I can add to what the other responses have suggested by saying that Solaris is one of Lem's harder books to comprehend. And it very well may be that the translation is a major culprit in that, since it doesn't have at all the same voice that the other English-language translations of Lem's works have. So I'll be…

I thought your comment was unnecessarily diplomatic. IMO, anything by Lem is better than anything by almost every English-language science fiction author. The main distinction I would propose is by pointing to the relationship between American science fiction and pulp adventure stories. A lot of classic science…

You should get a trademark on that sentence.

I thought she looked familiar as well, but I've never heard of her. Her name is Jennymarie Jemison, listed in the credits. Apparently, she is an actress in Austin, Texas.

Angsty teen drama in the 'Verse! "I love Mal, I love the way he leans...."

I register that as "on topic."

I haven't seen the movie for a while either, but I seem to recall one shot in which it is implied that Thade is sitting in the space station, scheming something sinister but non-specific. I remember thinking that something about that scene bothered me, because it didn't seem to go anywhere. I would have to re-watch…

If someone made My So-Called Firefly, it would be doubly effective.

You should pay him a visit and give him a copy of Clan of the Cave Bear.

Now that we know about breeding among different lines of hominids, there's no reason to characterize the disappearance of Neanderthals as an extinction event, any more than the disappearance of the Mayans was an extinction event. Interbreeding hominids are significantly more related than currently existing species of…

I'm going to say: time travel. Or the appearance of time travel. Like, a parlor trick.

That would throw off ALL astrophysics.

Your explanation is really impressive. I might have to watch that movie again; I always kind of liked how it was different from the original movie series but never spent any effort trying to figure it out. Normally, plot inconsistencies about time and dimensional travel really bother me, but intuitively Burton's…

It's best to look at The Undiscovered Country as an optimistic allegory about the end of the Cold War. Evidently Leonard Nimoy suggested the idea of a Star Trek movie that would portray what would happen "if the wall came down in space." The explosion of the Klingon moon mirrors the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. And…

Yes, I was thinking about that element after writing the comment.

The BBC article is far from clear about what an alternative hypothesis would have been. But what I gather to be the main aspects of the report that are exciting have to do with the high temporal resolution of the data the fEITER technique generates. fMRI doesn't generate a picture of functional activity at anywhere…

There are so many ways to criticize this study that it hardly seems worthwhile to start. But, I'll set up this concept for comparison: a study demonstrates that high school seniors can only differentiate photographs of planets and electron micrographs of micro-organisms 72% of the time. Hence, there is very little…

There isn't a lot out there ob fEITER, except that it uses a 32-electrode array, that an electrical signal is generated between two electrodes, and that the resulting spread of the signal is used to generate a cross-sectional image. I presume the ability to generate the image is derived from relatively high-frequency…

Well, apparently being half-susceptible to being motivated by the fear of being tied to a tree and beaten is hardwired, in the sense that no government authority is required. If government authority is applied, the rate of success presumably goes way up from 50%.

I only know of one instance where Levi-Strauss discusses written language to any great extent. He makes an argument (based in large part on anecdotal evidence from some of his own field experience) that the primary function of writing is in pressing other people into slavery. He had an experience where a member of a…