Bravo for the image.

I haven't really been keeping up with the show so maybe the situation was different there, but I felt the Red Wedding was the bigger game-changer in the books.

I'm not really sure the supertask even makes sense within Newtonian mechanics. If the particles each have finite mass, then the whole system has infinite mass, which means lots of weird nonsensical things. For example, such a system could absorb an incoming particle and its momentum with no effect since it would take…

Except for four nice weeks, that's pretty much so.

Because these people operate on rationalization not deduction.

Ok, this was confusing me a bit so let me add a little something to the discussion. The putative donut shape was not thought to describe the black hole itself, but rather the cloud of gas that surrounds the black hole. The reason I was confused is because there is a well-known theorem in general relativity (proven by…

A little general complaint about reporting language. Phrases like "physicists say" or "scientists say" are bad. For one, the paper under discussion is by a single individual so it just isn't factually correct reporting to use the plural. Second, those phrases lump together all physicists or all scientists as if they…

Interesting theory. I hadn't thought of the possibility that zombie-fication would release him from the Night's Watch oath.

Wait, did the headline change? Wasn't it a "mammoth victory" beforehand? I think that is an acceptable pun under the circumstances.

Where's Jon Snow on this list? Is he included in #3?

Well, your first two paragraphs about science journalism are reasonable enough. Certainly things get over-hyped and/or poorly explained.

The first law is that energy is conserved in isolated systems. If the combined energy of the colliding photons is equal to the combined energy of the electron and positron, then there is no problem with conservation of energy. There is a threshold for the photon energy since the electron-positron system has a minimum…

What exactly is your objection to this?

You could just shoot photons out the back of your ship. Photons carry momentum and so shooting them out the back makes the ship go, just like shooting a hot gas out the back would. Using photons would be more efficient than particles with a rest mass since you'd get the most momentum gained per unit energy.

Actually, no. E=mc^2 is really an equivalence between mass and energy. Let's say you have a box full of light (somehow) to use as your fuel on your spaceship. As you extract energy E from the box, the box will decrease in mass an amount E/c^2. A similar effect is the following: a box full of a hot gas is heavier than…

"gamma rays" is basically just a synonym for "really energetic light". So, unhealthy in the sense of burning your ass. Not sure if it's also carcinogenic if you survive the burn, but probably.

It's only in the Fire sauce.

It would turn into very energetic light, so if you ate very much anti-matter you'd probably blow up or burn up.

Yes, maybe they disagreed with official teachings. The thing that isn't generally recognized about Catholics as a group is that they pretty much all disagree with official teachings over something. It would be almost impossible not to do so. At any rate, I doubt even the pope believes in Adam in Eve as literal…

My Catholic teachers (many of them nuns and priests) did, in fact, say no such thing.