I wish them good luck with all this, though I wish that the political will existed on both sides to allow the Chinese to work in conjunction with NASA, the ESA, and the Russian Space Acronym. I do kind of get the feeling that the Chinese are in it as much for the propaganda and prestige as they are for the science,…

Behe's organization made a book where, in early copies, you could easily see where someone did find "creationism" and replaced with "intelligent design".

See, I disagree. There is a place for mockery. Why should religious beliefs get a free pass from mockery? It just encourages people to fold their political and scientific views, however wrong, into their religious beliefs. Why should it be okay to make fun of someone because they think Mexico is our neighbor to…

The top claim they used to counter scientific theories is that the Bible is the literal word of God, and represents eyewitness views of these events. Everything else derives from that claim.

I actually like the tower in Seattle, it looks like a spaceship... the one in Toronto looks really pretty all lit up at night, but it suffers from the same problem of being a huge concrete block.

For me, at least, the things that really say 'Warsaw Pact" are those gigantic television towers that all the major Eastern European cities have in them. Berlin and Prague both have them, and I wonder if its some sort of combination of a love for big concrete things combined with a dash of Eiffel Tower Envy.

Well, the Minds and Drones are sort of robots. And boy howdy, are they a lot of fun.

I third the Culture novels, and I'd also suggest Embassytown by China Mievelle, its not entirely 'space opera', but its certainly lots of fun weird aliens and jargon.

See, now that I'd understand... with us it was more that the paladin would refuse to interact with someone that they tagged as evil, even party members. Which could be a real pain.

Yeah, I guess my main problem with a paladin is that they tend to end up as grease stains because of exactly what you describe... they either piss of some evil being, or they get killed by their own party. They are kind of interesting to explore as character, but the person playing them has to recognize that their…

Poor Batman. Seriously, I hope Darkseid is nice enough to give him someone on the level of a Bane or Joker to deal with while he's busy beating Superman to death with Wonder Woman.

I've known people who hated other characters so much that they developed elaborate, branching trees designed to lead, ultimately, to a character's doom. The problem is that sort of thing almost always leads to hurt feelings, or an early end to a game.

You know, I've gotten to the age as a D&D player where I'd much rather people have a consistent character than a consistent alignment. I've had characters in games I've run have genocidal intentions towards whole species of tremendously evil beings that were motivated by dark thoughts of revenge. Does that make…

Particularly since Paladins have the ability to detect evil with magic, and have a mandate to defeat evil people or else lose their alignment and class abilities. I honestly find them to be profoundly creepy characters, because their persecution of evil is entirely based on the idea that their magic (which isn't able…

Heh, I had the opposite experience... the bread and blood of Jesus always made me so hungry, but you'd have to wait for another half hour before lunch. Though Lutheran's never thought of it as anything other than metaphor.

I think it would be interesting to have scientists continually regenerate one of these jellyfish for a really extended period of time and see what happens. Because I'm curious if immortality would ever happen in real life, given the huge attrition rate of predation on little tasty things in the ocean, and if it does…

What's really funny is that I assumed that the first episode on the DVDs was the real first episode, and that they had started the show with a 'previously on'. Since I'd been told that the show was famously weird, I was actually pretty happy that it was that way right from the start.

I'm also highly skeptical any sensible Bigfoot would live that close to Detroit.

When I saw ID4 in theaters, everyone clapped at the end of his speech. One of the things I like best about theaters, is the spontaneous response of the audience like that.... just like how when a bee stung Scully before she could kiss Mulder, everyone groaned.

Actually, from what I understand the Gospels were written down in Greek first. If there was a historical Jesus, he probably would have spoken Aramaic, but aside from a few references to Aramaic words within the Gospels, there is no reason to presume that they're translations. Some people have even made a fairly good…