Oooh, VoIP and "virtual table-top" ... makes me wonder about getting the old gaming group back together, as we're all scattered across the planet now!

Aww, that brings back memories. I ran the whole Giants-Drow-Demonweb series twice, for two different groups, in 1E and 2E, and it was a blast.

The same Targaryen who mothered Daenerys? In that case Jon Snow's mother would be Rhaella, sister and wife of Aerys, and also mother of Rhaegar and Viserys. I think we can assume that's not the case!

That's simply not true. Neutrons are efficiently absorbed by air. An enhanced radiation weapon would not kill people beyond the range at which it would kill them anyway by heat and blast. Putting a higher proportion of the energy into the emission of high energy neutrons means that the device has a greater effect upon…

That's simply not true. Neutrons are efficiently absorbed by air. An enhanced radiation weapon would not kill people beyond the range at which it would kill them anyway by heat and blast. Putting a higher proportion of the energy into the emission of high energy neutrons means that the device has a greater effect upon…

"That's not quite the same as saying I have an equal chance of dieing in a plane crash vs an extinction event caused by an asteroid."

Yes, it's very unlikely a large impactor will hit within the lifetime of a given species (which is on the order of a few million years for a mammal, if memory serves).

"Others would deploy a radiation-intensive neutron bomb (the Cold War–era bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact)"

Well yes, but the largest airplane crashes kill a few hundred people, whereas a sufficiently large asteroid impact could kill every single person on Earth.

Very badly done, the moment leaped out at me. Obviously she doesn't make contact, and it really does look like she just flicks him with her hair.

Dark energy and dark matter are not things that one believes in, or that one does not believe in.

Dark energy: yes, the simplest model is that it's the energy density of the vacuum. One might think of this simply as a scalar field, so every cubic centimeter of vacuum has the same quantity of dark energy, but the effects only become significant over cosmological distances.

Well, you do have the problem of lifting the stuff out of Jupiter's gravity, and the delta-v requirements of moving it across the solar system. The justification for lunar helium mining is that the energy inherent in the helium-3 is very large compared to the energy required for baking it out of the regolith and…

"...from the guy who made Battle: Los Angeles..."

Helium from the solar wind is trapped in the lunar regolith, so in principle one could extract it.

Coincidence! I haven't heard anyone mention Wild Cards in years: but only yesterday, I pulled the first book of my shelf for the first time in living memory, and enjoyed a couple of stories.

What MrLebowski says, really. A low mass star will live ("stay on the main sequence") for a very, very long time.

Here's a wikipedia article on star metallicity, which provides quite a good summary.

Just as we seem to slowly heading towards a post-religious society, America seems to be turning into some ghastly theocracy. It was always extremely religious, and the extreme religious wing has been way past crazy for years, but the direction that country's going is really disturbing.

Hey, I've never even replied to any creationists. Although I do like yoghurt.