By all accounts, Mieville's novels should be right up my alley, yet I gave up 80% through Perdido Street Station and could not bring myself to go back. I really enjoyed his writing and his world, but the plot seemed too thin for my liking. Should I keep reading, or is the plot playing second fiddle to the amazing…

Imagine it's the early 1980s and you've got a couple in their late 30s or early 40s, with kids in their early teens. The parents are strongly religious, not too well educated, and easily swayed by emotional appeals to their fears. Fast forward 30 years. Those parents are now in their late 60s or early 70s, watch…

There are a lot of religious people in America for whom demons are very real, and so they get freaked out by any media that mentions of depicts them. I've known D&D players that were uncomfortable roleplaying characters that worshiped other gods, because they thought that their God would take offense. When you're…

Environmental advocates who are anti-nuclear power get chewed out by me, if I have the time to chew them out.

If a theory that posits the existence of other universes lets us make meaningful, testable predictions about the behavior of our own universe, we don't need to get to them to have the theory be valuable.

It's funny, because I'm usually super disdainful of the gaming "community" (in quotes because it's based in hyperbole and stereotype and trolls in threads), as the idea of gamers as selfish consumers and whiny entitled people is the common image.

I agree with George Carlin. We should reclaim golf courses and build housing for the homeless there.

Well the Venn diagram of "rich white guys who run the government" and "guys who golf" is a circle, so there you go.

No kidding. Let's use up acres and acres of land for an exclusive group of people to walk around an unsustainable landscape so that they can hit a ball around.

Which leads to an interesting question: in the increasingly dry region, currently suffering from a major drought, should golf courses regulate the types of clubs that can be used?

The controversial Doctor Who. Dang time traveler interfering with our experiments.

I like to simplify to:

I think you mean The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray et. al.

You're right on all accounts, and I apologize for bringing this up in this article. Cooler heads should have prevailed.

word.

All that 'viral' marketing (trailers of trailers, TED promo, websites), rich story background, great cast and director, great cinematography. Meh end result with 'scientists' doing not so scientific things.

Hey, phrenology is a wholly respectable field of expertise, provided your end-goal is to design a better hat. It was when people tried to conflate it with neuroscience and point to it as evidence of European superiority that it ran into problems of legitimacy.

Paragraph one: intriguing! Paragraph two: interesting! Paragraph three: morbid! Final sentence: dickhead!

Cool. Fun Fact: The south "pole" pictured is not the actual, geographic pole. It's a ceremonial pole for photo ops, conveniently placed near the toasty habitat. The actual pole is some distance away, and they move the marker all the time as the ice sheet slides around over the land underneath.

That's what happens when you do World Record Cliff Jumps with a rope. Eventually that rope is going to fail.