Unless you’re taking on mid-flight hitchhikers, that is.

What about the possibility that civilizations exhaust their planetary reserves of energy before developing sufficiently advanced technology to leave their homeworld in great numbers? Or is that just a variant on an already-advanced argument?

How many apps did the iPad have when it launched in 2010? What's Microsoft's excuse for not learning from that example?

There's a lot of that in Ann Arbor as well. I sometimes wonder if the collective intelligence of the resident corvids is higher than that of the undergraduates.

Ah, but a centiliter is only about a third of a fluid ounce, so you could BOTH be correct!

In part, though, that's her point: the clinical data about the physiology of orgasm tell you as little about the *experience* and its *meaning* as the various studies on the neurophysiology of religious experiences tell you about the inner states of the people undergoing the experiences and their significance. There…

This is the kind of thing a president might actually produce with two seconds of preparation in the middle of an existential crisis affecting all of humanity. I think we can cut him a little slack on that basis.

Ah, here it is: *Human and divine: an introduction to the philosophy of religious experience* by Gwen Griffith Dickson (Duckworth, 2000). Check your local library; an interlibrary loan might be necessary. There's no version on Google Books.

If you've never had an orgasm, are you justified in claiming that they don't exist?

Reducing visual pollution from wind farms?

Have you only had it steamed/boiled? I recommend pretty much the same cooking procedure for any non-root vegetable: chop into bite-sized pieces and stir-fry with olive oil, a little salt, a little garlic.

In Q3 2012, Apple's iTunes revenue was a single-digit percentage of their total: $1.8 billion out of $35 billion. Apple earns the bulk of its revenue from hardware sales; content is really just a sideline from a financial perspective.

Point taken, but South Asian != East Asian, which is canonically the Mandarin's background.

For more on that particular issue: http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1510426.html

The whole Cap tattoo thing: is the Mandarin really Bucky Barnes, magically preserved and ready to take his revenge, or something? That would go some distance toward explaining why it's Kingsley instead of, y'know, an Asian actor....

At least one more, Mr. Turtle.

There's a chant involved; she just doesn't lead with that. (And how sad is it that I remember that without having to refer back to footage?)

ALL THE FACEPALMS. SO MANY FACEPALMS.

"Nice to have you in town, Tonto!" I spent hours glued to my dad's collection of Cosby LPs as a kid. Used to drive my junior-high friends batty by reciting them in the cafeteria.

I would really like to like this. I think that Carey has written some of the more interesting fantasy I've read in the past decade or so. The Sundering books took a nuanced approach to the politics and ethical dilemmas of epic fantasy that never devolved into "Mordor good, imperialist West bad" parodic inversion. …