Agh, cordyceps again! Although apparently it's under threat by another fungus right now.

I guess I'm deeply stupid then. I will readily admit to using "like" conversationally, though nowhere near as often as the Valley Girl stereotype indicates.

Sounding "educated" isn't necessarily a goal everyone should aspired to; it's only a (shallow) marker of status, not whether or not someone is intelligent or not. After all, everyone learns their first language naturally by exposure; it's not really something that's taught in schools.

Maybe it's only because I'm Californian, but it's usage actually makes sense to me. In my experience it's often it's a case of trying to think of something by analogy.

Really, Polish lacks gutturals? Because I've heard most languages have them. Japanese has "ano" and "eto," French "euh," and Spanish "como" (which actually literally means "like").

I'm not sure but it sounds like this poll was done scientifically, as in through random selection. If so, it's likely very accurate since a sample size of 2,000 yields a margin of error of only about +/-2%. So while the exact numbers could be off, it's very probable that if so they only are by as little as 2%.

Those were all terrific, but the best one for my money has to be the Kirby one; that was just hilariously awesome.

I guess that fills out one part of the Drake equation (fp).

My personal thought is that the Engineers have more than one kind of bioweapon, though they may ultimately have similar properties. The black goo was what they were specifically testing on LV-223, whereas the xenomorphs were a previous creation.

I think you were missing my point.

Precisely. When explaining how life came about it ultimately doesn't matter whether its ultimately from Earth or Mars. The only thing that matters is the chemical processes that resulted in its creation.

I know it's almost certainly a coincidence that the writers never gave a second thought, but I can't help but wonder if the changelings were actually a lost colony of those guys.

It's an interesting idea, to be sure, but unfortunately it doesn't usually offer much explanatory power to the origin of life, merely redirecting the location of the question. There are a few exceptions, as I've seen hypotheses that perhaps life as we know it did originate on Earth, but got some help from the impact…

That's kind of my problem with it as well. It has no explanatory power at all in regards to the actual origins of life, at least not when the idea is simply that life arrived from elsewhere.

I know you conceded and I shouldn't carry on, but it's not semantics, it's a straight-up difference in culture. Saying that it's an argument over semantics is like saying that the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism is one of semantics because they both happened to occupy the same location (India) at around the…

That seems to be something reasonably enough inferred to me.

That doesn't seem like that big of a hyperbole, to be perfectly honest. That's like saying that paleontologists found the oldest dinosaur fossil. There'd always be some doubt as to whether or not it actually was since it would be impossible to prove one way or the other.

There's a big flowing structure above the xeno's head in the mural that looks sort of like the head crest of a queen.

To a certain extent you're correct (that it's silly to have your ideal be a person whose status is ascribed rather than earned) but Disney princesses aren't exactly princess princesses. Neither Mulan nor Belle were born into princess-hood and Mulan doesn't even marry a prince.

While the trailers don't do anything for me, Pixar trailers never had. I've always been underwhelmed by Pixar's ad campaigns, which seem to rely on reminding you that "hey, this is a Pixar film, you're going to see it right?" I never feel like they sell a film on its own merits but rather on the reputation of the…