@46:
That woman sure has odd sexual tastes! Come to think of it, apparently cthulhu does too, from his species' point of view.

Nice video.
Now off to figure out why Camino can't get its act together and download it. (Firefox does just fine)

Thanks, @8.
Now for a poll: Which do you like better:

1) Molesworth
2) Tom Brown ('s School Days)
3) Mr. Chips

:-)

Omigawd, I didn't think anyone besides me had ever heard of Molesworth, at least not in the States. "How to be Topp" was one of my major favorite books back in my elementary school days.

So, who was Willans?

@#3: there are more than 3 rules.
Asimov himself came up w/ the Zeroth Law:

A robot shall not cause harm, or thru inaction allow harm to occur to Mankind.

My favorite off-Asimov 4th rule is:
A robot shall know it is a robot.

You can see what could happen if it didn't.

I hate to be a spoilsport (OK, I love it), but imaging tachyons doesn't let you see into the future. FTL just means you get information before info shows up on a light (electromagnetic) wave. Even tachyons take a finite amount of time to propogate.
Now, if they used positrons, under the Feynmann model in which antiparticles are just particles travelling backward in time....
:-)

I'm going to claim unintentional plagiarism: Howard Waldrop, "Heirs of the Perisphere" .

I've got it: the person she told about the dream thought they were characters in The Lathe of Heaven.
(UK LeGuin)

I think they could have used a better model-- check out the Balrog on the LOTR pinball machine :-)

Dunno about MRI (which looks for different densities of various molecules which have magnetic moments), but I sure bet a combination of IR scanning and multispectral analysis would reveal the inner pages pretty well.

very nice looking-- similar in concept to staircases on some military ships. There, each rung is half-width and offset from its neighbors. Saves space but you better start off on the right foot ^_^

Let me add another vote for the Moomintroll series. I absolutely loved them when I was a small kid. Adventures, magic, comets attacking the Earth; what more could you want?

If you like this, check out Josh Simpson's Virtual Worlds. Absolutely stunning.
http://www.megaplanet.com