The Spanish dub really affects the Simpsons though - Homer has this deep manly voice and, at least in Argentina, people really see him as the protagonist and not one player among several. I remember finding it very strange the way "The Simpsons" = "The Homer Show" in the popular imagination there. Some local colour…

I didn't have cable in the early 2000s and had never seen House in North America. But then, in 2006, I found myself recovering from a milder, second bout of water-borne typhoid fever in a hostel in La Paz, Bolivia (yes, I got the shot, no it doesn't work for the Latin American strain). I watched 7 episodes in a row…

Thank you! There's a lot of great stuff out there and it's awesome that you're plugging it!

Well, some good folks have been working on changing CBS's mind with a crowd-funded pilot and get their day in court this month:

Well there goes my joke about the 'Wine-dark seas'.

Ah, I thought you meant the speed ratio of regular instellar vehicles against the super-fast ones - I was only pointing out that the difference is between 'stupidly fast' and 'very stupidly fast', not 'fast' and 'stupidly fast'.

Fair point - I could see the zeal of mission founders pushing forward development of that extra engineering effort - provided they had some unusual sway of the economic system of their planet, or they were from an interstellar civilization taking the next step.

Good to know!

More like everyone driving a NASCAR or slower is undetectable, but Formula 1 and Indy cars are detectable.

Yeah, I just didn't want to get into wave/particle duality here, but you're absolutely correct.

Oh yes, the dust is probably useful, it's the photons here - seems like a big hassle. But you might have a more astute analysis of the builders than me - it's just that I'd rather we didn't encounter the interstellar Hellcat owners association. As the new kids on the block, we'd probably have an easier time with the…

My point is only that if you're 90% of the way there, why put your effort into 11% more speed when you could put it into something like FTL-like space folding. And I agree about the baryonic particles, but photons are a different issue - much harder to interact with, though not impossible - just seems like a lot of…

The problem is that a photons energy is contained in it's momentum - in this case, a good deal of that relative momentum is derived from the fact you're moving so quickly already. So it'd be a bit like trying to get a hot air balloon to drift against the direction of the wind.

Doesn't this amount to saying we could detect ships that foolishly move beyond 0.9C where baryonic collisions, gravity effects and time dilation all get really unfriendly. So really, it's saying that we could detect the most outlandish of our galactic neighbours, if any are such fools. Why would any species engineer…

This explains so much.

Or an English cozy mystery with a Supernatural or Rural Fantasy plot.

And even so, 'subterranean' is a bit of a nonsense term since it's based on the Greek/Roman concept of Earth as what is between the Heavens and the Underworld and is the realm of humanity which necessarily exists between those poles (look at what happened to Orpheus and Icarus when they strayed!)
Really we mean…

I had always assumed they'd just create an inflatable a-la Bigelow that could fill all or part of tube. Then you have gas and heat exchange under control without worrying about a lot of support structure.

Yeah, I agree it seems likely - it's just weird to me that the stairs just look like the enormous stairs I've seen and climbed at Monte Alban, a Zapotec ruin near Oaxaca City. There aren't a lot of good place for experiments in archaeology, but this might be one. Still trying to think of a location without a back-echo…

But is this some kind of intentional feature, or is this just what happens when you build that many stairs out of a very hard material? As in - is it a sonic refractor, or is a staircase with a weird accidental property. A lot of the built environment has this sort of weird accidental property. For instance, at the…