Asphyxiation is quick, though. I can live with asphyxiation. (Ha! I guess I actually can't, but . . . y'know.)

Since reading this last night, my thoughts have frequently returned to the practice of "pulling the plug" on persistent vegetative state patients, which often means pulling the feeding tube and letting them dehydrate/starve to death over a span of days or weeks.

There's a lot of hostility here directed towards ideas that aren't in this article (or the linked writing) at all!

I laugh EVERY time I see a picture of the Alfa canine. Including this time.

1) Great movies

You want a *real* Star Trek villain, have him play Brannon Braga.

"matching bawdy vandalism from First Century Pompeii with its thematic ancestors in Sixties Los Angeles."

I suspect that the *real* question asked by many surveys is "how good is the survey-taker at communicating clearly with a large and diverse group of people?"

Would it be any different if the Enterprise instead beamed the house around the vampire?

There's a difference between traveling through time and teleporting through time. You're traveling through time right now, and you have absolutely no problem staying firmly attached to the Earth's surface, even though the Earth is not only traveling very fast but also accelerating quite a bit. To travel forward…

"No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other." - Jascha Heifetz

"Enough food to keep the chicks alive and growing" is not the same as "enough food to let the chicks develop as fast as possible". Fewer siblings means the remaining chick or chicks get more food each, and can strengthen their flight muscles faster. Having more skinny drowned chicks is not as good as having fewer…

This was a lot funnier when the image was visible.

Let's not forget that in the early 1850s there were as many as 23 "planets" in our solar system. Before the 19th century, at least 12 more celestial bodies had been labeled "planet", only to have their titles subsequently revoked by later generations.

Maybe it's because Jurassic Park was and is the greatest movie ever made!

Looks like this is the very first "featured comment" . . . props to corpore-metal!

Wait, then the Jetsons has already been contradicted by events, too. It takes place in the 1980s.

Cum ebullire, ergo propter ebullire.

From the looks of it, the surveyor had a broad enough definition of "violence" ("have carried a knife in the past year", for example) that it would be pretty clear to anybody whether or not you lined up with his definition.