People need to lighten up.

If the quotes were instead from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, perhaps something pithy like "Mostly Harmless", we'd be applauding their sense of irony. Instead they were from another book, just one arguably more well-read.

The issue here is that these sorts of things will be taken as evidence of some sort of religious crusade. But Muslims around the world already have more than enough justification to be pissed off, this is just another drop in the bucket. And even if they didn't, Dutch cartoonists and Salman Rushdie have already stepped on enough toes to merit the occasional assassination attempt for their own politically incorrect behaviour.

Which is to reiterate: people need to lighten up.

I must have been answering the call of nature when the movie claimed that "technology is bad", because I didn't get that impression from it at all. At most, there was a "might makes right" is bad, and "allowing mankind to become subservient to quarterly shareholder reports" is bad, but that's about it.

The scientists in the movie did wondrous things with their avatar technology, and the Na'vi had their own, organic version of the same, but never did I see a message that any of this was bad. What was portrayed in a poor light was forcibly relocating a people so as to be able to mine out a large chunk of resource that they're sitting on top of, and that's just theft.

The submitter's 3D glasses must have been defective if he's getting an anti-tech message from this.

Astronomers generally don't worry about piddly little details like factors of 2 or 3. Often the potential error associated with making the measurement itself can make the point moot, especially when dealing with extragalactic distances, since most of our distance scale calibrations tend to be done "in galaxy". Error propagation isn't fun. Factors of 10, on the other hand, are more serious... In this specific case, however, I suspect someone either made a typo or used a nice, round phrase like "one billion".

wAnder