Dont put human/cultural values over things that don't have/need them. Having them could had been an evolutionary advantage for us with big brains but for them, if it works, then is ok. Most animal species could consider us with a miserable existence being slaves of our culture, all the obstacles we put in front of…

Believing in small lies (Santa, Tooth fairy, easter bunny) as a child helps you to believe in the big lies (justice, good, honor, etc) as a grown up. Hogfather was a great book.

Regarding Benderama, i think that there was a Henry Kuttner tale about an ugly boy that ended having microscopic copies of himself, involving timetravel, superpowered hillbillies and granting wishes. Compared with that, the futurama episode looked not as crazy as it could had been.

We are too tied to names, including and specially regarding to colors. How many colors a child see in the rainbow? As much as main color names know.

We make stories, and repeat them in new ways. Our prediction of the future, unless comes from math, usually tries to put one of those stories in the present, watching only in the things that match and discarding what not, to see how things should come, or what we should do for the tale to continue for some path. We…

Could we physiologically have that perception, but culturally being unable to put it in context and discard it as noise?

I suppose that i should apply Hanlon's razor to that comment about meego and mango (guess which company OS runs the typical zombie computer in internet?) If well in the near future no other (ok, the N950 too, but that will be targeted for a limited set of developers) nokia meego phone will be delivered, don't mean…

Remember the patent apple filled about disabling camera if tried to be used at live concerts?[www.huffingtonpost.com]

How you define top/best/must read/etc in science fiction and fantasy? And what you expect to get from a poll where you ask to vote for your favorite book from a list? What if one is consistently second in every criteria for most?

Would be interesting also a serious study about the environmental damage caused by the bard's voice. It could even compete against Storm in weather controlling powers.

Why books? If well wasnt Fredric Brown, Dick had the biggest impact in shorter form stories. Would love to see (a good adaptation of) The Lethal Factor or Upon the dull Earth.

All the rats using it will have the generic name "Algernon". Uh, and, they accept flowers for the ones not surviving.

Maybe a better way to approach yerba mate is not as a tea, but as "mate" ( [en.wikipedia.org] ). Is a local drink in lots of countries of south america, and you see people in the streets or at work drinking it. At least in Uruguay seem to be more popular than tea or even than coffee.

If hybernating for centuries could be feasible, then superintellingence will be the most probable superpower. Just sleep for 400 years and then wake up in Idiocracy apogee.

Google is not the only one that does that. If well faster loading pages means potentially more selling for them, also means better web for us. Both sides wins, and you still win even if what you browse don't have google ads or content.

Copying what others do, look or behave, what could be seen as most of our behaviour, is definitely a social skill, but not a very smart one (you need to be smart enough to get whats the pattern to copy, but not a lot more than that), and probably is what right now raises the odds of mating

Considering that thanks for modern medicine bad mutations don't always affect your chances to survive and mate, and good mutations don't give much better chances neither, what is surprising is that there is some kind of evolution happening anyway. Probably that evolution is driving us more toward social skills than…

After last week southpark episode this kind of articles seem to be talking about poop to me.

Not just that, also don't put a joke with a scientific paper title (specially if you could make scientific papers too). If in doubt, check Asimov's "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"

Don't know why you could ever go eww with it. Separate the problem between source and content. It should "fit better" on us human milk than cow milk (unless our genome changed a lot in the last 5k years?), at least for our children. Regarding source, it solves a lot of problems that come from cows instead of humans,…