Then, of course, when…