Serenity/Firefly were good, too. The TV show is even rewatch-worthy.

I'm in the same boat. Even if I brought my bike on the train to shorten the endpoints, only one train runs from my home to work in the morning, and it is about an hour and a half before I can get the kids to school. The single return train comes back far too early. The result is that I'd have to change trains and it would take over an hour to go 10 miles. It takes me 15-20 minutes in the car.

Agreed. This is one reason public transit is so popular in NYC - it might not be any faster than transit in other cities but driving is even slower.

One way to improve things is to make the bus immune to traffic. If you could sit on the beltway for 30 minutes in bumper-to-bumper or take the same trip in 20 on a bus in a dedicated lane, you might be more inclined to do he latter. They could even let cars in that lane for some kind of surcharge pricing to make better use of the capital investment.

I lived in NYC for almost 5 years and never saw a pressure washer in the MTA. Thank god for the 30lb rats - they at least keep the edible waste to a minimum.

This will get better with time. George Lucas, and the other people of his generation involved in making films, are products of their time. They made films based on films they had seen earlier. Certainly Star Wars is nowhere near as blatantly offensive as the films that influenced it, and the next generation of filmmakers will produce films even further detached from the older stereotypes.

A few years ago I saw "The Nutcracker" with my daughter. One of the main characters (the little girl, Clara or Marie) was played by a black ballerina. This is a fairly major sign of change - in the recent past, people would have been hung up on the fact that it is very unlikely that Dr. Stahlbaum would have a mixed race family in early 19th century Prussia. Naturally, it is also unlikely that an enchanted nutcracker would fight a mouse army, but I digress...

And when you "blink", you still get an interference pattern. Unless you "filter" the one that hits the first detector - then the pattern goes away. So no prize for you just yet.

No, I mean I enjoyed watching it. You didn't, and that's OK too.

OK, so you prefer superhero movies. To me, the Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy movies were also fun - but similarly not liable to become classics. I think you'd have to give Christopher Nolan some props, too. He does both superhero and sci-fi.

Your theory does not explain why the interference pattern is destroyed when they start filtering the photons.

Describe the mechanism for "filtering of photons based on time of emission" and there is a Nobel Prize waiting for you.

It is trivial to observe that the placebo effect occurs with a sugar pill or with a homeopathic remedy. If there is "quantum mechanics" involved, it is almost certainly not the mechanism described by homeopathy.

Yes, I don't think he was being malevolent. I just think Lucas is not that good and fell on stereotypes he was familiar with, not even aware of what was wrong with them. Space villain? Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon! Goofy comedic character? Blackface minstrels! Greedy slave-owning merchant? Shylock in Merchant of Venice!

I might have the direct influences wrong, but I'm pretty sure he just lifted ideas from past films without considering (or even being aware of) the ramifications of his choices.

Actually, my least favorite casting choice was Simon Pegg as Scotty. I love Simon Pegg, and still laughed at him in Star Trek... I just think he was misplaced. No one says Khan has to be Indian. He was Mexican the first time.

There was a second, and they are currently making a third.

I hear you, and if it was just Jar-Jar I would probably write it off. But the Jewish/Arab caricature in Watto and the Japanese caricature in the Trade Federation just makes it hard to ignore.