I think it works a bit like that scene in Heinlein's Job, on board the bus in Heaven, where our protagonist [1] is stuck in the back of the bus with the ordinary run of souls. Suddenly his halo is enlarged to Saintly proportions [2], and everyone insists he move to the front of the bus, as a sign he is no longer of the common ruck.
[1] (who is, let us say, an ordinary writer of mostly SF)
[2] (no doubt due to a posthumous Pulitzer for a non-SF work, á la Ballard's Empire)
Fragano Ledgister @7:And, of course, Ballard wrote Empire of the Sun which wasn't SFnal...
Scraps @44:Remember who J.G. Ballard called his favorite writer? Isaac Asimov.
But by the same reasoning, Asimov wasn't stuck in the SF ghetto either: he wrote popular science, with occasional slumming in mystery -- when he wasn't actually teaching courses and writing textbooks, that is.
Rikibeth @ 585: She suspects that our more widespread than in previous years, but still not total, program of vaccinating for flu is pushing the flu bugs to mutate more rapidly and to change more thoroughly from previous years' strains,....
Multiple strains appear every year, and have for a very long time, without any "pushing" by the existence of vaccines. For instance, the animals among which the Avian and Swine flus evolved were not vaccinated to begin with. The catastrophic 1918 flu wasn't "pushed" by any "widespread vaccination program"; it hit so hard because there wasn't one.
The "flu shot" is prepared every year to target already existing strains -- not all of them, just the ones thought likeliest to be a danger over the coming year. With the best of research, this is still a guessing game, and sometimes we guess wrong. This year, for example, a strain is spreading that wasn't covered in the vaccine, and a new vaccine to cover it won't be ready until Fall.
A strain that isn't covered by the vaccine can spread among both those who didn't get the "flu shot" and those who did -- neither group has immunity, so there is no "herd immunity".
This is likelier to hit everyone than a strain that was covered by the vaccine. More people will get sick from it.
But the vaccine didn't "push" it to "mutate".
At the risk of making a stupid suggestion (and being told so), may I ask what would be wrong with attaching a retractable leash to the baby carrier -- not the installed car seat but the part that goes wherever the baby goes -- and the other end to: (a) your wrist? (b) your purse? (c) your car keys?
Not much required in the way of technology (no circuitry, no batteries, no car upgrade), but it could serve as an effective reminder, yes?
"Buy real" could also be good stock market advice: buy stock in actual manufacturers (or service providers, whatever), rather than derivatives.
Direct investment supports those companies, whose survival and success in turn repays your investment.
Derivatives are only a side bet, and ultimately you don't know who'll end up repaying you or whether they will -- witness the crash in credit default swaps.
Link missing: "(where the quakes are clustering)".
Birthday candles, okay.
Fireworks, nicer still.
But the BIG party should be held at Yellowstone National Park, by the north end of the big lake (where the quakes are clustering), just in time for the eruption.
Bring lots of hot dogs and marshmallows, and some really long sticks!
Lis Riba @ 138:
Keep in mind, that in Batman Year One (written shortly after DKR), Miller retconned Catwoman to make her a dominatrix-prostitute.
Given that she wears tight black leather (with a mask) and wields a whip, was this a huge leap of imagination?
I think the best movie take on rapists may have been in the Alien film series -- the things that come out of the eggs, looking like two hands and a snake-tail (with a penis-like organ where the "palms" and tail join), to leap on victims' faces and implant the next Alien generation down their throats.
The helpful thing about that is that men and women can equally picture being victims, with equal revulsion. 'Tain't sexy at all, just horrific -- which gives a point of reference for discussing feelings about real-life human rape.
Theophylact @ 10: She left a tip (gratuity) in their jar after watching each video.
Bob Rossney @153: I mean, Ireland is struggling to deal with immigration. (Ireland! When has that ever happened?)
I Pale at the thought.
P.S. I think you'll want to encode that weight as "5 x 10^6 kg", or "5E6 kg". The [sup] tag doesn't work here.
Bruce E. Durocher II @145: According to the final scene of The Five Doctors, multiple instantiations of the Tardis can appear in the same place and time, in which case they appear to merely coincide (entirely overlap).
I'm not sure the mass/weight would be additive in that event. From the outside, to all appearances, there is only one Tardis there and then -- and that might well include "to such instruments as massometers and weight scales".
James D. Macdonald @139:
Therefore, we should start praying to Bugs Moran forintercessionvigorisha piece of the action.
obMobster and obStarTrek!
Sad news: Forrest J. Ackerman dead at 92
On the Visual Guide's DHD photos and diagrams, there is only one Point-Of-Origin key, the remainder being the constellation keys.
The glyph designs roughly correspond to those on the gate.
"Dialing seven symbols chosen from a pool of 38 non-repeating candidates results in about 63 billion possible stargate addresses."
One oddity: only 38 symbols on the DHD, compared to 39 on the gate ring.
Aquila, the Eagle, glyph #13 on the ring, is missing on the DHD!
Who knew the Ancients were superstitious?
Let me add, as to whether the glyphs are credibly supposed to be the stated constellations:
Orion's glyph, as Daniel explains, looks like a simplified sketch of the constellation itself, shoulders, belt, and knees.
Triangulum's glyph is an isoceles triangle.
Gemini's glyph looks very much like the Roman numeral II, which is also its symbol in astrology.
Et (as the King of Siam would relish saying) cetera.
Xopher @126: Except that, as far back as the movie, it was already established that at least many symbols represented constellations, not planets, so there can't have been "38 planets" on the dial. Orion, remember?
The Stargate Visual Companion is a book, not a website. ISBN 0-7566-2361-8. It has photos of the TV set and props, including the Stargate and its glyphs, numbered and named. Orion's on there, just the way Daniel explained it in the movie. The whole æsthetic looks just the same. I haven't gone back to do a glyph-by-glyph comparison, but if you think they might've revamped the whole design, I'll look.
JCarson @119: Anyway, what kind of awesome space-time wormhole makes you tell it where you're coming from in order to dial? Shouldn't that be obvious, based on what Stargate is dialing?
It turns out that this particular kind of awesome space-time wormhole uses seven-digit addresses for within-galaxy transportation, and eight-digit addresses for long-distance dialing, such as going to another galaxy, for instance Atlantis in the Pegasus Galaxy.
So pressing the "home" symbol amounts to hitting an "I'm done" key, like pressing the "#" on your telephone keypad after entering an account number at your bank's automated line, so the system doesn't keep waiting for you to enter another number.
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