Happy Rhodes, for your consideration. Here's her song "100 Years," from the album "Many Worlds Are Born Tonight," sung by, basically, a defense satellite long after doomsday has come and gone.

It's great. I say that and I'm not particularly a Philip Glass fan; I don't feel that much he did after "Einstein" was very interesting at all. (And that was all the way back in '76.) But everything up to and including "Einstein" is damned good — tingling with energy.

"To all the commenters—whom I shall assume are mostly humanities majors..."

Let us not forget Samuel R. Delany's "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders," which is now out on bookshelves and just got this outstanding review from Paul Di Filippo at Locus Online:

Very nice selections. Other thoughts:

Kubrick himself seems to have been pretty unambiguously straight — but I think he was very tuned into the question of what normative (that is, straight) masculinity meant or entailed.

Really fun article. Would've been interesting to delve more deeply into Kubrick's side of this equation, as essentially *all* his films are about masculinity — about worlds inhabited and run primarily by men, and all the pressure and fear that saturates those worlds.

bakana: 'The question of this thread is at what point can we comfortably assert that the entity is no longer one of those things and has become something/someone that ethics demands we not harm? Lazy, simple ideologically-charged, and intellectually-dishonest responses like "once it leaves the womb" are just as silly…

'The question of this thread is at what point can we comfortably assert that the entity is no longer one of those things and has become something/someone that ethics demands we not harm? Lazy, simple ideologically-charged, and intellectually-dishonest responses like "once it leaves the womb" are just as silly as lazy,…

I'm struck by how much this sounds like laughter. Laughter just has to originate from a "signaling" vocalization like this.

Just FYI, it's called "Dragon's Domain" — and judging from the comments YouTube clips of this episode get, it unquestionably traumatized an entire generation of young viewers! (I was one of them.)

A joke, people! (But re-read the section on the initial mining of Mercury: "Why Mercury first? According to Armstrong, we need a convenient source of material close to the sun.")

...and all that energy will be beamed back to an Earth that will have long been rendered lifeless by the blockage of sunlight.

Yeah, he forgot the dullest subject of all:

It's called a "rhetorical question." And it's a question these people wouldn't be asking if they hadn't already read precisely those reviews and comments.

Which pretty much provides the definitive answer to this question for all time.

Great to see you guys branching out into other presentation formats.

"And before anybody tells me about 60 million uninsured or underinsured Americans, let me point out that the 80% not in that group still constitutes a vast majority."

Just terrific.

Beautiful photo. I realize this is probably just a trick of the perspective, but it looks as though Io is dragging along cloud turbulence on the surface of Jupiter beneath it.