I was going to come in here and say that it could be a case like track star Michael Johnson, who broke all the accepted forms of running and could cross the finish line and have his gold shoes unlaced before the race was officially over. However, two arm guards? Yeah, they might as well just have given him a…

Okay, only getting a couple feet off a shot is pretty bad (I could at least hit the target when I was a Cub Scout, even if I couldn't hit the center). However, any arrow fired from a bow will have a noticable amount of whip if the footage is slow enough to actually watch it. Crossbows supposedly do not cause this to…

Did they send the iPhone into space-space? Because just about every single one of those "X Thing sent into Space" articles I've read in the last few years has turned out to be "X Thing sent one or two layers up in the atmosphere, but generally not even halfway to the internationally-recognized boundary to Space". …

It should be noted that this defensive technique only works when the bees are going up against a single scout-hornet. Killing it before it can get back to its own hive and round up a posse will keep the hive safe for a while longer. Once a murder-horde does show up, the Japanese bees have no advantages over their…

You forgot "And be careful, because even if you're not allergic, a single sting could potentially kill you."

Not if you try to give him directions on how to do a stabbed-in-the-back death scene, he wouldn't.

I'd think the humidity and possibly the salt would make that a very bad idea. Remember, high altitude means thin air, means clearer image. Just being at sea level is far from ideal to begin with, without making it even thicker with all that water. Imagine being the guy who has to scrub all the algal growth off of…

Yeah, some people can get into a serious snit over stuff that they just don't understand. One of the most banned books in US schools is Mark Twain's Huck Finn, generally on the basis that a black slave in the slave-dependent southern US, where it was illegal to educate slaves, was depicted as being uneducated. You…

More likely is that the chapter in question is the one where Ender and Bonzo have their little naked shower fight. Remember, everyone. Whenever you're writing a story that involves kids taking showers, _make_sure_ to stress, at every opportunity, that all involved children are still wearing tight little denim…

Try reading "Agatha H and the Airship City". It's a novelization of the first couple graphic novels, which was written by a different author. I was kinda reluctant to read it because it felt like it would be just a pared down version of the original. Turns out it goes into considerably more detail than they ever…

Yeah, in terms of light pollution, one of the best options would be to sink observatories smack in the centers of the largest national parks and wildlife reserves we can offer. Which is almost certainly never going to happen.

I would love to be able to congratulate the internet for finding a naked breast that no person on this green Earth would want to fondle. I would seriously love to be able to do that. And yet, I know that somewhere out there, there's bound to be one person who has been waiting for just this sort of thing.

Is that with or without the marketing budget tacked on? Because they tend to spend more promoting would-be blockbusters than the GDP of some nations. Marketing can actually double the cost of a movie, which has resulted in many movies going straight to video at the last minute when they believed the box office take…

"A lot of the writing on the Internet about The Hunger Games is snark about its derivativeness..."

The Foglios started referring to Girl Genius as Gaslamp Fantasy, which came about from two things they got mixed up. The first was that they didn't even know the Steampunk name had already been applied to the genre, and the second was that they misremembered the title of Gotham by Gaslight. Regardless, while the…

You could always try Girl Genius or Gotham by Gaslight.

Our sun is called Sol, our moon is called Luna, our planet is called Earth. Saying that there is only one moon is not unlike saying that there is only one planet.

Rule of thumb is that any movie has to make back at least half of its budget on opening weekend, in domestic box office only, or it's considered a flop because it's very unlikely to recoup the costs over the long haul if it fails to hit that benchmark. Of course, that rule of thumb was set before the home video…

All I could think was "but the term 'biomechanical' refers to the mechanics of biological organisms, like how our musculoskeletal system allows us to walk and pick things up, not cybernetic modifications or android body replacements".

You don't keep any of the old-style lick-to-stick stamps and envelopes around, do you? Because the gum on those is supposed to be their favorite snack. I'm not sure about the sticker-style ones, since the bit I watched on that odd factoid was back when they were just starting to be available around that time. …