I always felt the badness of Star Trek: III was exaggerated to make the “even films are good, odd films are bad” rule work. I mean, it’s not a good film, but it’s not really a bad film either, it just... exists. It’s got nothin’ on Star Trek I or V.

It’s not like he didn’t think about killing Vader or the Emperor though. He straight up tried to kill the Emperor, Vader got in the way. He was pretty intent on killing Vader too, for a minute or so. Really Kylo Ren is the guy Luke has contemplated killing for the least amount of time.

Yeah, but they’d be an object in motion when they hit zero g, and would thus stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force. No pun intended.

It’s all academic though. We’ve already seen bombs fall in space as early as Empire, when TIE bombers attempt to flush out the Millennium Falcon from the asteroid field.…

Eh, I’m not sure the two were that different. Both had their character ups and downs. I’ll defend RTD’s work with Donna Noble to the death (okay, maybe not that far) but I felt like basically everything Rose was involved in could get to be a little... melodramatic, and I never bought the relationship with the Doctor…

That’s perfectly fair. At the time I kind of hated RTD as a showrunner and I don’t want to go easier on him for Moffat’s faults, but in retrospect, he was the better showrunner. He was just, frankly, terrible at actually writing episodes. Moffat was a fairly poor showrunner (even in his best, first season, we never…

RTD is the guy who had the Doctor restored by the power of prayer. He ended his first season by having a companion magic away all the problems AND restore someone to life because she looked inside the TARDIS console. He’s the guy who allowed all the enemies to be defeated in his final proper seasons via 30 seconds of…

That’s fair enough, but honestly, I’ll accept Simm being there for no reason just to have him around. It was nice to see his version of the Master, especially his version of the Master played a little bit straighter. It’s a far more dignified way for Simm’s Master to end than his previous appearance, and it was the…

I hate a lot about that episode, but the line works well enough. Eccleston was happy to regenerate because he was still the one trying to get over what he had just done to end the war. A new regeneration, a fresh start, would be a blessing for him. Smith lived out a full lifespan, basically. Both of them were ready to…

Oh dear god, you had to post a picture. I actually apparently managed to blank the memory of that costume from my mind. I mean, I knew it was stupid. I knew it was awful. I knew it took a process that’s supposed to be body horror and made it sexy. But I had managed to forget what it actually LOOKED like until now.

What…

To be fair, Tennant’s Doctor might well have held off regeneration at least as long as Capaldi’s will through the next episode. Zooming around to creep on everyone you ever knew takes time. I mean, just the stuff they showed us on the television felt like it took a hundred years.

In all honesty though, holding off the…

I am told that the ancient Greeks felt somewhat the opposite of how we do today. My source here is QI, by the way, so I could well be wrong. But very large male genitalia was seen as less attractive than that of more modest size. Hence most Greek statues are not particularly well endowed. Which raises further…

I would like to add Peter Davison’s 5th Doctor in addition to Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor. 5 will always have my adoration for being both absolutely the Doctor, and also being somewhat meek and stammery at the same time.

I know an AI decides its own goals. The whole point is, either humans or an AI have to direct the maintenance, and it’s much easier to let humans do it.

By free I mean humans make electricity entirely out of self interest. The AI need do nothing to compel humanity to keep generating electricity or make computer parts.…

That’s fairly unlikely though. For one thing, you need to find an intelligence with a viable infrastructure. That’s almost impossible in and of itself, what with space being vast, and decay of transmission over time. If the AI found a viable target infrastructure, it’d need viable hardware to run on, which would…

Yeah, but humans feed, shelter, and reproduce by themselves so there’s no real upkeep cost. Even if human labor is replaced by robots, someone needs to maintain the robots. You could have robots maintain robots, but ultimately the robots still need direction towards a goal. You could have an non-intelligent computer…

The other thing about AI, or robot revolutions for that matter, is that both rely on infrastructure. If robots want to build more of themselves, they need tools and materials. AI needs power, and probably replacement parts over time. Those things are provided by systems maintained by humans. Which is easier? Wipe out…

Looks like a whale to me. Guess I’m not high. ... Shit.

Most measures show that people are smarter. As always, IQ scores (for however much meaning you want to put in those) have to be adjusted downward so that the average IQ doesn’t go over 100.

People have, sadly, always science regardless of evidence. It is objectively worse in some regards. Vaccination rates, for…

I never quite understood the hated for Khaleesi. Sure, it’s a title in the original work, but that kind of shows the underlying point. It’s not just about naming your kid after something dorky. People picked it because it sounded nice. Which seems a perfectly reasonable criteria for a name.

“Over time, as technology has changed, so have the metaphors, but the gist is the same: the body is but a fancy machine.” That philosophy isn’t the problem. The problem is making loose inferences from it.

If I say I can make my car go faster by putting more RAM in it, that’s obviously stupid. But the problem isn’t that…