The Hall of Fire

tinwë, oh, geez, I'm so, so sorry to hear that you are worried about your job. I can't believe what a brutal, painful time this is for so many folks. My brother got laid off four months ago and is struggling because his profession, the newspaper business, is vanishing like smoke. And the brutal grin...

And now, the true tragedy of the show is that we have to wait until Spring 2012 for mooooore.......I want more!!!!!!!! That last episode was really well done. OMG the part where the brothers went and fetched Jon Snow back...that was really well done. And incredibly spooky and eerie during the pyre s...

As I think about this show, I really do think it is amazingly well done. Fantasy done wrong can be just heartbreakingly cheesy. I eagerly anticipated the SyFy channel's version of the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula Leguin, and when they showed it (it was an amalgam of books 1 and 2) it was so bad as to ...

I'm putting them in white font. Is that not enough, Alatar? I'm sorry. I'll just stop putting them out there, on second thought.

I've also started book 2, which I'm kicking myself for since the series isn't finished. I just despise getting started on books where the series isn't finished. :help: Oh well. i'm going to try to go slowly. Yeah, right. Spoiler: Yes, River, that scene was hair raising and shocking (Danaerys). But t...

Yes, that scene came across as pretty dumb. Although, after observing a hetero male watching the scene (i.e., my husband), I can say that he had NO problem with how dumb the scene was. For him, the scene totally rocked. ;) River, the one thing that I remember as the shocker in the first book was fin...

I can. The scene where Lord Baelish tutored the two er, ladies of the evening in how to convince customers they were really "into it" while talking about the love of his life, Cate. I'm having a problem thinking that Lord Baelish can have a "thing" for Cate in the series. The act...

Heh, I love you people. I just discovered this thread and went through the sequence. Saw the HBO previews, got intrigued, ordered book 1, read it, and now am watching the series on HBO. :D So I finished watching episode 7 early via HBOGO. I thought the first episode was amazing. Really, really great...

Interestingly Barbara Bush (daughter of prez) has come out for gay marriage, joining Meghan McCain. The cultural shift in the past 20 years has been truly remarkable.

Well. I have to say I couldn't "cut" my son because it just seemed like I shouldn't do that, although, I have to say, having experienced non circumcised v. circumsized in my life (TMI, but hey, this thread is going in that direction anyways) I prefer circumsized. I do feel for my son's eve...

Well, I have a lot more respect for the AGW "zealots" than I do for the homeopathy "zealots." :P And for me, I tend to extend the benefit of the doubt to results published that tend to support AGW because, after all, the climate change records, the physics of the molecules, and t...

AGW zeolots, such as vison, are true believers in the same way that homeopathic medicine zealots are true believers. I find this statement just mindbogglingly ironic because, of course, there is NO science supporting homeopathy and in fact, scientific facts completely contradict the "theory&qu...

tell me more about the "Monsanto Soybean Patent"....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/business/18seed.html

is it this?

And River, what your former lab was patenting (structures) are a classic type of "research tool" type patent. I assume the crystal structures were of biological molecules (proteins, and the like?) One thing that people do is patent unique crystal structures (polymorphs) of small molecules,...

Well, since I am a patent attorney dealing with biotech inventions (how did I miss this thread, anyways?) I find that there is a lot of misconceptions out there about "gene patents." The amicus brief filed by the DOJ didn't go so far as to say no gene patents should be granted. They came o...

Natural warming may well be coinciding with increased CO2 production, but that synchronicity may simply be a stastical anomoly. You are aware of the demonstrated "greenhouse" effect for CO2? That CO2 is demonstrated to absorb infrared radiation as the sun warmed earth re-radiates the abso...

But I didn't really get what science actually is (that it's not a mass of facts but a process and a way of thinking about the world) until I worked in a real research lab where the outcomes of our experiments weren't pre-printed in some lab manual. I learned to design experiments and how to set the...

gay as shameful is deeply ingrained in the culture. Along with Vison's story, I was a deeply introverted girl with one friend in 8th grade. And that friendship was ruined by people starting to spread the rumor that we were "lesbian." I didn't even know what lesbian was when somebody first ...

Good friends of ours are a lesbian couple.

One of them had their first child, the other, their second. I don't know anything about the "dad" but I believe it was likely the same sperm donor given how alike the two kids look.

That's pretty decent reproduction by a homosexual couple.

Well, interesting post Anthy. I would submit, though, that all this stuff about "evolution" and all that and genetics and surviving on through the eons through your kids...well, like River said, that is what all life on earth does. And it operates independently of what is "moral"...