Yeah, one of the things I liked best about that show was that they took the time to go to the area around the Wonder of the World and show how it looked when it wasn't put at its best camera angle. Pilkington went along the wall and it found there are vast stretches of it that are abandoned ruins.

Well, the speed of an action potential is only 120 mph (or there abouts... I can't find it instantly on a google search), so the brain isn't super fast technically, its fast in parallel. But yeah, I'd imagine the huge amount of interconnected neurons transmit giga or terabytes of data all the time.

George Carlin put it best "Saving all the dead people up for one part of town?! What the hell kind of a medieval, superstitious, religious, bulls**** idea is that?!"

If there were a mechanism for creating ghosts, we'd have noticed it before now. As it is, you can already dramatically alter memory and personality with sufficient amounts of drugs or brain damage... there's no reason to imagine that there's some sort of ethereal person left behind when you die, when there doesn't…

Apparently Iron Man 3 is filming in the SAS campus in Cary, North Carolina. I'm really curious as to whether he's going to trash the really fancy hotel where I had my anniversary dinner.

It sounds like 10 episodes is a concession to both money and time. They filmed some of the Night's Watch stuff in freaking Iceland, for instance, and apparently they had to beg to get the Battle of Blackwater to be more than just Cersei getting sporadic reports from the war.

To me, the silence is less a definitive 'no' on there being alien life, and more a definitive 'no' on their being any form of Faster Than Light travel. With it taking hundreds and thousands of years to travel between solar systems, I could easily see inter-solar system travel being really, really hard, and the…

Writing sci-fi to inspire future scientists is like running the space program to create spin-off technologies. Sure, that sort of thing happens, but its not the most efficient way. Certainly I've known a lot of people that were inspired to do science by pop culture ideas of what science is, but were immediately…

To be blunt, I find that to just be a crock of an argument. Exploration is exploration... sometimes the best way to explore places is not to have a clumsy bipedal ape tramping around. You would say that scientists are exploring the deep sea when they are sending robots down there right? There really isn't anything…

Good luck, but I fear they're just going to waste their money trying to do too much without enough caution. Saying you want a moon base is one thing, but what are you really going to do when you're up there? Look at rocks? Prospect? Robots can do all that without needing to keep meatbags like us alive in the…

We have not stopped exploring. You have only to look at the space probes orbiting Saturn, Mercury, Mars, the Moon, the Sun, Vesta, and operating on the ground on Mars at this very minute. What we have realized is that manned exploration is orders of magnitude more expensive, more risky, and not necessarily that much…

When I was a kid, I always wondered why scientists didn't spend more time debunking this sort of stuff. As an adult, I realize that its all just a waste of money and time that, as a scientists, you almost never have an excess off. I'm sure that next generation sequencing can produce definitive evidence that the hair…

Yeah, when you're fighting zombies, you want to keep as much space between you and the McBiterpants as you can. Which anime was that, btw?

I heartily approve of anyone smart enough not to try fighting Zombies with tiny combat knives.

Given some of the sermons from North Carolina's pastors popping up on youtube lately, OSC isn't even the most vile person in our state.

It really just makes me so sad that they finally, finally make an Ender's Game movie right after OSC has burned up every last shred of good will I felt towards him. If you haven't read his letter to the Greensboro Times about the need to support Ammendment One (which bans all forms of civil union and domestic…

I do enjoy fringe... but it did at least make some major changes from the whole "The Pattern" stuff at the start.

Not to mention basic chemistry revolves around electrons moving about. There are good sci-fi concepts, and there are just terrible ones... why not just have a war where a bunch of EMPs from nukes knocked out everything instead? It doesn't have to be a freaking mystery... and we are all sick of JJ Abram's…

I think, given enough time, HIV will get cracked. However, the thing about HIV, and a lot of the other STDs, is that they can be controlled, and perhaps even eradicated with just rigorous public health measures. Get people condoms, teach them how to use them, get people tested, get people educated, get them on the…

Not to mention that cell culture as it exists today didn't begin until the early 1950s with the development of HeLa cells.