Doom Shepherd

I hate people that do that. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could build some sort of feedback machine that you could turn on, and it would just cause a SCREEEEEEECHHHHH to come out of their speakers, and they wouldn't know where it was coming from? Also, I'm listening to Victims of Science "The Device has Been Modified."

That's what I keep saying, but they still won't let me kill college students.

Jonathan Coulton - Re: Your Brains

5th down on a Google search for "ddt health study": http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/another-study-on-human-health-and-ddt-adhd-linked-to-ddt/ ADHD does not = retardation. Anyone who thinks it does must be retarded. While that study may indicate "developmental delay," it in no way indicates that the delay is "severe." You need to be able to cite your sources accurately, and refrain from the type of exagerration we see here, if you want to be taken seriously.

Nature doesn't recognize moral rights. Humans do. This is why it's not "murder" if a tiger eats you, but it is if I do. Also, just out of curiosity, are you the same danielsangeo who posts on Punditkitchen?

Well, I've never watched Farscape or Stargate, and I think Starship Troopers sucked balls (the movie, that is. The book was freaking brilliant). so I wouldn't vote those. Or the prequels.

Unfortunately, now I can't vote for all the ones I really like. Should have been a way to "check all that apply."

By who? I can't find a single study that supports this claim. Malaria can cause retardation in infants.

That was all over NPR. He's lucky he didn't leave his hillbilly state, or he would've got his ass beat by the angry hippies. I personally despise the guy (He burned a book!), but I think the reaction kinda proved his point. Anybody remember when some photographer took a crucifix, put it in a bucket of his own pee, then exhibited the photos AND got an NEA grant for it? Or the other artist who made a Virgin Mary out of poop? Christians got all pissed off, but nobody died. It's also a bit hypocritical, given that Saudi Arabia shreds Bibles. (Not that any of this was recalled by any of the media outlets I heard discussing the story...one wonders why...)

I don't think you have to be a brit to enjoy Dr Who. Well, no, you don't. After seeing a few eps on BBC America, I recently bought the most recent 5 seasons/series and am working my way through them, and love them. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.

Most of the "most awesome moment" of my life is a blank to me, mainly because in the course of being awesome I sustained a nasty concussion. (Also broken bones in my hands, cracked ribs, and serious bruising.) Here's what I know: In my last year of college, a guy I knew developed a dangerous stalker obsession with a girl who was like a little sister to me. She rejected him, mainly due to the fact that he was a sloppy unsanitary creep. (The guy had visible ear crust. It was GROSS.) He didn't take that well, and one night he decided that he was going to attack her with an aluminum baseball bat. Now, despite the fact that I'm not known as a fighter, and that this guy was about twice my size, I got between him and her. Hey, nobody else was available, so I didn't have a choice. I remember he took a swing at me with the bat. And that's ALL I remember, up until the point that a couple of other people pulled me off him. Apparently, after taking a couple of hits, I caught the bat, wrested it away from him, and proceeded to just keep hitting him until he collapsed. He got kicked out. I had to attend all kinds of hearings, but eventually it was all ruled self-defense.

Though most of us here may not be Brits, I do think we do ourselves a disservice by leaving off Dr. Who.

In my belief, there's only one sin: hurting other people unnecessarily. Everything else is just stuff we made up.

So are you the person to ask about how long it's gonna be before I can stick a chip in my head and suddenly understand Latin, or have a graduate degree in paleontlogy?

From what I hear, the gays feel the same way about the straights. After all, who makes more disgusting spectacles of their tongue-wrestling skills in public than straight people? Um, NO. That's not how it works. There's a huge difference between sexuality and committment. Just because a bisexual decides to be exclusive to one person, it doesn't stop them from being able to be sexually attracted to either sex. That's like saying that just because I'm committed to my girlfriend, (sorry, ladies,) I automatically don't find that girl who plays Amy Pond on Dr. Who super-hot.

We might engineer our own successors. A guy named Dougal Dixon wrote a book called "Man after Man," in which future scientists engineer humans to work in space (even in a vacuum), and they go on to colonize the cosmos as a successor species to man. They also engineer humans to fill ecological niches abandoned by animals who the humans drove extinct. Eventually, "Prime" man goes extinct, and the engineered "aftermen" evolve on their own. It's kinda creepy, but interesting, if you can find a copy.

You're forgetting that I said "benevolent" dictator. This presupposes that the dictator has society's best interests at heart, he does good because he feels like it (the same reason any of us do good when we don't have to) as a matter of character, which means that he or she would seek to choose the best possible successor. I forsee a battery of tests of intelligence and character and psychology that would be applied to a number of potential candidates, even before the Dictator takes the future successor as an apprentice. And of course, you're also missing that my example of an ideal dictator QUIT and returned power to the people immediately after his goals were accomplished. In that event, there isn't even a need to choose a successor. The best emergency leaders want to get the job done and get out.

Apparently, the makers of "Waiting for Superman" would disagree. Personally, I think one of the biggest problems with education is that the people making the big decisions about education are politicians, sociologists, psychologists... ANYBODY but educators. And that is why we have the students with the highest self-esteem in the world... despite it being entirely undeserved. They can shout "We're number one!!!" but they can't SPELL it. (Some slight exaggeration for rhetorical purposes.) I find it amusing, but not surprising, that in studies of student self-esteem, the group with the lowest self-esteem (Asian kids) tended to be the highest achievers.

Okay, here's an old one: I'm in college, over at my best friend's trailer (she lived off campus) with a few other friends, getting ready to play D&D. Suddenly, there's a flash and a HUGE explosion outside. We all rush out of the trailer, and we're suddenly dressed as Next Gen. Starfleet officers. A half dozen Romulan Warbirds are coming in low over the countryside, strafing the houses and trailers. Everybody but me draws their hand phasers and starts shooting at the Romulan troops who are now being beamed down. Me, I pull this BFG-looking thing out of nowhere (maybe out of the same place where Highlander stores his sword), and start shooting at the Warbirds. I hit one, and it starts to crash. I fire again, before I wake up. Curiously, the entire time this is going on, "Renegade" by Styx is playing as background music. "The jig is up, the news is out, they finally found me..."

If we're talking literary SF, I enjoy the works of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven, POurnelle, and Douglas Adams. I'm also a big fan of alternate universe science fiction, including Harry Turtledove, Eric Flint, and Robert Conroy.

You are either not being entirely truthful, or willfully ignorant. Name TWO transitional fossils that are fakes.

Let's put it this way. I had refused to watch the show, because a friend LIED to me and told me it was a rip-off of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Another friend made me watch a single episode, and I was hooked after wards (It was "Mind War," and it was G'Kar's brilliant speech concerning ants, that did it.) A couple years later, I was dating a girl, a very staunch trekkie. She reluctantly agreed to watch a VHS-taped hour of B5 with me. SIX hours later she said "This isn't like Star Trek. It's..." and she furtively looked around as if committing treason, "...it's BETTER."

It's not the first time planets have been "demoted." The asteroids Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta were considered planets for about 50 years after Ceres's discovery. Ceres is now also a "dwarf planet."

No, but there's an extremely small possibility that if you live long enough, you will play Dr. Who on TV. Um yes, scientists try to disprove what they believe all the time. (Or to be more accurate, using observation and experimentation they try to determine whether an argument is true or false). Determining whether or not an argument is falsifiable is an inherent part of the scientific proccess. Crreationists do not. There is no experimentation in Creationism. No Creationists ever do science to try to determine whether or not God exists. (Some people - like me - do, but Creationists always ignore the results.) There are, however, experiments that can be carried out to help determine whether or not Panspermia is a possible hypothesis. The Plenetary Society is working on one right now, to determine whether or not organisms can actually survive being exposed to space for the kind of time it would take to travel between planets. They're putting a sample containier holding several hardy Earth life forms on a Russian probe that is scheduled to fly from Earth to Phobos and back. If the critters siurvive the trip, it will lend weight to (but not prove, by any means) the panspermia hypothesis. I thought Pan was latin for foreign. Nope, "whole" or "encompassing" Pangaea = all the Earth Pantheon = all the Gods Panacea = cure-all. Pan-European = across Europe. And so on. The literal translation of "Panspermia" is, in fact, "all seed." Nothing about origin, human, or race. You all keep falling back on God... It isn't possible that some alien species seeded us here? Theoretically possible, but unlikely. Our biochemistry suggets an Earth origin. (At least, until we can study the biochemistry of other worlds where life has arisen... which is a long way off.) In any case, saying we were seeded doesn't answer the original question... where did the seeders come from, ad Infinitum.

A contradiction in terms. Not really. Though I should have used "Dictatorship" since "tyranny" carries too many negative connotations. Most good families are benevolent dictatorships. (Or maybe co-dictatorships.) The problem, as I said, is finiding a Dictator (and note I'm using the OLD meaning of "Dictator.") who actually has the best interests of the citizenry at heart, and who is wise enough to lead, or wise enough to choose advisers to guide him in decision making in the areas in which he is not knowledgeable enough to lead on his own. The best leaders, it is said, are those who surround themselves with advisers who are smarter than they are. There have been good Dictators in the past. Lucius Quinctius Cincinattus is generally considertd the greatest. He was so well-regarded that many of the US's founders formed an organization named after him. George Washington was its first President. Though I think I would need a little longer than Cincinattus did.