I have always liked dolphins but I can't pinpoint why - maybe it was "Flipper" when I was a kid, it can't be "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" because a whale was saving the Earth in that one. It could certainly be Manfred Mann's Earth Band. If you aren't familiar with Manfred Mann, he was a keyboard player from South Africa who made it big in England in the 1960s and then quit...
read moreFor the first 15 minutes of “Speed Racer” you have us convinced you are making the best movie of 2008, “The Matrix” for kids and race cars. Then you introduce two swear words and a pointless interlude and you end up giving us “The Matrix Revolutions” instead. I’d recut this movie and make it good if you would accept my help. I can’t do much...
read moreThomas Edison did a lot right but there is one thing he got very, very wrong.Namely, a talking doll that was sure to be an inspiration for generations of future horror movie fans. It was a bold idea, of course, Edison had a lot of those, but sometimes even a marketing juggernaut can't make something work for the public given technological limitations - we are also talking to you, 3-D movie...
read moreThe controversy over human embryonic stem cell research was a policy one more than a science one; with so many diverse scientists there had to be an ethical standard created by society, just like with animal testing and the environment.Since the introduction of the 2008 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act in the UK, with standards much looser than the US and most of Europe, 155 ‘admixed’...
read moreEconomics says you don’t have 8,000 sittings per year when 2,000,000 people per year want to eat in your restaurant, but El Bulli in Cala Montjoi, two hours north of Barcelona, did just that. And if your name came up, literally in a lottery, you paid $720 per couple and had no idea what kind of food you were going to get. And you were going to get it, not ask for it, the menu is what...
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