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A flare for drama is a big help in keeping the local systems in line.

That's a valid question, but I suspect that if we did the math, we'd find out that there are dogs, cats, and rats in the world separated from each other for many more generations than sapiens and neanderthals who crossbreed just fine. Now, number of generations isn't necessarily an honest...

Frankly, that didn't even occur to me. It seems, frankly, astoundingly obvious. Which is why I dropped it and went back to humans interacting with humans, which has been roundly ignored every time I bring it up in favor of going after the low-hanging fruit of less typical human behavior. To...

Hobo, you are correct that we are getting way, way off topic with all these other species and such. I was trying to address the "they are different species and therefore cannot mate" angle. That's really a red herring. I disagree that cultural prejudices informing the way we make decisions...

Also, on the fungi example.. I think that's significantly understating the case. In the other stages of their life cycle, some of those fungi don't have much similarity to each other at all. Some of them only form fruiting bodies in combination with other species that are genetically about...

Workable, sure. But fundamentally ignorant and incapable of informing policy in the modern age. We teach people that things are simple. We do it in a way that reinforces cultural biases. Whenever the real world gets complicated, people think it's an aberration, because we spent high school...

I was running fast over the top, as befits this not being a science forum, but if you want, I'll go into some of these in detail. There are primates in the wild who masturbate vigorously by rubbing themselves on trees. There are Old World monkeys who include sex in their social grooming, as...

True. But felines and hominids are a rather different ballgame. Hominids will mate with a rock if it's shaped roughly the right way. So will lots of other primates. Not remotely true. Many types of plants do all kinds of ridiculous genetic mumbo jumbo. In some cases, you might call it...

As is the case with a lot of DNA, the vast majority of it will be either junk or regulatory functions we don't understand yet. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for anyone to know what any of it does. That said, I'm sure within a couple years we'll have a couple people claiming to know...

She has been conditioned to lie to you by probably hundreds of customers berating her for policies over which she has no control. There isn't enough money in the world to get me to work retail ever again. And if there were, they sure as heck wouldn't be giving it to people in retail, anyway...

They did very well with it on Up. Added a real scope to the vistas without being obtrusive. Honestly, I have yet to see a live action sequence in 3D that I can endorse with no reservations, and 2D-to-3D conversions are a terrible joke on the human eye and common decency. But straight-up pure...

It's not binary. If you're telling a hard sci-fi societal allegory, you need more scientific rigor than if you're telling a space opera. Some stories or genres simply need more scientific rigor than others to be accepted by audiences. Stories that are very fantastic on some dimensions are...

I wasn't talking about him dying. I'm not so crass as that. I was talking about the decade of nonsense I was party to between 1991 and 2001. I gave up reading the series after he spent the 6 books wandering in the bushes instead of actually progressing the story. Every once in a great while...

From some quick thought about my friends, I would guess that Wiiware would hit a larger segment of the population who would actually be willing to pay for these.

EDIT: Gah! wrong thread.

Oh, ye gods. I just re-took the Bartle test for giggles, and man, it's out of date. Half of the dichotomies are choices between two things I don't care about or that are completely foreign to my experience of MMOs. Several of them require motivations that don't apply in most games. There are...

Bartle would classify all of them as some form of "socializer", but that's about as useful as saying "this apple is red" when you could classify it as "Red delicious", "Macintosh", "Rome Beauty", etc. For one thing, it's sort of useless. A "red" apple might be a very tasty eating apple or a...

Repeat it until the society learns from it, IMO. ;) Or, more accurately, writers will keep using it until they work out their own conflicts and issues with it. As long as our society continues to re-fight the same battles with bad in-group/out-group definitions, it's fertile and appropriate...

Do you see the exact same posters commenting year-to-year, Fast Learner? I doubt it. For example, this is the first year I bothered to weigh in here on GRRM at all. Until recently I hadn't read any of his books because I didn't want to pick up another unfinished series.I waited until I heard...

We had to work harder to look hardcore. I chose metal rather than rap and considered this a great virtue. I was badass. The white kids listening to rap were poseurs. Of course, D&D had already descended from hardcore to nerdy by the time I was in middle school, so the metal heads and stoners...