As a dad who is soon to take the plunge and buy a gaming platform to share with his first-grader, I'm grateful for this. I hope there's a guy like you at my local gaming shop.

Yeah. Gates Macfadden was so severely underrated, back in the day.

Actually, it's not Genesis. (That idea would depend on an understanding of how gravity works which was not available to premodern people). I believe that the classic prooftext is Joshua 10:12-13, which says that, during a ferocious battle, the sun and moon stood still.

A third? I'd say Volstagg makes up at least half of the Wareiors Three ...

I hear you. I am a member of the clergy, and — like so many of us — am fascinated by science. My seminary classmates included, among many others, a couple of chemists and a rocket scientist.

Amazing article. But now I'm thinking just how frightened I would be to ride the roller coaster at a Chinese amusement park. May be we can guess why that one never got built, huh?

I came here to say this. The Harappan symbols — if that's what they really are — are a seemingly insuluble mystery. This is a shame, because if we could make sense of them, they'd be a guide to the earliest civilization of Indus Valley.

Could you or I survive the Heat Death of the universe? Nope.

Other commenters have suggested the same thing. I'm not comfortable with it, because details are what make science work. If a model doesn't account for the observed details, it is — by definition — an inadequate model.

Of course, "inadequate" isn't quite the same as "false," but it gets close enough that I don't…

TheSnedders is onto something important: any generalization that requires a big "except for" clause is suspicious. This one, in particular, needs a grain of salt the size of a boulder.

That said, there are certainly some genres that Hollywood has figured out how to make money on, and some that it hasn't. Along…

Beat me to it. You know this is coming.

Jack Reacher.

"Adventuress" doesn't mean what you think it means. Just so you know.

Same for More's "Utopia," as I recall. Not to mention the Houynhyms. And most of the rest of them, except the ones from children's cartoons. May as well add "Brave New World" and "1984" to your list of dystopic Utopias.

As somebody who performs a fair number of funerals and weddings, I can say that both of these are messed-up industries. Their whole game is to extract money out of emotionally-vulnerable people by creating "needs" that don't really exist. Floor runners at weddings are the most egregious, but I expect that embalming…

"Atomic batteries to power ..."

Guy fell into a coma, eh? This is why I prefer surgeons who don't use heroin ...

I never made this connection before, but you could write a story where somebody used transporters the way Richard Burton uses reincarnation in Riverworld — as a sort of "fast exploration by repeated suicide" gimmick. I'm not sure how you'd make that idea interesting, so it's free to a good home.