Or if the Kraken was Edison.

Its really hard to beat the death of Spock. What a way to go. But you take Kirk out of his own time and introduce him at the very tail end of Generations? If they were going to have Kirk as a character, he should have been in the movie for the whole run, not just as an extended cameo. Have him buddy up with Riker,…

The problem I had with it was just this. They had the capability to go backwards in time, seemingly without any limitations. So, why pick that moment? Why couldn't Kirk have just gone back to *his* time and said, hey, lets find this guy now, before he starts blowing up suns. Its not like he wasn't just a refugee…

I think that's over simplifying. Science uses a huge amount of methods for producing data beyond simple language. That's part of the problem a lot of physicists have, since they can clearly measure a lot of very small or very large phenomena but lack an easy way to relate them to our own experiences. And that's…

Something I would add would be the Microbiome. The cheap DNA sequencing being developed to sequence human genomes is already highly, highly effective at sequencing the genes of viruses and bacteria, and are giving us a much larger understanding of the microbial ecology around and within humans. Being able to…

I honestly wasn't too worried about South Korean textbooks. The creationists were only having success because the scientific community was busy doing what it does best, science, and the creationists could just fly under the radar without much criticism. Once its out in the open, the full wait of scientific objection…

Not to mention 'Bain Capital'.

This validates every bitter experience I've had with these stupid things. The claw goes down, and the toy just slips right out, no matter how good the positioning actually is. And, you know what, its fine, if they advertised it as a gambling machine, but it seems to clearly suggest that you can get good enough at to…

What's interesting is that the Bubonic Plague came here by way of China. There was a big outbreak in San Fransisco in the early 1900s that was brought over on ships during a very large outbreak in China, and it got into the prairie dogs after that and has been lurking ever since.

This must be more of a problem for popular science writing, because in college I never heard "Junk DNA" being used to refer to non coding DNA that was actually good for something. Maybe its just me having a wrong impression, but I always assumed junk DNA was the DNA that really wasn't good for anything, like the…

I'd love to see some DNA sequencing on the skins. I've heard that there are potentially two subspecies of crocodile in the Nile, and it would be interesting to see how these ancient skins match up to the current ones.

I think we'll have to use a spectrum of different tests. I've done a lot of work with cell cultures, and at one point we compared our results with those done in mice, and there were quite dramatic differences in how some chemicals are processed in a whole body that you just cannot get by using cell culture. I think…

And also, its good to remember the things that were permitted in the bible. Slavery, genocide, the murder of disobedient children, the murder of cheaters, beating a slave until almost dead, murder of people that work on sabbath, systematically making women second class citizens, rapists marrying the women they rape,…

So, on looking that up, it does seem a lot more promising a technology (wiki is saying they've vitrified kidneys and such), but is that the technology they're using for cyro-preserving people? Because if they're still doing it in the old methods, those people *are* dead, unrecoverable so. And Alcor hasn't been…

A waste of money. Even if there is a fantastic advance in cryogenics, it won't change the fact that the *current* preservation technology will pretty much render her body pile of mush if it was ever thawed out. And that's presuming that the companies don't just go out of business, suffer a power failure, or are just…

Even a small local flood would seem huge for the people experiencing it, particularly since almost every early civilization built up around rivers. Some of the Mississippi river floods, or the ones in Australia last year had people clinging to trees surrounded on all sides by water. It would be easy to imagine the…

I think the real problem to the market isn't so much that buyers are getting artificial stuff sold to them (though apparently the market is flooded with artificial quartz gemstones) since you could always regulate that sort of thing somewhat. Its that, once you buy a gemstone, how can you ever prove its provenance to…

He could come with a little medicine cabinet to keep them in.

What other awesome old horror movies could you do this for? A The Fly action figure you can squeeze to produce vomit perhaps? Or a bunch of Hellraiser action figures all in a nice puzzle box. Or your own little possessed Exorcist doll. Hug her and she says "Let Jesus f*&# you!".

Its certainly not the *only* element... BSG did a lot of other things well. But with something like Fringe, where the 'science' annoyed me (particularly in the first season), the show having a sense of humor made all the difference.