I'd say that the Ender's Game series probably ends like this. When you finally wade through Children of Men, they discover instant transport, the ability to generate stuff by thinking about it really hard, and have at their disposal a variety of horrible world ending weapons. Its the sort of level of power where one…

There are a lot of cannon novels that cover this period (which aren't all that great, apparently). It sounds like the Rebels got a lot of momentum, and the Empire didn't have a good succession policy in place, it was the Rebels against a variety of Imperial factions. You have to imagine too, that the Imperial…

I felt like the Doctor just needed to show up in the middle of T:SCC and yell "STOP IT!" over and over again.

What's even more glaring is that the past and the future aren't running at the same speed at the same time. Once Skynet sent a machine back into the past, the future should change instantly, since the past has already been modified. Its not like you get to the machine 5 minutes later and send a person back in time 5…

Avatar had to make a huge amount of compromises in order to achieve its happy Na'vi victory. They couldn't explain anything about the use of Unobtainium, other than that is has value, they made the mining a private expedition rather than an Earth wide effort (which is rather stupid... they made space travel seem so…

Exactly, the solution is not to find better ways to produce Bear Bile, but to better educate the people who are using those products that they are not medicine, they don't work, and even when there are useful properties in these products, its much, much better to synthesize them so you have a known and controlled…

That is true... the situation with a deaf person being a perfect lip reader is a good example of ease in story telling trumping a more realistic setting. And to an extent, its understandable to keep things moving at a good clip. And sometimes, it can be exaggerated the opposite way too, where the difficulties facing…

Its not just autistic people that are expected to have super powers. People imagine blind people to have super hearing that can make up for their lost sight. Having a blind friend that can get lost in her own bedroom, I can tell you that's not exactly true. Deaf people in fiction are perfect lip readers too... I…

I feel the same way... it was a shocking dose of realism, that the man of faith would ultimately be disappointed, and that his legacy would be co-opted by someone more bloody minded. Though I still think Lost never did a good job of explaining why Jacob's evil counterpart was ... well, evil. All he wanted to do was…

@Thidrekr

I always find the "this caused the fall of the Rome" ideas to fall a little flat, because they don't really explain why Rome persisted for as long as it did. If the whole population of the city had chronic lead poisoning, you'd think it wouldn't have become a great empire at all, or even a major presence in Italy. …

I guess my question is whether JJ Abrams actually is involved with many of these shows after he lends his name to them, or if he just gets the general idea, hires writers and directors and sets the show marching on its way. Same for Spielberg. If they're just slapping a name on something, its no wonder that Star…

Yeah, you can suss out a whole bunch of random EMF variations, but that still doesn't answer the question of "why are ghosts EMF?". You also see those ghost hunters trying to find warm and cold spots, but that doesn't explain "why are ghosts hot, or cold?". Its just a clever way to appear more professional than the…

You can in a lab, certainly. I seem to recall that scientists were able use a very strong magnetic field to mess with people's brains enough to give them out of body experiences when the fields were directed to a particular portion of the brain. Since neurons uses electrochemistry to transmit their signals, they can…

The whole table top gaming system suffers a lot from the fact that they have made a game that promotes individual creativity and inventiveness, and yet still need to sell people a ton of books. When I did a lot more DMing a few years ago, I used 3E, or 3.5, but I pretty much made up my own monsters to fit my style of…

I also love how the movie didn't feel the need to get bogged down trying to condense a whole comic book series into a single movie like a lot of other comic book movies do, but just built its own world on the principals of the comic.

The Kennedy Space Center already has a fun, cheap little shuttle launch simulator. Its amazing how you can change people's perception of their orientation just by messing with the angle of their chair.

Heck, the question mark seems to be a perfectly good symbol to me. Science is a process of questioning, correction, and extrapolation.

While asteroids are an existential threat, and human travel within and outside the solar system is important, I think there are plenty of ways to further research into those areas without necessarily shooting people out there. The trip to the moon is a lightweight one compared to living on the Moon, or going to Mars,…

While there is definitely something symbolic about manned space flight, it seems sort of ridiculous to imagine that the US is somehow 'behind' China, when China is trying to replicate something America accomplished 40 years ago, and that our space tech is somehow 'behind' that of the Chinese when you consider that we…