I was working at a print shop that had a lot of self-service copy machines available for customers to use. Needless to say, when the shop's electricity was out, there was pretty close to zero business we could conduct until the power was restored. During one such outage, I was standing outside the door to prevent…

The definition of what is or is not a 'planet' has changed throughout civilization. The ancient Greeks defined a planet as more or less "wandering," essentially "anything in the sky that moved differently than the stars," because they didn't understand what they saw in the night sky all that well. Under that…

Yeah, but the 'test' is going to return a whole bunch of data, too. It's not just a matter of making sure things work, they want to know to what extent they work, particularly stuff like the radiation shielding capacity. They're going to be pouring over the telemetry from this launch for months.

They're just now getting to the point of trying to generate a warp field in a laboratory. Microscopic ones. Not sure how far out that project is slated for off the top of my head though.

It'd be more accurate to say that "*your* clock is so far behind," rather than saying that "Earth is so far ahead." It's your frame of reference that changed, not Earth's.

As you approach the speed of light, it becomes impossible for matter to move faster, according to the theory. It takes exponentially more energy to accelerate matter the closer you get to the speed of light. In a way, you can imagine it as a car trying to go faster and faster—air resistance pushes against you…

There are lots of people, here, who share your astonishment. Unfortunately, we're so far outnumbered by the willfully ignorant at this point that it's less of a 'war' against science as it is a siege. They're wearing us down via attrition. You'd think that, with so much information available, we'd be better than…

Let's hear it for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration space agency for detecting and identifying an alien craft, disguised as a big rock so as to obviously be up to no good, then hand first-contact to the Europeans instead of taking the initiative for themselves. Because nothing says 'United States…

We should mention, however, that it DOES have copper platting below the water line. I'm not sure how wide-spread that practice was, I'm sure someone else out there can chime in on that?

A *responsible* skeptic will follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if (especially if) the evidence leads to a conclusion they thought was wrong at first, because the first rule of being a responsible skeptic is knowing that you can be wrong about *anything.* I, for example, have this debate with my cousin quite…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In science, eye-witness testimony is fairly useless as humans have been proven to be notoriously unreliable witnesses. Our memories are too susceptible to alteration or misrepresentation, both intentional and unintentional. In a world where dementia,…

"Newsworthy" isn't my department, nor is whether it was worthy of an apology by Bono. Those are both decisions made by people who are not me. I don't have a dog in this fight—I didn't have Bono pop up in my library unasked nor would I be any more than momentarily annoyed if I had, but that doesn't mean I can't…

Wow. Apparently someone has a reading comprehension problem in addition to an infantile name-calling problem. I'll highlight the important bits for your benefit; "Haven't used iTunes in months," which implies that I not only didn't experience this issue myself, I can't even experience the problem now because they've…

The penalty for stupid is OFTEN death, just not always the death of the one who did the stupid.

You're looking at it from solely your own perspective, rather than trying to look at it from the perspective of one who might find annoyance with the situation. Just this weekend a bunch of us were hanging out with a Pandora station on and it kept bringing up music that we *weren't* interested in listening to, music…

It's the musical equivalent of a pop-up ad—If your library has been carefully cultivated, and you're just listening to it cycling on random, then suddenly this thing that is totally not what you put into it and different than everything else comes on, and you don't know at first how it got there or how to remove it,…