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Apparently some people are now taking D&D to be the original source (look at Table 2-2): http://home.utah.edu/~rfs4/jkm02.htm

Oh you know her too? I was impressed until I found out med school was like "Mr. Li's Institute of Tai Chi Aromatherapy." I pretty much make my job up as I go along, so it works for me.

The reason it never turned me on was that all the DL stuff I saw was built around characters from unbearably cheesy novels that I wasn't going to read just for the sake of understanding the setting. Too much assumed reference to the heroic deeds of super ultrapowerful Whoosits and Whatsisnames...

Secret rolls.

I think it wasn't until I was about maybe 10 or 11 that I figured out horror films were supposed to be scary. But then the first film my dad ever saw was King Kong, and he was 7 at the time, so I guess maybe it's in the genes or something. I practically grew up on Dr. Creep and Saturday Shock...

It's better to let your young one watch the Old Ones than to let the Old Ones watch your young one.

Hence "doppelgegangener" - a dead doppleganger "doppelginger" - tangy, dead doppleganger that you're telling a story about "doppelwiedergekommener" - an undead doppleganger

I can't remember the last time I saw someone play a single-class human fighter.

Yeah, if you want to bring phosphorous bronze, aluminum bronze, etc. into it, but you'd have to compare bronze with exclusively modern metallurgy to steel with period metallurgy.

Bronze of the same volume as iron weighs around 10% more - you just can't argue against density. Practically speaking it also has to be much thicker to get the same stiffness. The factor required to match iron is pretty ridiculous (only has ~1/2 the shear modulus)...

The short answer is that D&D rules for weapon sundering and damage are so coarse and unrealistic that the real differences between bronze and steel probably can't be captured effectively. I think the best thing to do is drop the hardness to 9 and increase the weight by about 20%, perhaps even...

No, but the trailers look reasonable. The new Doctor seems to be one of the junkies from Trainspotting.

That's what we don't know and won't ever know if we dump a bunch of terrestrial algae on it and hope for the best. The problem with objectively evaluating microbial evolutionary processes on Earth is that we know they get a lot of their genetic material by trading it around, which is even...

Some organisms do already use extra pigments to supplement the chlorophyll, though the chlorophyll is still at the heart of the process. There's been a lot of speculation as to why the fundamental photosynthetic pigment has that peculiar absorption gap - there might have been some advantage to...

Molecular evolution is relevant right now to understanding pathogens like bird flu, Ebola, disease-resistant TB, and HIV, which are all pretty relevant to the human condition. Terraforming Mars I figure would cost quadrillions of dollars, take thousands of years, and in the end probably wouldn't...

It sounds to me like the other player doesn't know what a monk is. Seriously. I recall some other times when I've run into people playing D&D who didn't know the thing a class had taken its name from, definitely "paladin," I think "rogue" too. Oh, for the "does it fit?", I usually use setting...

Just imagine writing it. In the end, I think it did have a feeling of authenticity though, like the rather byzantine histories of Castel Sant' Angelo, the Hagia Sophia, the Vatican, the Tower of London, etc.

I think these two are specifically addressed in the preview, with the answers yes and no. Apparently, a wizard can now spend the first half of his career as more than the party's umbrella.

I think the novelty is more in the mechanism - DNA repair is a pretty well known phenomenon. It just means that the mutation rate is slower than it could be, not that it doesn't happen, since the repair mechanisms sometimes fail to detect or repair damage.

Nucleic acids and proteins have a very chicken-and-egg relationship, but there are a lot of possibilities as to how they originally got together.