Let's talk shop for second.

"Haaarummpff... filthy peasants and their portrait mode videos. I dare say that such a thing would never have been provided by someone who had attended fair Harvard. One can only assume the videographer was educated at Yale."

I used my own name, so, Shep Shepard.

And they would. First thing they did when they got to Baghdad was set up a neo-liberal utopia - privatize everything, sell to highest bidder, throw thousands out of work, and open the floodgates to the big international corps. And of course, peace, paradise, and prosperity followed.

Except for the religions where aliens are a key part of it. I know that my faith in the Church of Practicology, founded by the alien king living inside Stan Lee, has prepared me well for that day.

Thank god someone didn't put flouride in it or there'd really be a panic.

Thank you for teaching us about wug biology.

It's an article about violins and somehow you get on talking about Big Pharma and Wine tasting.

I will now nod sagely and pretend I know what that means.

So when do we start shooting relativistic asteroids at them, as the ultra-rational Fermi Paradox-solving "Central Park at night" people insist we must?

I wouldn't have said this after the 2009 film, but once Into Darkness hit theaters, it was pretty clear they should have set them in a new universe. They are pretty fun on their own, but the Star Trek baggage — and the failure to play nice with the source material — is just too much.

The "sci-fi" (particularly when pronounced "skiffy") has traditionally been seen as either trivializing the whole genre or as a label specifically for the schlockiest, pulpiest forms of sci-fi. E.g., here's Harlan Ellison ranting about the term:

And how does a person respond to something like this? How does a woman who started reading this website as a teenager, who used to seek refuge here when her ideas about gender and equality were shot down by her friends, peers, and sometimes even family, who for some reason imagined this place as being a center for…

My Canadian cousin was on this show for four episodes. Never seen it.

Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Of these GRBs, dark matter, dark energy and cosmic geometry are the most interesting to me. The latter three seem (And I emphasize "seem" for a reason.) to indicate there is something very fundamental we don't understand about gravity, I hope this year brings some crucial breakthroughs in data, just so as to stop the…

I'm axiomatically okay with any video where Kaku (or any of his ilk) does something other than tell us that the future is magic.

As an archaeologist, I don't see any major problem with this practice. The article says that the ingots are well-recorded and a sample is preserved, with any inscriptions cut out and saved. Nearly all of the ingots would just end up sitting in boxes never to be touched again, and a small representative sample should…

Pish posh. A minor detail. How are we supposed to forward science with thinking like that. Now, for everybody's sake, try not to move too much while I aim this thing.

Pish posh. Details. Now try not to move too much while I aim this thing.