You proceeded with your description of Mary the Colorblind Scientist from the question "Will she learn anything or not?" as if you had definitively answered that question, without any evidence. You kind of just suggested that the answer was obvious, when in fact it is not.

And where is the "fixed point," relative to which you're going to measure all other distances? If you're going to say something isn't fixed, you need to define what is first.

It's kind of like a swnan.

Correction:

I'd say this was pretty iconic for him.

Saga was terrific! For a fully voice-acted fan-made production, it had remarkably few fourth-wall-breaking moments, too. (Like, seriously, it's nice that one of you can do a "House" impression, but...really?)

Ah. Try bringing a sniper with In the Zone and a plasma rifle to a terror site. Groups of cryssalids become three free kills - and you still have both actions left for whatever your original plan was. :)

So, I know I'm dredging here, but I've been playing a lot of XCOM lately specifically with the goal of trying some new things out, and here are my thoughts on your trees:

This looks like a great set of examples of informal fallacies!

Agreed. The juxtaposition of the cool-looking spaceships and environments with the latex masks of the aliens just added to the appeal.

Standalones can be terrific. The Fifth Element should be one of them.

Yes; this is a similar phenomenon we see when people use the term "theory" to mean something very different in an everyday vs. scientific context.

My point is that precision is important. Using a word with such multiple meanings opens you up to the reader or listener misinterpreting which meaning you intended - or (perhaps maliciously) choosing to take a different meaning than that which you intended.

I have a gripe with this article - and this is a gripe that applies to pretty much all media trying to communicate science.

Reminds me of one of my favorite series as a little kid:

Ahh...I have to love a world where one can sit in a thin-walled aluminum tube at such a high altitude that there is insufficient oxygen to support life, hurtle forward at a significant fraction of the speed of sound, participate in communication with people all over the globe, and make all this out to be a minor…

Wow, this is an article that really hits me and my fiancee close to home. (We're both in aerospace, and I can argue that we'd have more buying power to throw back into the economy if NASA was able to hire.)

That's such a good NdGT clip.

The movie Apollo 13 depicts Gene Kranz and his White Team as the flight controllers on console during the entire mission. In fact, after the explosion struck, Kranz almost immediately pulled his flight team off the console rotation and instead used them as a "tiger team" to solve the mission-critical problems while…