Or, as we like to call magic around here: CHEMISTRY!

Well, I speak Hindi so I'm pretty sure I didn't say chai tea anywhere.

Considering these guys are better-armed than the force-pike wielding guards on Death Star II, this might be a better setup.

they have a big problem with ensurance scams, so they have the dashboard cams to film everything when in doubt.

Llamas weren't found in Central America; they're Andean. They aren't relevant to the Aztecs or the Maya, or any of the preceding Mexican cultures. Andean civilizations seem to have solved the problems of long-distance provisioning quite well.

Not to mention how it hurts real-life cases as juries assume if the prosecution can't prove via perfect forensic detail, there's reasonable doubt in cases that should be obvious guilty verdicts.

Linguistics; since the beginning of the talkies.

I don't know if I would say the job of an archaeologist is to "preserve ruins", although in my work as an archeologist for state parks, it actually is. Our job is to help to protect and conserve cultural resources (goes far beyond ruins), and when this can't be done, to scientifically excavate and properly document…

By coincidence, Tor.com has just posted a really interesting rebuttal to the "Indiana Jones is a bad archaeologist" argument: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/11/…

I'm slightly amazed that the general horribleness of Venus' atmosphere didn't melt the cap away...

I feel bad for him too. And I think your compassion comes across wonderfully in the article. Kudos.

Were you not going to wash their clothes?

I'm calling bullshit on the last question due to a technicality: When you ask me something like "Which ships escaped the blast?" that, to me, implies that we're talking about the ships that were on the surface of the Death Star at the time the blast was initiated. If you left 5 minutes earlier, 'escaping the blast'…

"Hopefully they will embarrass themselves so badly that they will go back to doing good documentaries."

Thank you. I wasn't sure I wanted to write this: I don't like jumping on people when they make mistakes. I finally did becauase it'd be even sadder if we walked away from this mess without anyone learning from it.

The idea that the major ethnic/tribal/language groups of Africa would have stayed nicely within their own boundaries without the arrival of the Europeans seems rather naive.

That's why I didn't say "Islamic invasion."

Correct, but the colonization efforts of Dar-Al-Islam in the 9th-14th centuries were almost overwhelmingly perpetrated by Arab Muslims.

Well, completely uncolonized by Europeans, anyway. The Arab invasions seem to have gone down without a hitch.