Thank you!

Every time I think we have a chance of understanding the ecology, nature reveals something like this, and I am awestruck. Various organisms employ poisons, talons, electric shocks, and I learn now... Heat. Go nature!

Yeah, that's a very widely held belief that Rayleigh scattering makes the sky blue. The problem with that explanation is that it's so beautiful, people believe it — even in the face of the contrary evidence of their own eyes. Rayleigh scattering makes the sky violet, which is even higher frequency than blue.

I actually did. Because it had the guy from Caprica in it. I feel I had a moral duty.

I was thinking along the lines of the color of the sky. It's blue because of our eyes, not the atmosphere.

That's an illustrative thought experiment. To me, such a war would be about oil. That's the issue that people were willing to go to the mat over. The oil states are not objecting to federalism, because they would be perfectly happy to enjoy the benefits that come from, say, being defended by the nation's army,…

But, surely that's an artifact of human biology and not stellar physics? I assume there must be a temperature whose peak is in the green range, but it's washed out by the way our eyes process colors.

"Cheer up Charlie. The new series is coming."

This is called the caught-cot merger. In other (most?) parts of the English speaking world, they are not homonyms, but for those of us in the northeast, they are.

Thac0 was unnecessarily complicated. Why should "armor class" be anything other than the required die roll? The extra level of indirection in the early rules, which is thankfully now gone, is not missed.

You have made an interesting comment, but I have to very respectfully disagree with you there. Yes states rights and free trade mattered, but only to the extent that those issues were relevant to slavery. Historian Shelby Foote, for example, spoke quite persuasively on this topic.

"If you had God's Own tape measure, you wouldn't notice the distances getting larger because your tape measure itself is getting longer too, and the distance between the marks on the tape measure are getting longer."

"I try to imagine the two most separated stars in the universe, which must be actually measurable (in theory)."

I'm both pleased and horrified to discover that youtube has kept a history of everything I've watched.

Am I the only person who loved Caprica? I still have the last episode on tape. I can't bring myself to watch it, because then it will be over.

Yeah, I really miss Caprica too.

Brent Spiner has a pretty enlightening take on how it got cancelled (by Les Moonves IIRC) on Youtube somewhere from a con appearance. I enjoyed Threshold and was disappointed to see it go.

Total Recall 2070 was available on Hulu during its beta testing phase. So, it might still be on Hulu now.

"He's no more a psychopath than every other action hero who kills hundreds of bad guys just because they're "bad guys"."

If you've seen one condor... you've seen them both.