An AI to add a laugh track to the Simpsons so you'll know when there has been a joke.

And red-state conservatives don't smoke pot?

Actually, I think physicists have speculated that gravity is the weakest force because some of it leaks out of our brane. Stands to reason that some would leak in from other branes to. Mutual attraction means matter clumps up "in the same place" on nearby branes. Dark matter is dark because only its gravitation leaks in; other forces and interactions are constrained to its own universe.

The amount of dark matter - or rather, the amount of gravitational energy leaking in - might tell us how many branes we are "adjacent to" in the bigger scheme of things.

They need to update gunboat diplomacy to railgunboat diplomacy.

Sharks can easily swim around either.

I want new toys, not more of the same old crap you used to give me.

And a pony. With railguns on its head..

Why are so many people such jerks?

One big problem is that the "nutritional" industry, which amount to well-spoken charlatans. They make outlandish, unprovable claims, and people swallow it (literally) by the billions.

They masquerade marketing as science in order feign legitimacy, and the fact is they aren't providing anything with a provable benefit.

The only regulatory bar they have to cross is that it's not obviously harmful. There's no requirement that the 'supplement' be beneficial.

It's bad enough to claim that some herb or vitamin supplement provides health benefits that are nonexistent. It's another thing entirely to sell a product that doesn't even have what is on the label. This morning, ABC news had a story about a number of nutritional companies were forced to pull their 'supplements' after testing proved they didn't contain anything they claimed to have.

I wish I could say I'm surprised, but after working for such a company, I have few doubts: the entire industry is rotten to the core, and is only interested in fooling their customers into buying snake oil. It's not like it's an insular thing; you're have to be aware of what the competition is doing, and I saw the same BS everywhere.

Whereas in the real world, if you look at published papers rather than magazine articles, scientists predicted warming over cooling by a 6:1 ratio during 1965-1979.

Also, for those who didn't understand greenhouse gasses, cooling would be a natural supposition since we had been in an interglacial for about as long as the previous time. Turns out that interglacials aren't as clockwork as people used to think, but some scientists still think there's an end-interglacial forcing that partly counteracts the anthropogenic forcing in the opposite direction.

Please add these to your list of facts to ignore.

I think he's a better troll than cartoonist.

Look what happened to the British Empire.

Nine out of ten mes agree!

FDA...? Do they consider mosquitos food or drugs?

GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

Sure, why not. At 22,000 miles away, the letters won't be visible (let alone legible) to most ground-based telescopes.