Perhaps the sniper and medic achievements suggest that aliens will pick up some kind of class system. That would be interesting; it'd mix up the later missions a lot more instead of being all mutons and heavy floaters with a robot thrown in.

I've got the little numbers, but I also have a bunch of open squares that I suspect are missing characters.

This is also a good idea in case you hit unexpected snags. Which would be most of the time...

Oh, shoot! I missed this. That's what I get for having a day job.

Fire nation is nowhere near as threatening as smallpox nation.

We don't "live in the third [dimension]." That would be a one-dimensional existence. We live in all three dimensions, at once.

Oh, that's awesome. Is the second paragraph IPA? Sadly, not all the characters came out on my browser...

Think about how many dialects exist in a single country...and now imagine that in a thousand years, all those dialects will be entirely separate, mutually incomprehensible languages.

I find it a little sad that you'd be worried about trolling by stating a scientific fact. (Understated it, really. Your number should have been more than "thousands.")

Alphabet has almost no bearing on how languages are pronounced. (People make fun of English all the time for this.)

They're coming up with likely estimates, based on the languages spoken today.

They do have data. My degrees are in physics and aerospace engineering - so we have that background in common - but I also took a fair amount of linguistics, and I feel confident in saying that it's about as hard a science as it can be. What historical linguists do is take languages as they are spoken now, and compare…

Item #2 there is a viewpoint that I have never been able to understand. Do you assume that any other intelligent/sentient/whateveryouwannacallit species wouldn't have any of those behaviors? That's a rather humongous assumption.

I'm not saying that time machines couldn't be used for evil, or that that idea shouldn't be explored...I'm saying that (1) the Romulan Wars, which allegedly happened pre-TOS, would have been awesome, and (2) it's silly to have a Temporal Cold War - since a major part of a "cold war" involves...waiting.

Personally, I thought Serenity did a terrible job of it, and threw away a lot of the established atmosphere of the show, to boot...

I think that was pretty awesome.

The challenge to describe characters without mentioning their jobs or costumes is particularly insightful.

Okay, you win the internet.

I think Firefly's cancellation was a blessing in disguise: it's nearly all good. It didn't have a chance to go downhill. And that's why we all remember it so fondly.

Star Trek: Enterprise not being about the Romulan Wars instead of the Temporal Cold War (what does that even mean?).