The Sarlacc is just a gigantic ant-lion. Since it's sessile it probably doesn't need to eat much (and obviously it makes its food last, since it digests things slowly over a period of a thousand years.) And we see several times that the Tatooine deserts are filled with large animal life.

Star Wars is a fairy tale. It's not science fiction. It takes place in an imaginary universe where things work differently. (Why didn't Scalzi include on his list, "It's not actually possible to lift large objects with your mind"?)

Speaking for myself, the only sorts of script problems that really bother me are ones of human motivation, because imaginary universe or not, these are supposed to be real people. I don't want to watch a movie and think, "Wait, he/she wouldn't do that." (Leia sees that the Empire let them escape from the Death Star. So why does she go straight to the rebels' secret base, when she must know that the only reason for the Empire to let them go is to follow them?)

Well, I use running shoes because I run outdoors, and what with the rocks and soda cans and broken beer bottles, well, it's a lot easier to replace damaged shoes than damaged feet. Plus it's cold outside more than half the year and I don't feel like running in the snow barefoot.

By the way, I am a heel-strike runner myself -- as are about 75% of runners, according to the running magazines -- and twenty-six years of heel-striking hasn't caused me any foot or joint pain yet. No running style is "best", because everybody's body is different. The best running style is the one you're most comfortable with.

Right....because "large numbers of non-doctors" have done two minutes' poking around on Google, and decided that they can now speak with authority on a subject they've never heard of until five minutes ago, therefore the kid's doctors are incompetent.

Heh. My recruiting sergeant phrased it something like this:

"Yeah, there's this question here about whether you've used drugs. If, you know, you maybe just smoked a couple joints back in high school or something...I'm not telling you to lie...nobody's gonna go looking for that." (Pause) "I'm not telling you to lie." (Meaningful look.)

That doesn't make any sense. When I needed a new power supply for my old T21 Thinkpad, I just called IBM and ordered one. They didn't ask why I wanted it, or ask me to prove I hadn't stolen my laptop. Why would they? It's a spare part. They have no reason to care what I do with it.

The same seems to apply to this case, from what I can tell. The guy wanted a spare part. He called Alienware to order it. Why did they even ask what he wanted it for? If he were going to use it as a paper weight, or as a weird kind of sex toy, what difference does that make to them? It's a spare part.

Yes, that's true. Because humans and pigs are so similar, almost all parasites that live in pigs, like trichinosis, can also live in humans, so we have to cook the pig meat enough to kill parasites before we eat it. On the other hand, humans and cows are not very similar, so cow parasites generally cannot live in humans; we don't have to cook cow meat thoroughly, because any parasites that may be living in the cow meat won't affect us.

Similarly, if a cow gets sick, that's not really a concern for people; if you're a farmer, and your cow gets a bronchial infection, you don't have to worry about catching it if the cow coughs on you, because most cow diseases can't live in human hosts. However, if your pig gets the flu, then you do have to worry, because there are many variants of pig diseases that can live in humans.

People died of infectious diseases long before sanitization began. Europeans in the 14th and 17th centuries lived their whole lives massively exposed to germs of every kind (living shorter, less generally healthy lives than they do now as a consequence), and that was no help at all when the bubonic plague came.

Flu viruses live in bird populations, and mostly people don't get sick from them because birds and humans are so dissimilar. But pigs can get the flu from birds -- mainly from drinking water that infected birds have crapped in -- and pigs and humans are so similar that we can catch many pig diseases. (This is why you can eat rare beef but not rare pork.) These viruses mutate in the pigs, that's why they're so deadly. The H1N1 strain that caused the 1918 pandemic is still around, it's just that it isn't as deadly any more because we've accomodated ourselves to it.

This current strain is not a "previously harmless germ"; it's new, and so no amount of previous exposure to other germs would have any effect at all on our reaction to this one. Worrying about over-sanitization leading to immune weakness is probably a valid concern, but it doesn't apply here, and invoking it is an example of one-theory-to-fit-everything sloppy thinking.

Amazon has an automated feature that tags any book as "adult" if a certain number of people complain about it (using the "report this as inappropriate" button.)

A hacker, apparently as revenge for some delisting on Craigslist for which he blamed gay people, scraped Amazon for books whose metadata tagged them as GBLT, and then mass-reported them as "adult" to get them removed from search rankings. (The details are here: http://pastebin.ca/1390576.)

So it was both a glitch *and* a hack: that is, the glitch was that a hacker could take advantage of an automated feature in this way. The reply sent to Mark Probst -- that Amazon excludes adult material from searches -- was perfectly accurate, and simply sent to him at a time when Amazon had not yet realized that this hack was taking place.

I also have to point out people have no right to tell any store what they can and can't sell

Of course they do. It's called the free market. It goes like this:

1) Amazon decides to categorize what they sell in a manner that a certain group of people finds objectionable.

2) The offended group responds by withholding their business from Amazon.

3) If the losses Amazon suffers from this are above a certain threshold, they will reverse the policy; if not, they won't.

Every interest group in America uses this approach all the time. It was probably an interest group that caused the policy decision at Amazon in the first place. It's Amazon's fiduciary responsibility to maximize its income, so it will appease whichever group spends more money.

So, if I run into the guy who owns one of the two gas stations in my town, and I tell him, "You know, Jim, I use Bill's gas station instead of yours because I can get coffee at his place," I am forcing Jim to start selling coffee?

I actually thought one word change really summed up the difference between the comic and the movie.

In both versions there is a scene where the vigilante Rorschach is in a prison cell with a crowd of rioting prisoners trying to break into his cell and kill him. One prisoner reaches through the bars to try to grab Rorschach and says, "We've got a prison full of guys that hate your guts! What the hell have you got?"

Rorschach grabs the guy's hands and ties them together using strips ripped from his shirt, breaking some fingers in the process. As he does, he answers the guy's question:

In the comic, the answer is, "Your hands. My perspective."

In the movie, the answer is, "Your hands. My pleasure."

That sums it all up, I think. The comic uses violence; the movie enjoys violence. Not only are there more fight scenes in the movie, the fights are a hundred times more violent, carefully showing the broken bones rip out of the flesh in slow-motion loving detail.

According to TFA the guy has been in and out of hospitals getting various treatments for twenty years. So your thesis does not seem likely.

I agree. When I was in seventh or eighth grade (mid-80s) we had a home economics class, which was required for everybody (boys and girls both). It was in three segments: how to cook, how to sew, and how to shop. The shopping part included stuff like how to fill out a check, what a loss leader is, how to recognize a bait-and-switch, and so on. In terms of long-term usefulness, it was one of the best classes I ever took. Something like that class really should be required in every school.

That's not really true. Before the war, the South had many wealthy individuals, but remember that their economy was entirely agricultural and they were totally dependent on only three cash crops (tobacco, sugar, and cotton.) By contrast, the North was heavily industrialized, had a much larger population, and had a much more diverse economy, and thus a much broader tax base. In fact, among the reasons the North won the war is that they were so much better financed.

Well, what that actually shows, I think, is that Oppenheimer was very, very good at talking his way out of trouble. Consider that after he tried to murder his graduate advisor, all that happened to him was that he had to see a psychiatrist for the 1920s equivalent of anger management. He received no other punishment and in fact he completed his graduate work at the same university.

Consider further that General Groves selected him to run the Manhattan Project even though he had all the following black marks against him: he was only 38, and would have to be in charge of many people senior to him; he was a theoretical physicist, and would have to be in charge of applied scientists; he had no administrative experience whatever; he had no mechanical aptitude at all and was helpless with the simplest machine; he was a leftist and all his friends were open Communists; and oh yeah, he tried to murder his graduate advisor. The lesson: it's really important to be a good interview.