There's only one way to answer a question like that:

"Couldn't you find an honest job?"

I use it most frequently at airports. It has always worked well for me.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Five times? Alcohol.

No, it was that the metal alloys they had weren't strong enough. The gears would have broken ("spalled").

I like to name my computers after parts of the Analytical Engine -- cog, mill, rod, lug, adder -- the last two are laptops.

My response to all such incursions is the same: "Couldn't you find an honest job?"

Since my brother called it that, I've been unable to think of D&D as anything other than "My Guy Does This". Now you won't either!

It looks like they tossed the hat on top for scale.

Rays with friggin' sharks!

It's a sad that mathematicians need to pretend to be physicists to get academic support.

It's sad for mathematicians, but tragic for students who would like to become physicists and not abstract mathematicians. Entire physics departments (e.g. Harvard's) have been taken over by mathematicians who have no practical interest in the actual science of physics -- lab work, experiments, synthesis from experimental data. Astronomy departments are similarly afflicted.

I'll bet Lisi's notion is beautiful, and from a mathematical standpoint that should suffice. It's a shame he has to dress it up as physics.

Since when did anybody detect anything even vaguely related to dark matter or dark energy in a lab?

Last I heard it was all vague speculation, the cosmologists waggling eyebrows at the string theorists, and no true scientist to be seen for miles around.

The funny thing is that there's no such thing as a "Great Wall"; it's a marketing construct. There are hundreds of miles of walls, to be sure, constructed over two millennia, but they are not all connected, and are of no unified design. Everybody sees the same photos of a bit of one wall, and imagines the rest. As marketing, it's brilliant, but it would have made as much sense for Nixon to say of Paris, "This is truly a Great Apartment Complex".

The universe can stand having its dark corners looked into. Astronomy, not so much. Preoccupation with "dark matter" and "dark energy" weaken the legacies of astronomers who publish on it. When it is all finally demonstrated to be a load of hooey, there will be red faces all over.

We'll need a new generation of astrophysicists who actually know more than a little ("a little" being MHD) about plasma fluid dynamics before that demonstration can happen; maybe two. In the meantime, it's a lot of wasted careers. The universe can wait for us to understand it better. The harm being done is to students who are being denied the tools needed to understand what they see.

On a peripherally related note, I have developed the bad habit of writing "SMALL PENIS" on the backs of parked Hummer vehicles with soap, cheese, or whatever's at hand.

If enough people began to do so, they might well go extinct.

These things have a name, in antiquity. They are called "talaria". Hermes used them, and Perseus. Of course theirs worked better.