Supergrunch

Troilus and Cressida is a cool play though, very underappreciated. I have 8000 words for the 14th of January, but have done 4000 of them... Oh, got a PhD application to sort out too. And I got IDed buying a 12 yesterday.

I agree that CAD is rubbish, but am too brain-dead right now from essay writing to critique it, so I'll do that later. And I have complex views on xkcd. What I do want to do is plug Gunnerkrigg Court, which is pretty amazing. It's a long form dramatic webcomic with twinges of Harry Potter that's basically about the clash of science and magic. And did I mention it's awesome? It's better than lots of published graphic novels (well, it itself is published now), and apparently Neil Gaiman is a fan. The art starts out good but not outstanding, but gradually gets brilliant: clicky 1 clicky 2

I saw this the other day, very postmodern. I overheard someone in the cinema describe it as Avatar meets Cloverfield, which is about right. While I like the concept and didn't realise how much it was ad-libbed, I had various problems:

Bard wins the thread, although not without a little espousing of obfuscation. :wink: It would be awesome (and consistent) if Oxigen really turned out to be a Platonist though. Anyhoo, Majora's Mask is still winning. Which is better than many things that could have won, although it's sadly not a game I ever really had a chance to get into.

Can't you just use the [noparse] tag?

Flink has the best name evar.

That episode was amazing, I don't even care about the lost character development or anything. And milk guy made such an awesome villain.

Melee > Brawl, but then again I really haven't spent much time on Brawl. SotC or Portal should win this, with Metroid Prime a little behind.

I reckon it's Jonnas for me.

This thread is amazing. I've never considered socks much of a problem... I just take them off. Clearly some of you need to be more agile in your sock removing abilities.

This looks amazing, as expected.

I've done a whole course on this stuff - it's quite fun I suppose. There are a hell of a lot of DEs, if you like that kind of thing. I perhaps liked the epidemiology most.

Yesterday I got a load of linguistics books for free. Yay for conferences!

I think Nintendohnut is likely to be right about the die comment. As for the parallel v.s. single universe thing, I agree that a single universe is more likely because of all the timings etc., but it's possible that the parallel universe is just sufficiently similar to the previous one for Simon to guess what will happen. Or more plausibly, he may have worked things out by trial and error like you're saying. But I wouldn't worry too much about this, because script writers almost always conflate the two time travel possibilities, meaning that they can just let things happen however they want.

The problem is that it's actually full moon, crescent moon, and new moon. That always annoyed me.

Substrate = the substance in which an organism lives and/or carries out reactions, not the fundamental structural element. Humans (and presumably this bacterium) largely use water as a substrate. But yeah, silicon lifeforms are less feasible - they'd not only be heavier, they'd have less stable macromolecules, as silicon isn't as happy forming such bonding structures. Nonetheless, you could even postulate organisms using something making fewer than 4 covalent bonds, perhaps with heavier use of ligands. But this kind of thing gets increasingly unlikely. And yeah, I doubt any eukaryotes will be found that exhibit this property, but it'd be awesome. What I'm interested in is what the organism uses in place of pyruvate dehydrogenase (or the bacterial equivalent), which is one of the key proteins that's allosterically inhibited by arsenic.

Yes you did. Thus making youself unable to win it. If you actually hadn't proposed it then you would be capable of winning it.

I think we should have an award for best new award, which I should get for proposing best new award as an award.

Just the entire discussion of evolution and chicken/egg arguments. Essentially, selection (whether it be natural, sexual, kin, or whatever, but not artificial) is a non-random non-teleological process, with mutation and random genetic drift being the random processes that feed selection. Evolution is what we term the interaction and results of all these phenomena when we combine them with genetic inheritance. Note that acquired characters can be inherited culturally, but not genetically. Also, the bacterium isn't just capable of living in arsenic, it appears to use arsenic instead of phosphorus in all its macromolecules, which is pretty crazy. It brings to mind the astrobiological proposals of silicon-based lifeforms using ammonia as a substrate.

This thread makes me facepalm. (the discovery is cool though) Oh, and just to confuse everything more, Darwin (unlike modern scientists) believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Boo, it's not online any more.

Happy birthday to you merry chaps.

Here we go, a dodgy paint diagram to make things clearer: Wikipedia calls these type 2 (mutable timeline) and type 3 (alternate timelines) universes. Type 1 universes don't allow paradoxes at all.