Good thing Catholic University wasn't playing North Texas.

Some day, far in the future, archeologists will find a huge stash of forgotten Star Wars books and games, carefully concealed in clay jars in a cave on the West Bank, material banned by the Council of Disney.

The late Dr. Raymond Bice of the University of Virginia built a similar contraption (his "Bice Device") which reversed the sounds - left sound to right ear and vice versa - as a way of fucking with the heads of his first year psych students. It was a very weird experience to wear.

Doesn't stop Spanish speakers, and the meaning of the name is the same in both languages.

You know who else was in office for 12 years? Hitler. That's who.

A Hispanic colleague asked me this week why we Anglo people never name our kids Jesus. I told him it is because we are insecure and didn't want to call attention to the fact that there never HAS been a white guy named Jesus.

I sense no danger here.

The greatest threat to Humanity is whatever fucking cold I have right now, 'cause if everyone had it, we'd all be sitting around wishing for mass extinction.

Wonder if this is where the Star Trek writers got the plot device they used a couple of times where some villain or another used high frequency sound to disable the crew. I even remember one episode where Spock said something like "Sound at that frequency doesn't deafen - it kills." That always struck me as weird,…

I couldn't disagree more, at least based on the first movie. Jackson fundamentally changed the story by adding all the portentous gobbledy gook back story stuff and gratuitous combat and action - in my view, he imported all the weakest features of the Lord of the Rings (both books and movies), the humorless and bleak…

Such intellectual dissection of memes. Wow. So time to apply for grant.

Such a theory ignores the fact that no car should be going in excess of 90 mph in this (or any area) in the first place. It is sort of like blaming the owner of a tree or building for placing it in the path of a speeding vehicle. Or blaming the ground for the fatal impact of a falling airplane.

On the other hand, being killed by a giant, slow-burning hand cannon made of Mentos and Redbull does have a certain romantic, product-placement kind of appeal

I would disagree about the "unconditional surrender" demand being an error, as such, though it clearly had long-term effects. It was an effort to reassure Stalin, who was deeply paranoid about western intentions, that the US and UK would not try to cut a separate deal with the Germans and leave the Soviet Union to its…

He's kind of the R2-D2 of the Potter series. I have always said that the Star Wars series could be accurately summarized by saying "plucky little robot saves the galaxy." Works similarly for Neville in the Potter world too.

What's the point, then? Lotta words spilled in this post for nothing.

I still don't see what this achieves besides creating a fancy word problem. It is no more enlightening than noting that the rules of a particular game affect the strategies the players employ strategy. Which is not revelatory It's no more profound that noting that a quarterback would employ more complex strategies in…

This scenario actually doesn't force us to "rethink the way we calculate the odds of a coin flip." What it does is set up an artificial constraint in which we apply some kind of game theory. Try running the same thought experiment presuming that she does not know the rules of the experiment and the calculation…

I remember making several stabs at Radix but I don't remember ever making it through.

Rendezvous with Rama is my favorite sci-fi novels - maybe favorite novels of any sort - in part because it doesn't resort to lots of hocus-pocus dressed up as science. We have no idea how or why many of the features of the starship work, but at no point did I find that any of it seemed faintly implausible, or violated…