You might enjoy the book "Blindsight" by Peter Watts.

It does a phenomenal job telling a very unique first contact story. I can't remember if cameras are much of a plot point (I think they use them occasionally), but one of the characters is a linguist, and the aliens are distinctly non-human.

The episode is "My Screw Up" (S3E14) if anyone is wondering.

I might actually prefer "My Lunch" from S5 as an episode, but they are both fantastic.

Nonsense! Zoidberg's a fine physician. For Aliens. Your mistake is being human!

I disagree there - peer review as a system isn't designed to catch fraud at all, it's designed to ensure that studies that get published meet a minimum standard for competence. Reviewers aren't asked to look for fake data, and in most cases aren't trained to spot it either.

Whether we need to create a new system that is designed to catch fraud prior to publication is a whole different question.

Senate seats can't be altered much shifting the lines on the map because there's two per state, what you take from one you give to the other

Senate seats are ALWAYS state-wide elections, with no district lines to draw or gerrymander. Gerrymandering still arguably has an impact on senate elections, but it's a secondary factor of reducing turnout and not a primary factor of just picking the best districts.

I feel like you can do both these days, can't you? Hades was one of the first to break this ground.

This isn't a "comic book" universe, but the parahumans story universe (Worm and Ward) fits this pretty well.

Without spoiling too much of the story, characters all get powers in response to traumatic events. The powers they get also tend to reflect the type of trauma that occurred, so if they lost an arm they might get a healing power, or if they were trapped in a burning building they might get the ability to phase through walls and a resistance to fire. All of the powers in the setting tend to follow this approach, and stay within the rules of the setting.

Is Sicario an adaptation? I can't find any reference that it is.

Also, Prisoners is technically an adaptation of a short-story, but it's a not very well known short-story (I don't even see a name for the story on Wikipedia) from the writer of the screen play, so you could make an argument that the short story is essentially just a first draft of the script.

I do agree that we should just let him continue doing whatever he wants, he's done excellent work.

What is this garbage? If I own a house/gold/collectable/toilet paper during covid/... and the value goes up, am I supposed to pay taxes?

Yes, you are supposed to pay taxes on that (or on the house specifically). It's called property taxes.

If the value goes up, you pay more taxes the next year, if the value goes down you pay less.

I'm not sure the ownership situation of the company, but it is also independently in bankruptcy so I think that is being dealt with later

After a few years the orbit will degrade enough that it'll start to fall back to earth. At that point, the satellite will either burn up completely on re-entry, or partially and the rest will fall to earth.

Either way, each of these satellites will be completely gone from orbit after a few years.

ULA is already a private company. I don't think the US government has done any of their own work to get to space since the shuttle.

Good luck! I actually did the math on how "lucky/unlucky" each team had been relative to the actual draft odds, and as I recall San Jose had been one of the least lucky so they are due! (Arizona/Utah had been even less lucky though)

Hi Will!

Now that you've tried out directing as well as acting, which side of the camera do you prefer?

Are there any things you've learned from the experience of directing that you think will help in future acting roles? Additionally, is there anything you would do differently about directing Kodar if you got to start over from scratch today?

I believe that is correct.

In the book, they also took pains to point out the steps he took to try to avoid it happening to the other airlocks after that point too - by actually balancing out their usage a bit more, instead of just always using the same one.

Gravity and vacuum are not mutually exclusive - you always have to deal with gravity forces, although they become negligible pretty quickly when you get into and then leave orbits.

As to the specific claim, I suspect that the experiments they are currently doing (in vacuum chambers on earth) have gotten to the point that they are measuring the propulsion system producing more thrust than it's own weight (T/W >1), which would technically be enough thrust to overcome gravity. Even if it wasn't practically useful for actually getting to orbit, that amount of thrust on a reactionless motor would be incredible, and would totally unlock the solar system for us.

When you say "university staff", do you mean professors, or some other technical support staff?

If professors, then reaching out by email is probably a good way to start. They may get a lot of emails though, so your best chance to get a response might be timing the email right at the start of summer when they hopefully don't have any ongoing classes.

In terms of payment - most professors would happily talk about their areas of study with interested people for a short time (for free). If you needed a significant time investment from them though, then you might start having issues.

In my time looking for published papers, I have only very rarely seen papers which are also hosted by the university of the author. I suspect in your case it was hosted because of something specific to the school or the author, rather than a general thing.

What I am seeing more often in my field is people posting a version of the paper on "arxiv". This is a similar open-access approach, but you do have to be careful with arxiv papers as you can post anything on it, including work that never was or will be peer-reviewed.

As the other user commented, instigator is hardly ever actually used.

NHL reffing is... not great most of the time. Despite being a fan of the sport, I would like to see changes that would reduce the future rates of TBI among players. Refs actually enforcing the rules would probably help a bit there.

You seem to misunderstand how the penalties work out. 95% of the time after a fight happens, both teams get offsetting penalties, and so neither team is at a disadvantage because of the fight alone. There are instances where one team ends up with more penalties after a fight, but it's usually because of something that happened before the fight and prompted the fight (and should've been a penalty anyway)