Making the new Who focus on the relation of the Doctor to his companions was clearly a very conscious decision on Davies' part, and it does give the new Who more thematic coherence — it's now definitively "about" what it means for an ordinary person to be whisked away by the Doctor, in a way that old series wasn't. …

You mean that you, contrariwise, think that crumple zones should not be regulated?

"...the big 3 used government to destroy Tucker Auto which was trying to make cars safer by making their cars with safety features."

On the other hand, when last I checked asbestos caused cancer.

I'm loving how verbose the comment thread is for this article. Meanwhile, here's an amusing rant from someone on the receiving end of Answer Syndrome, or at least something closely related to it.

The problem is, without a specific cited source for his numbers and his characterization of economic and class trends, I have no reason to believe what he says. I can move rocks around and videotape it too. Sure, his claim is simple and direct — but so is the claim "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."

Well played! Now we just need a similar photo of a shark.

I'd suggest also John Crowley's "Engine Summer." It's a short book with an ending that absolutely takes the top of your head off. Every person I've ever spoken to who's read this has had the same experience. What's especially amazing is that the ending really poses a bunch of metafictional questions which, upon…

This is an inspired idea. Honestly, I'd like to see a fancy webpage/app that created slides/movies like this for every surface in the solar system.

Totally agree with all of that. I wonder if, in addition, its appeal has something to do with the dimensions and proportions of the various elements of the vehicle. The shapes and sizes, in relation to one another, of the cockpit, spine, engines, cargo unit, pods, and legs just seem very elegant — there's a kind of…

Lucky devil. I had both of them as a kid too and miss them now. Enjoy!

Excellent! Put working engines on that humongous thing! Sounds like a scene from my own "experimental" (explodey) childhood.

You sure can't beat Space: 1999 for its look. And dreadfully written as it was, when it went for Gothic horror in its first season, it was really on to something. (It's fun to find comment threads elsewhere on the web discussing the episode "Dragon's Domain." Traumatized a whole generation of now-forty-somethings. …

Very nice.

My feelings about this are mixed. But among those mixed feelings, I'm genuinely touched by his shouting "Run!" to whoever might be in the vicinity as he takes off. Now there's the social instinct at work.

I love how it doesn't even go particularly fast — it sort of toys with the riders, like a giant troll holding them in its hands before it suddenly claps and mashes them to a pulp.

Very nice. Kind of an "urban decay meets Andrew Wyeth" type thing.

This article isn't as clear up front as it needs to be. What exact function were these nanoreactors designed to fulfill in the first place? (You can sort of infer this from the later parts of the article, but even there it's pretty indirect.) Are these, like, the *first* nanoreactors, or just a recently developed…

And also a little subliminal suggestion of penetration.