Oh, yes. The Cultural Revolution (which was pretty much the opposite of sane) effectively only ended because Mao had the decency to finally kick the bucket, and the Party managed some epic quality quickstep to get things, if not entirely on the rails, at least a lot less off them than they had been under Mao. It's no…

You think that no-one loves Mao, the Great Helmsman who unified the country and threw off the yoke of Japanese imperialism and freed the people from poverty? Who ended the civil war and modernised China? Never mind that much of what Mao did led to vast amounts of people leaping forward to an early grave. The…

Actually, I suspect it would be a battle between Mao and Indira Gandhi (or something along those lines).

Unless you are for some reason committed to the notion of having your onion in rings (e.g. for a salad) it's a lot easier to peal it if you first cut it in half. (Strangely, this is among the top kitchen tips that I ever get to dole out. To me it's something that my mum did when I was a kid, and thus not something all…

Basically, money. They didn't like the contracts Discovery was offering so opted out. Pretty much the same story as with any other long running show. The talent gets more expensive the longer the show runs and at some point something's got to give. As someone said, if Mythbusters were an ensemble crime procedural, the…

I think Leningrad Cowboys did that first in the modern times. :D

For some reason when looking for directions to a small Oregon seaside town called Bandon, Google Maps helpfully directs me to bloody Kansas of all places. That's a bit weird.

#2 is a bit tricky. Of course when talking about large and known groups (men/women/Americans/black people/etc) it's obvious that everyone knows that not all members of said group are "x", but with some identities/labels it can be difficult to be certain if the generalisation used by someone is used in full knowledge…

Well, I think Channel 4's "Embarrassing Bodies" (in UK) manages to be reasonably good and informative yet sufficiently entertaining to keep people watching, mostly by talking a lot about STIs and booze, showing people's bits and the horrible afflictions plaguing them and featuring some truly terrible diseases. It's…

The fact that someone put the shit in there first, and he's just distributing it out of the goodness of his heart for a pile of cash that would make Smaug envious, doesn't mean that he's not full of shit. In fact, if he even had the decency to deceive his own self first, one would perhaps not find all this quite so…

As long as we're in Australia, I've always found the Taman Shud -case to be intriguing. It could well be murder, after all the pathologist was "quite convinced the death could not have been natural" and suspected poison.

Some people think that people drink less of a carbonated beverage than something flat (because of the bubbles etc.), but that's about the only thing one can criticise about carbonated water, so I say go for it. (SodaStream is pretty sweet.)

People have this weird idea that just because water is the best drink to rehydrate yourself, somehow all other drinks that aren't quite as good are somehow, by default, bad, which they of course aren't.

Also, the strength of the drinks will effect the absorption rate of alcohol. Alcohol is most rapidly absorbed when the concentration of the liquid in your GI tract is somewhere in the ballpark of 20%-vol. If you drink a lot of hard liquor and nothing else the absorption can slow down, and then when you have a glass of…

But if we assume a toroidal cow, the calculations are going to get much more complex! What next, some kind of atmospheric modelling, too?!

"First, we assume a spherical cow..." And people, too, one suspects.

Indeed. These "you'll plunge the earwax deeper into your ear" -comments just make me think of people trying to clean their ears like in one of those infomercial "look how Sue has difficulty functioning in the real world" -bits.

Indeed. I've always considered the single use worlds as results of fairly recent colonisation. One cannot expect evolution to populate such a world with intelligent humanoids, but I'd argue that the probability of a spacefaring civilisation taking advantage of the natural resources of such a planet is reasonably good.…

I kinda liked it in Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis that the one special thing about humans that the aliens found valuable was that we get cancer.