So, Nina Paley, basically. (Watch first five minutes.)

I am running my own one-man campaign to bring “groovy” back into circulation.

Great images. That train pic is like a scene out of Thunderbirds.

Several years ago my father traveled for a number of weeks on a giant icebreaker research vessel sailing in the vicinity of Antarctica. A favorite show for the scientists and crew was “Firefly.”

An entirely religion?

Brought this to mind immediately. (Giraffes = girls, staircase/pool = Guggenheim/pool, divers = climber.) Mildly NSFW.

It’d be interesting if the water from the geysers were actually on a two-way journey. Dispersed outward into the rings, then falling back from the rings onto Enceladus. Only to be slowly buried under succeeding layers of ice until it’s deep enough, and under enough pressure, to be thrown out again and re-dispersed.…

Oh, and now I find it *is* in English. Which makes the decision for no talk doubly mystifying.

Gotta love these European trailers for English-speaking audiences that go out of their way to conceal the fact that they’re not in English. No one ever talks in European trailers.

If you “unwrap” the cylinder into a rectangular sheet, and imagine the string parting at the unwrapping edge, then the string diagonally “crosses” the sheet four times. These four diagonal crosses form the hypotenuses of triangles, the base of which we know is 4 cm. (the circumference of the cylinder), and the height…

Just to follow up on the quoted comment: one interesting effect of having Dallas get "offed" in mid-film was to make the film scarier. It established clearly that the film was not going to treat characters according to pre-existing convention; it made the story, and thus the peril, more realistic. The creature really…

Good for them. I'm sorry they had to do it, but it was certainly appropriate. With luck some new rules will be put in place so that the Sad Puppies — or rather, miserable trolls — can't once again gum up the works because they believe that petulant tantrums are manly behavior.

Great stuff! A great exercise in graphic design. Must seek out more by this artist.

God, the word "hologram" is thrown around a lot these days. Presumably this is simply images projected on a screen, right? So yes, "virtual," but not a hologram.

Yup! I even looked it up beforehand and *still* miswrote it. Obviously Fermi was still on my mind.

I like Gould's response even more than Sagan's. You don't need to do the work of speculating about all the possible ways extraterrestrial civilizations might expand, as Sagan does. You just need to recognize that the Hart-Tipler argument is based on a gigantic unsupported assumption: that extraterrestrial…

That face is like a bolt of lightning.

Brilliant and beautiful choice.

I wouldn't wish this fate on anybody, and I think it's interesting that he's turned the lens on himself — but I always found Sacks' writing on his various subjects' ailments tasteless. Like a combination of shadenfreude, freak show, and Gothic horror.

These are extraordinary.