Luc Besson's Lucy is a movie about a woman who can access 100 percent of her brain that asks you the viewer to use less of yours. The premise is based on the oft-repeated fallacy that humans only use 10 percent of their brains, and if we could only harness our full capacity, we'd be enlightened gods. Not only is this untrue (virtually 100 percent of a normally functioning brain is used for some aspect of cognitive, motor, or involuntary functioning), it is a cliché. There are dozens of examples on the "90% of your brain" TV Tropes entry of pop culture that reiterates this bogus claim. Lucy, in which large doses of a synthetic form of CPH4 cause the brain of Scarlett Johansson's titular protagonist to expand, then, is not so much sci-fi as it is fi-fi.

Accepting it as such, though, requires even more suspension of disbelief. The task is downright herculean. After Lucy is infected with expanding awareness, via a bag of CPH4 that has been surgically implanted in her abdomen for the sake of drug trafficking she is forced into, she walks into a hospital brandishing a gun, which doesn't…seem so smart? She bursts into an operating room, reads the patient's brain X-rays, and shoots him right there on the operating table, explaining to the doctors that he was going to die anyway and since she can make it, they should operate on her. Even if you accept that her mind was expanding, she still has no apparent intimate knowledge of neuroscience—no matter how many terabytes you have at your disposal, a hard drive is just a hard drive until you fill it.

The movie charts Lucy's mind expansion over time, as she ingests more of the CPH4, but her development is haphazard. I found it hard to follow. How is it, for example, that she psychically knows the name of a cop she calls to help her hunt down the drug ring's CPH4, as well as the color of the pen next to him, but that she has to tap into a specific cell phone signal (represented by vertical lines that extend down from the sky and can be expanded with the reverse pinch one does on an iPhone screen) to find out the drug kingpin's whereabouts?

Inconsistencies and a failure to adhere to even its own made-up logic plague this tight little tale of superheroic nihilism that would be much less dumb if it didn't feel the need to explain why the superhero is the way she is. For that, it is pretentious and dumb, although it is not without its charms. It zips along with such velocity, the resulting g-force helps distract from its inanity. Visually, it's terrific—there's a tremendous scene on a plane where Lucy's skin starts to disintegrate from her face and eventually turns into a powder that spreads through the air like sand on a windy day. Apparently, this is what happens when CPH4 starts running low in one's system, or something—the movie just makes sure that Lucy stays well stocked for the rest of its duration. Scarlett Johansson does her detached, matter-of-fact robogirl thing that she almost always does, especially outside the confines of strict realism. Morgan Freeman, a brain expert, pontificates like he always does, his booming voice rewriting nature's laws as though he is god himself.

A fundamentally incorrect movie about elevated brain capacity, you can reject Lucy outright or get on board and dumb yourself down. That latter scenario creates an interactive experience in which you operate at a lower level than the film, giving you a working example of the divide between normal brains and Lucy's brain that the film devotes itself to. During a lecture early in the movie, Freeman's character offers, "Ten percent might not seem like a lot but look at what we've done with it." Yes indeed. Soak it all in.

The US Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for keeping debris out of New York's Harbor, whether it's dead whales, helicopters, driftwood, or floating docks. Without the Corps the harbor and the outlying beaches of the Rockaways and the Jersey Shore would be filled with massive pieces of debris and ships would risk being critically damaged. Using specially equipped boats the Corps pulls flotsam and jetsam out of the water with cranes and nets.

Every year the Corps pulls 530,000 cubic feet of debris out of the NY Waterways. These waterways fall underneath the 25 mile radius of NYC that constitutes the Corps' jurisdiction. The Corps goes out every day of the year (except Christmas) to make sure the area is kept safe. Three boats split up the waterways depending on what type of equipment is needed.

There are boats with crane arms to pull large debris out of the water along with other watercraft with nets for catching lots of smaller pieces that wouldn't be worth a crane's time. The ship I was on is named the Hayward. It's captained by Brian Aballo, a man who has been keeping the harbor safe for 34 years.

The Hayward's crane is capable of holding 20 tons of debris at once. And if the crane were on land it would be capable of closer to 65 tons. Two cables come off the tip of the crane: the whipwire and the mainfall. My time spent with the Corps only allowed demonstration of the whipwire, though the mainfall is significantly stronger.

Captain Aballo explained that debris is more common during full or new moons when the tide is extra high but slows down in between. Of course weather plays a role too; the year following Sandy was a exceptionally big year for debris totaling up to 670,000 cubic feet that year. He joked when I asked if he'd need to do much work tomorrow; he always replies "I don't know. You tell me what's happening in the Harbor tonight, I'll tell you how it'll be tomorrow."

Days that start and end early are common for workers in the harbor and the Corps is no exception. After a full morning and afternoon of following colliding currents and investigating call ins from other shipmasters the Hayward and other Corps ships head to a pair of anchored barges they have near their docks in New Jersey. After everything is unloaded the crew heads home before another day on the water, painstaking cleaning up the harbor one piece of debris at a time.

Rumors about which actor might step into the role of Marvel's "Doctor Strange" have been floating around for some time—will it be Benedict Cumberbatch? Tom Hardy? Jared Leto?! According to The Wrap, the answer could be none of the above.

The Wrap reports that, though "insiders caution there is no deal in place yet," they have heard from multiple sources that Joaquin Phoenix has had "discussions" about the role, and is in consideration. From The Wrap:

Many would assume that Phoenix is one of the last actors in Hollywood who would be willing to lock himself into a potential long-term deal, but it's possible that he's not being asked to sign the same staggering multi-picture contract that other actors in the MCU have.

Phoenix was previously in discussions for the role of Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—a role that eventually went to Jesse Eisenberg—and, according to The Wrap, "it's believed that those talks would not have gotten as far as they did if Phoenix had no interest in doing a comic book movie."

Hmm. Fair enough!

[image via Getty]

Tara Reid recently said in an interview that a sharknado really could happen. Contrary to all you sharknado truthers making fun of Reid, I agree with her assessment. The real question is to figure out where a sharknado is most likely to occur. Let's take a look at the science.

What kind of storm do we need?

The first hurdle we approach is the battle between shark waterspout (sharkospout?) versus a sharknado. A waterspout forms when rising air begins to stretch out and rotate, creating a rotating column of air; the low pressure inside the column condenses the water vapor and creates a smooth, tall tornado-like structure. Waterspouts are different from tornadoes in that tornadoes require rotation from within a thunderstorm in order to develop.

When a tornado forms from a thunderstorm over water, it's still called a waterspout, but it's a tornadic waterspout. Regular ol' waterspouts don't usually have winds much stronger than 60 or 70 MPH in the most intense cases, so they're hardly enough to suck up a shiver of sharks. We would need a tornadic thunderstorm to move over shark-infested waters in order to see Tara Reid's vision come true.

This greatly narrows down where we can have a veritable sharknado.

Where are the sharks?

Sharks are everywhere. Next question.

Where are shark-bearing tornadoes most likely?

We can determine this crucial piece of science-evidence by looking back at a post of mine from a few weeks ago titled "64 Years of Tornado Tracks Look Like a Jackson Pollock Painting." I still have all of the GIS data I used to make that map, so I isolated tornadoes rated EF-3 and stronger (136+ MPH) and took a look at where these intense tornadoes occurred close enough to the coast that they could theoretically move over water, scoop up a shiver of sharks, and land people.

Since a good number of classic tornado outbreaks involving supercell thunderstorms travel from southwest to northeast, we can rule out most of the Gulf Coast for sharknado activity. Similarly, EF-3 or stronger tornadoes in Florida are exceedingly rare (back in 1966 the state saw its only F4, with its path running a disputed 134 miles from Tampa to the Atlantic), so Florida is out, too.

This leaves us the east coast of the United States where a) a tornadic supercell can form and b) move over water and then move back over land. Let's take a closer look...

The one spot on the East Coast prone to intense tornado outbreaks like the ones we see in the Deep South or the Plains is eastern North Carolina. The eastern side of the Tar Heel State is an ideal location for intense tornadoes because, during tornado outbreaks, it experiences strong winds aloft coming in from the west as well as strong southerly winds at the surface coming in off the Atlantic.

This leaves us with the possible scenario of an intense tornadic supercell forming over land, moving out over one of the sounds on the west side of the Outer Banks, then making landfall somewhere on the Outer Banks as a sharknado.

The Most Likely Spot in the United States for a Sharknado Is...

The appropriately- and prophetically-named Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Based on the North Carolina coast's vulnerability to shark attacks, as well as Kill Devil Hills' location on the other side of Albemarle Sound from mainland North Carolina, the city is the most likely to be hit by a sharknado one day.

Sorry, Kill Devil Hillians.

[shark-shaped storm map via SPC, all other maps by the author]

You can follow the sharknado lobbyist-turned-author on Twitter or send him an email.

Speculative fiction is the literature of change and discovery. But every now and then, a book comes along that changes the rules of science fiction and fantasy for everybody. Certain great books inspire scores of authors to create something new. Here are 21 of the most influential science fiction and fantasy books.

Top image: Magrathea from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, art by Microbot 23 on Deviant Art.

These are books which clearly inspired a generation of authors, and made a huge splash either in publishing success or critical acclaim. Or both. And these are in no particular order.

1) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The first (maybe only) science-fiction-comedy-multimedia phenomenon, Hitchhiker's was a radio drama before it was a book, and the book sold 250,000 copies in its first three months.The Guardian named it one of the 1000 novels everyone must read, and a BBC poll ranked it fourth, out of 200, in their Big Read poll.

Ted Gioia comments on Adams' hilarious book about the trials and tribulations of Arthur Dent, the survivor of a destroyed Earth, across the universe:

No book better epitomizes the post-heroic tone of sci-fi than Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As the name indicates, a certain louche bohemianism permeates its pages. This is star-hopping on the cheap, pursued by those aiming not to conquer the universe, but merely sample its richeson fewer than thirty Altairian dollars per day. You can trace the lineage of many later science fictions books, with their hip and irreverent tone, back to this influential and much beloved predecessor.

2) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

Verne's whole career is full of works that have inspired generations of authors — but this tale of the underwater adventure of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus has also had a profound effect on science, and inspired real scientific advancement.

In the introduction to William Butcher's book Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Self Ray Bradbury wrote that, "We are all, in one way, children of Jules Verne. His name never stops. At aerospace or NASA gatherings, Verne is the verb that moves us to space."

Verne translator and scholar F.P. Walter added:

For many, then, this book has been a source of fascination, surely one of the most influential novels ever written, an inspiration for such scientists and discoverers as engineer Simon Lake, oceanographer William Beebe, polar traveler Sir Ernest Shackleton. Likewise Dr. Robert D. Ballard, finder of the sunken Titanic, confesses that this was his favorite book as a teenager, and Cousteau himself, most renowned of marine explorers, called it his shipboard bible.

3) Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney

Sam Anderson prefaced his interview with Samuel R. Delany with this praise for Dhalgren's impact:

In the 35 years since its publication, Dhalgren has been adored and reviled with roughly equal vigor. It has been cited as the downfall of science fiction (Philip K. Dick once called it "the worst trash I've ever read"), turned into a rock opera, dropped by its publisher, and reissued by others. These days, it seems to have settled into the groove of a cult classic. In a foreword in the current edition, William Gibson describes the book as "a literary singularity" and Delany as "the most remarkable prose stylist to have emerged from the culture of American science fiction." Jonathan Lethem called it "the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive.

Dhalgren has remained popular through the years, being reprinted 7 times since 1975. It was also dropped by Bantam, the original publisher, because of its willingness to tackle LGBT themes despite the fact that the Bantam version sold over a million copies and went through 19 printings.

And most of all, this is one of the books most often mentioned when authors mention works that spurred them to invention and boldness of experimentation with form.

4) Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Author Terry Brooks explains why this book made a whole genre possible:

I think I can safely assert that virtually every writer of fantasy working in the field today who began writing after the publication of the RINGS trilogy owes a debt to Tolkien. He may not have invented the form, but he provided it with its most important model in modern times and every writer is aware of its various components. Ask them. Few will dispute me. Moreover, the material has impacted writers working in other categories of fiction as well, not so much by its content as by its form and style. Not a month goes by that I don't read at least one interview or review that credits J.R.R. Tolkien with contributing to a writer's current work.

Cover art by Barbara Remington.

5) War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

In his book about The War of the Worlds, a seminal look at an invasion of Earth by Martians, author Brian Holmsten states:

Since 1898 the War of the Worlds has been translated into countless languages, adapted by comic books, radio, film, stage, and even computer games, and has inspired a wide range of alien invasion tales in every medium. Few ideas have captured the imagination of so many people all over the world in the last century so well. It is a tribute to H.G. Wells that his story of alien conquest was not only the first of its kind, but remains one of the best.

The 1927 American reprint, it can be argued, was one of the touching-off points for the Golden Age of science fiction. It inspired John W. Campbell to write and commission invasion stories — which also prompted authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford Simak, Robert A. Heinlein and John Wyndham to do the same.

Image by My Reckless Creation

6) Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Foundation is a sweeping tale of pyschohistory and the battle for the intellectual soul of a civilization. and According to the BBC:

The Foundation series helped to launch the careers of three notable science fiction authors of the succeeding generation. Janet Asimov sanctioned these novels, which were published in the late 1990s: Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford, Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear, and Foundation's Triumph by David Brin." And without a doubt it launched the imaginations of countless other writers.

It is also worth mentioning that the Foundation series won the 1966 Hugo for best all-time series. An award that has not been given out since.

And this book's influence goes beyond science fiction: Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky classified Asimov "among the finest of modern philosophers," and Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman describesFoundation as his version of Atlas Shrugged, "I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation."

Cover art by Don Ivan Punchatz.

7) Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

The first science-fiction work to enter the New York Times Book Review's bestseller list, Stranger sold 100,000 copies in hardcover and over five million in paperback. Kurt Vonnegut gloated on Heinlein's behalf, on the occasion of the novel's 30^th "birthday," calling it "a wonderfully humanizing artifact for those who can enjoy thinking about the place of human beings not at a dinner table but in the universe."

And this book's influence (and that of Heinlein's other books) can't be overstated. Arthur D. Hlavaty refers to Heinlein as a prototypical science-fiction author, saying:

One of the ways human beings organize the world is by prototypes. We define a set as a typical example and a bunch of other things that are like it. For instance, when I was growing up, the prototype Writer was Shakespeare, the Artist was Rembrandt, and the Composer was Beethoven.In that way, Robert A. Heinlein has been often been taken as the prototype Science Fiction Writer, and as changes and new paradigms shake the field, he still sometimes represents the science fiction of the past.

Writer Ted Gioia looks at Stranger in a Strange Land's main character as a prototype for other similar characters in SF, saying: "Smith is more than a character. He is prototype of an alternative personality structure. The question of whether we can remake the human personality from the ground up." To date, there have been 28 editions of this book.

Cover art by James Warhola.

8) Dangerous Visions, Edited by Harlan Ellison

This series helped launch the careers of almost every major author of the New Wave. The first volume included Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard. In his introduction to the 2002 reissue of Ellison's anthology, contributor Michael Moorcock wrote of Ellison's collections:

He changed our world forever. And ironically, it is usually the mark of a world so fundamentally altered—be it by Stokely Carmichael or Martin Luther King Jr. or Lyndon Johnson, or Kate Millet—that nobody remembers what it was like before things got better. That's the real measure of Ellison's success.

"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for Best novelette. Philip K. Dick's "Faith of Our Fathers" was also nominated for best novelette. "Riders of the Purple Wage" a novella by Philip José Farmer tied for the Hugo Award. Samuel R. Delany got the Nebula for Best Short Story for "Aye, and Gomorrah..." Harlan Ellison was given a commendation at the 26th World SF Convention for editing "the most significant and controversial SF book" published in 1967.

8) Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke himself had reservations about this novel, yet it sold out its first printing, 200,000 copies, in just two months after publication. Author Jo Walton writes about the first book to feature benevolent aliens who try to help the human race evolve:

Science fiction is a very broad genre, with lots of room for lots of kinds of stories, stories that go all over the place and do all kinds of things. One of the reasons for that is that early on there got to be a lot of wiggle room. Childhood's End was one of those things that expanded the genre early and helped make it more open-ended and open to possibility. Clarke was an engineer and he was a solidly scientific writer, but he wasn't a Campbellian writer. He brought his different experiences to his work, and the field is better for it.

Childhood's End was nominated for a retro Hugo award in 2004.

Artwork by Neal Adams.

9) Ringworld by Larry Niven

Sam Jordison of the Guardian had this to say about Ringworld, the masterpiece that is centered around around a theoretical ring-shaped space-habitat:

Larry Niven's 1970 Hugo award winner, Ringworld, is arguably one of the most influential science fiction novels of the past 50 years. As well as having had a huge impact on nearly all subsequent space operas (Iain M Banks' Culture series and Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns are just two), the book has helped generate a multi-billion-dollar industry.

To add to this Jonathan Cowie, who wrote Essetial SF: A Concise Guide, called Ringworld "a landmark novel of planetary engineering (for want of a better term) that ranks alongside the late Bob Shaw's Orbitsville."

10) The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Jo Walton, again, comments on this novel about interstellar diplomacy and anthropology:

The Left Hand of Darkness didn't just change science fiction—it changed feminism, and it was part of the process of change of the concept of what it was to be a man or a woman. The battle may not be over. What I mean is that thanks in part to this book we're standing in a very different place from the combatants of 1968.

In 1994 literary critic Harold Bloom included it in his Western Canon of Literature, going as far as to say, "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time."

11) Neuromancer by William Gibson

By 2007, this cyberpunk classic had sold more than 6.5 million copies. It's been adapted into almost every genre, and it's responsible for introducing numerous terms, and, arguably, the idea of the internet. The Encyclopedia of NewMedia calls Neuromancer more important than On the Road in its cultural influence, and credits its formative influence on subsequent media, from Wired magazine to The X-Files, to the internet itself. After the initial inventions of the ARPANET, Paul T. Riddell writes, the internet took shape due to "impressionable students reading [Gibson's] stories and novels; instead of whining and complaining after reading Robert Anton Wilson, they read Gibson and thought, 'You know, we can do this.'"

Neuromancer was the first novel to win all three of the major science-fiction awards —- the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award for paperback original.

12) Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

According to the New York Times, Stephenson's look at the way humans interact with digital worlds has a well-earned reputation for prescience:

Snow Crash was published way back in ancient 1992 and laid out many of the attributes of today's online life, including the Metaverse, a virtual place where people meet, do business and play, presenting themselves as avatars. If you've ever played wildly popular multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, or visited the virtual communities of Second Life, you can get a chill thinking about what he saw back before the popularization of the World Wide Web."

Despite the reputation of his book, Stephenson is pretty reluctant to take on the title of "Seer" saying in the same article, "I can talk all day long about how wrong I got it. But there are a lot of people who feel as though that was an accurate prediction."

13) A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin

From its first publication in 1996, this book and its sequels helped spur a new, darker revival of epic fantasy that turned the genre's expectations on their heads. In Game of Thrones and Philosophy: Logic Cuts Deeper Than Swords, editor Henry Jacoby, a philosophy professor at East Carolina University, speculates about the series' popularity:

Readers often cite the moral complexity of the novels as a key part of their enjoyment, alluding to characters painted in "shades of gray." Previous works of epic fantasy tended to operate with a straightforward moral compass where the antagonist was some variety of evil "Dark Lord" and the protagonists were defined by their opposition to this evil character based on their obvious moral goodness. In contrast, Martin's series has been written with no dark lord to speak of. …Martin's choice to keep his eyes on the very human characters, with their very human flaws, was done well enough to win him legions of fans who appreciated the so-called "gritty realism" of the narrative.

Fantasy author Mark Lawrence agrees:

He showed what fantasy could be. Real people who didn't carry a particular flaw around like an attribute rolled up in a role-playing game, but who were complex, capable of both good and evil, victims of circumstance, heroes of the moment. Heroes in gleaming mail could suffer from corns without it being a joke. That's a big part of his secret - EVERY ONE IS HUMAN - get behind their eyes and nobody is perfect, nobody is worthless.

14) Kindred by Octavia Butler

John C. Snider, editor at scifidimensions described Octavia Butler's celebrated novel as:

A dark fantasy novel that drills down into the prickly core of American history: slavery. This novel, in which a young middle-class black woman finds herself shuttled between 1976 California and antebellum Maryland, has become a classic of SF&F and required reading in both women's and African-American studies. But don't be fooled - while Butler's fiction appeals to feminist and minority demographics, it's not propped up by that appeal. To read Octavia Butler is to read good literature - period.

Octavia Butler was also the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship also known as the Genius Grant. And in 2012, hundreds of thousands of copies of Kindred were given away for World Book Night.

15) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

The Spotlight Review explains the importance of this epic series of wizards and muggles, beloved by people of all ages:

They are the standard by which every child or teen-oriented book is viewed. Passed on by dozens of publishers, who all have lost billions of dollars in doing so, Harry Potter radically changed the landscape in the publishing industry. Before Harry Potter, children and teen books were considered a worthy area to publish, but it wasn't a very lucrative one. After Harry's rise to dominance over the entire publishing world, suddenly every firm began accepting similar book proposals in the hopes that another diamond in the rough could be found. It's been harder than previously thought. There have been some promising books, but none that have captured the hearts and minds of millions.

Harry Potter has been translated into 57 different languages, even Latin and Ancient Greek.

16) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games is a YA classic about a young woman who battles for her life and ultimately her civilization's fuutre in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. NPR reports that, "Dystopian fiction has been around for a long time, but the success of The Hunger Games has spawned a whole new crop of books set in a grim future where an authoritarian regime is just begging to be overthrown. They are aimed straight at a teenage audience."

Right now, more than 26 million copies are in print in the United States.

17) Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The growing trend of climate-focused science fiction, and a greater attention to future problems in general, owes a lot to this great book about the very real problem of future food shortages. In this biopunk SF novel, Emiko is a humanoid GM organism, who is enslaved as a prostitute in Thailand. She yearns for an escape. Niall Harrison, judge of the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2006 and 2007, writes:

Emiko is a stepping-stone to that future; and by the logic of The Windup Girl, so are we all. From our point of view, it's hardly an optimistic conclusion but it is, in The Windup Girl's terms, a very human one, and I can't recall another novel that has articulated the same vision of what it means to be human in the present moment with the same force. It's that vision that insists that Emiko is human, and that she remains bound at the end of the novel: because we remain bound, and she is us; because at least for now, science fiction remains bound; and because, quite probably, so does our world.

The Windup Girl tied for the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel with China Miéville's The City & the City. In the same year it also won the Nebula award along with the John W. Campbell award.

Cover art by Raphael Lacoste.

18) The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Michael M. Jones explains what makes this book distinct from previous works of military science fiction:

The Forever War is a masterpiece of military science fiction and social observation, applicable on numerous levels. While some aspects might be far-fetched, there's no denying that it's a powerful work. William Mandella is no career soldier like many of the military SF heroes out there; certainly not like Johnny Rico in Starship Trooper. He's just an ordinary guy who gets drafted, and has the bad luck to actually survive the war.

Haldeman won Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards for this book, and along with Heinlein's Starship Troopers, it helped inspire generations of more realistic military SF authors.

19) Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Salon's Michael Schmidt writes about the way Vonnegut changed the war novel by using aspects of science-fiction:

Doris Lessing calls him "moral in an old-fashioned way . . . he has made nonsense of the little categories, the unnatural divisions into 'real' literature and the rest, because he is comic and sad at once, because his painful seriousness is never solemn." His acknowledgment and expression of the nuanced nature of experience makes him "unique among us; and these same qualities account for the way a few academics still try to patronize him." As though what he does is easier than the resolved plotting of more derivatively artful novelists.

After a school tried to ban this novel, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered 150 free copies of the book to students in Rockville, Missouri.

20) The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Ray Walters at geek.com explains why this book was influential on not just literature, but also science:

The Martian Chronicles is a collection of loosely related fictional stories depicting humanities struggle to flee from the potential of nuclear war on Earth to try and find refuge on the Red Planet. Many of the ideas Bradbury put forth in the novels seemed fantastical at the time, but modern day efforts to explore Mars smack of the science fiction writer's vision of what it would be like to visit there.

While Bradbury is seen primarily as an author who had a profound effect on his literary genre, in reality his reach has been much wider. While his novels may not be required reading in our schools anymore (which blows my mind), his ideas are talked about everyday with the people uttering the words usually not knowing the origins of the topics they are discussing. Ray Bradbury will certainly be missed, not just for his amazing science fiction writing, but also for his visionary foresight into cultural phenomenons.

NASA put a burned DVD containing The Martian Chronicles on the hull of the Phoenix Martian Rover.

21) Dune - Frank Herbert

Scott Timberg at the L.A. Times says Frank Herbert's epic novel, in which noble houses battle for control of each others' planets, was not just massive but ground-breaking:

Writers had imagined life on other planets and written of environmental catastrophe. But the scale of Dune was unprecedented, comparable, as Arthur C. Clarke said at the time, only to "The Lord of the Rings."

It's not quite New Wave — which developed in the late 1960s — not an antecedent to cyberpunk, nor a precursor to the recent space-opera renaissance. "It's some kind of singularity," says Latham.

"Dune" both channeled and stoked a greater environmental consciousness in SF: Important later novels by Ursula Le Guin, John Brunner and Octavia Butler looked at planetary ecology.

Dune won the Hugo award in 1966 as well as the very first Nebula award.

It's almost impossible to fit all of the most game-changing works of science fiction and fantasy into one article. Which books do you think should be on this list, and why?

Ever since Paul Graham stepped down from Y Combinator, the Stanford of startup accelerators has been trying to give off a more welcoming vibe. The attempts thus far have seemed awkward, half-hearted, and therefore insincere. As though Sam Altman got PR advice on crisis control from a YC bro-founder: Just tell 'em what they want to hear.

But I've been waiting to see how it plays out. Today Altman published a post on diversity numbers that focuses primarily on the gender gap at Y Combinator, skirting race and ethnicity. Altman's predecessor, Paul Graham, has made influential statements on both fronts. This follows the same trend as tech corporations who have begun pulling back the curtain, after hears of trying to obscure the numbers. There's an inherent good in increased transparency, but it's hard to muster the obligatory sense of gratefulness. Silicon Valley defines itself in opposition to the status quo, but these reports reek of it.

Last week, I emailed Altman to ask why this post on portfolio stats included the number of YC nuclear energy startups, but not the number of female cofounders or foreign-born cofounders (since Graham had mentioned them specifically.) He told me those numbers were in the works adding, "btw, i was originally planning to put diversity and financial metrics in the same post, but several people convinced me the diversity data deserved its own post."

Here's what he came up with:

Sexism in tech is real. One of the most insidious things happening in the debate is people claiming versions of "other industries may have problems with sexism, but our industry doesn't." Both men and women claim this, even though it keeps getting harder to do in the face of shocks like the Tinder texts. We know there is a problem, especially when it comes to starting companies, and we think YC can do something about it.

I'm willing to believe it's worse in other industries [1], but it's still very bad in our own industry. Debating how to fix it is important, but debating whether or not sexism actually exists trivializes the problem in a toxic way. A lot of women may not experience sexism, a lot of women may experience it but not talk about it, and a lot of men aren't sexist. Saying "There isn't any sexism in tech" in the face of a mountain of data hurts things in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

This is a straw man argument. Who is this person arguing that there is no sexism, except perhaps on Hacker News? (Hey, fellas!) And who would say tech has it worse among all other industries? The statistics Altman offers focus on the past few years, this year, or the current batch. A bummer since Y Combinator was founded in 2005 with huge network effects in Silicon Valley:

it appears we fund technical women that apply to YC at a slightly higher rate than technical men that apply to YC for at least the last few years. [2] However, a lower percentage of women than men that apply are technical. [...]

We can get more precise number when we disregard background and just look at the gender of applicants (based on looking at the application videos)—19.5% of the startups we have funded this year have women on the founding team compared to approximately 24.3% of startups that applied, based on a random sample of a few hundred applications. [...]

10% of our companies currently worth more than $100 million are now run by women. These women aren't just on the founding team—they're the CEOs. While this number is still much smaller than we'd like, and I believe we can do more to make it higher, it's a big improvement from 0% a few years ago and well above the industry average [...]

We have four female full-time partners (and in addition to advising startups, to a large extent they run YC).

Those four full-time female partners are not named. They are: YC cofounder Jessica Livingston, Graham's wife and the backbone of the operation by all accounts, Kat Manalac (hired in 2013, promoted to partner this April), Kristy Nathoo (hired in 2011, promoted to partner in 2012) and Carolynn Levy (hired in 2012).

In terms of race and ethnicity, he offers one line:

39.6% of the founders in our current batch were not born in the US, representing 27 different countries.

That's not very instructive considering that Paul Graham and Peter Thiel, for example, also both count as foreign-born. It's even less helpful when it's only the current batch and Y Combinator made an argument about foreign-born founders based on "a lot of empirical evidence."

These statistics focus on founders, which is important. But some of the dismaying stories I've heard come from women lower in the ranks. As one woman who worked at a Y Company told me after reading Altman's statements:

"Putting women in speaking positions and holding a female founders conference doesn't end the endemic sexism in YC startups. They are focused on 'women' events and 'female founders,' but what about those of us who don't fit that mold? Harassment and sexism still happens to non-founder employees who have no tools or legal protections to fight back."

Altman acknowledges the issue of culture fit and vows to help reduce it. But offers an optimistic take on the current state of affairs:

Nearly all of the women I've spoken to feel that Hacker News has improved a great deal—and even when jerks write nasty comments, they usually get a lot of responses of the type we like to see.

Graham once spent an entire blog post recommending that founders take advantage of lax regulations on startups:

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon.

Altman pivots from that approach:

We're encouraging our startups to get HR infrastructure in place earlier. Many startups wait until they have 50 or so employees before thinking about this; our sense is that many will benefit by doing it earlier. Traditionally, startups have thought of HR as a drag on moving fast and openness, but a well-running team is one of the best assets a company can ever have. We're working on some projects here but aren't ready to share details yet.

"HR" has become the code word du jour. After creating a work environment so inappropriate that one of the cofounders had to resign, GitHub reframed the debacle as an HR issue in the Wall Street Journal. The company, which raised $100 million in financing and was founded in 2008 just didn't have the right folks in place!

Previous discussions about sexism at Y Combinator have been shouted down as politically correct myopia that ignores the inherent riskiness of starting a company and law of meritocracy. They argue that Graham has done incredible things for the community. That is true and that might be why Altman's arguments sound so half-assed. He thinks the opposition cares about pretense.

However, all along what many people have tried to explain is that diversity is in Y Combinator's best economic interests. Criticism is not an indictment on Paul Graham. It's an attempt to prop their eyelids open: confirmation bias is blinding you to true talent and new markets at a time when its bad ideas abound.

Altman finally acknowledges that angle:

We—the tech industry as a whole—need to fix this. Most importantly, it's an ethical issue. And speaking for YC, it's also in our best interest. People who are not white males will start many of the best companies of the future, and we'd like to fund them. (White men will start many of the best companies, and we'd like to fund those too.)

Personally, I think I said it better last year, but I am totally biased. Something me and YC have in common!

Update: Sam Altman reached out to say he was "super bummed" about this post. Sexism is one of life's big bummers! Here's his response via FB Messenger:

you don't hear people claim "there is no sexism in tech" all the time?...well, I'm happy to hear you think it's generally moved on. i still hear subtle undertones of it fairly often, and i think it really undermines the whole discussion. i asked several YC founders if i could share specific examples of their own experience, but they all asked me not to. it's difficult to fully anonymize. but i did generally talk about investors being inappropriate and also only focusing on the men in the room, which were the two most common issues.

and i certainly agree with this: "Harassment and sexism still happens to non-founder employees who have no tools or legal protections to fight back." which is why we're pushing for HR earlier in cos. and finally i said many months ago that its in our own self interest—i really believe that!

As I mentioned to Altman, those "commons issues" also occur within YC.

To contact the author of this post about Y Combinator, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image via Flickr]

Let's get one thing straight right from the beginning. You don't love "The Gays" and neither do I. And that's okay. Really, you can stop saying it now.

I don't keep careful notes (because I am a mess), but if I had to guess, I would say I've heard the term "I love the gays" approximately 372,789 times since I slipped out of the closet when I was 18. At first, it made me feel welcomed. Because being gay was a huge part of my identity at the time (I was basically a caricature), I thought that someone telling me how much they loved a group I was part of was nice, heart-warming even. Here was someone telling me that it didn't matter what my orientation was, that they loved all homosexuals regardless or race, creed, or ability. But as I've grown older, I've found the phrase less and less comforting and more and more grating. Why? Because it isn't possible to love all the people in one group, and because there's a specific stereotype one has in mind when they're talking about their love of the gays. It's not so much an "I'm down with your sexual orientation" as an "I love the homosexuals that I know who enjoy shopping and are fabulous on the dance floor, and if you are one of those types of people we will get along very well." Not so much a sign of acceptance as an assumption of who you are and what role you're expected to play.

In June, I saw NeNe Leakes perform in Cirque Du Soleil's Zumanity. While most of her lines were scripted, the last part of the show was an awkward meet-and-greet where NeNe, silk trailing behind her, slinked into the audience and talked to the people who had filled the auditorium to half-capacity to see her.

"Where are my gays at?" Nene screamed. "Where are my fabulous gays?" We all cheered (because tickets cost over $100 a pop), but the pickings were slim that night. NeNe made her way over to a man in a plaid shirt and referred to him as her fabulous gay, saying "you know I love a fabulous gay" over and over. The man in question was from Nebraska and had never met NeNe before. He was about as fabulous as a Swiffer mop (which, for the record, is my level of fabulousness and game recognizes game) and looked mildly frightened throughout, but now he was suddenly one of NeNe's gays. All she needed to know was his sexual orientation and now they were old friends. Awesome! Except not.

Growing up, I knew a few things about gay men, mostly learned from television: Most of them were fit, they were excellent dancers, they had excellent fashion sense and they kept their homes clean. While not inherently negative, none of these things apply to me. I haven't been to a gym in god knows how long, I can only do a shuffle-ball-step on the dance floor (that is embarrassing to both myself and the people around me), I wear the same outfit every day (people used to think I owned one black shirt and one pair of jeans, but SURPRISE: I have 15 black shirts!) and I can't clean to save my life. That's not because I'm not gay, it's because the only thing my sexual orientation says about me is that my romantic partners are male and that I am not generally attracted to women in a sexual way. And also: I hate shopping.

I can't tell you how many times I've disappointed someone by being the wrong type of gay (a phrase I have actually heard come out of someone's mouth hole) and not knowing the difference between a pashmina and an angora (one is a rabbit, right?) or having absolutely no knowledge of what Madonna is up to despite the fact that she is a gay icon. And I can't tell you how demoralizing it can be to be identified with by people you've just met only by your sexual orientation and the preconceived notions others have about it.

Before I go any further, I must point out that none of this ever happens in bad faith. No one has ever told me they love gays as a way to insult me (although people who identify as heterosexual have playfully called me a fag because "oh my god, I have gay friends! It's fine!") but as a way to connect with me. I appreciate wanting to build rapport, but I wonder how it would be taken if this same logic were applied the other way around. Wouldn't "oh my god, I love heterosexuals so much I literally can't even" be just the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever heard? Why? Because heterosexuals are not a homogenous group of people who can be defined by one label. So unless you're talking about how much you love the Gay family down the street (by which I will take it to mean you are talking about Sarah and Jennifer Gay and their lovely daughter Esmeralda Gay who's really named Ashley, but is going through a difficult phase), it's time to stop seeing all homosexuals as one group of people as well.

Here's the thing. Gays (or as I like to call them "The Gay" because it makes it sound more ridiculous and also somehow French, which I like) are an incredibly diverse group of people. Or groups of people. The point is that there's not one thing that defines all homosexuals besides the fact that they want to be romantically involved with someone of the same sex or gender. Therefore, there's no possible way that you could love all the gays because there's just so goddamn different varieties of us out there and some of us are awesome and some of us are not and some of us just like taking naps and playing Mario Kart 8 half-naked on Thursday evenings (holla at me). So you're either going to have to specify specifically which kind of gay you love (farts? No; Likes Glitter starring Mariah Carey ironically? yes) or just treat people as individuals instead of as part of a larger group. Because it's not politics we're talking about here, it's human connection.

And here's probably the most important part of the whole thing. Referring to a member of a minority group as if they represent all members of said group is dehumanizing. Shouting "I love gays" at someone you've just met signals that all the information you need to know about the person to make any judgment about them is their sexual orientation. Not only does this strip someone of their individuality, but, like any microaggression, it's hard to respond to. How do you even say "hey, that's great, but I don't represent the larger group I am identified with" without sounding like a dick? (It's basically impossible.) (Trust me. This is something I once tried to do at a Ruby Tuesday and it did not end well.) (Whatever, Ruby Tuesday sucks since they stopped serving honey butter.)

So maybe let's avoid this altogether by not connecting with people by claiming to love just one part of their identity. Start with something like "I love your shoes." Or, if you're talking to me "I love how you haven't shaved your work-at-home beard in three weeks. There's just something about that unwashed look that's really in right now."

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.

Car thieves in Philadelphia drove into a crowd of people this afternoon, killing three pedestrians and seriously injuring three others. One of the dead, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, was a 10-year-old boy.

According to the Los Angeles Times, two victims died on the scene and the third died later at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children. At least two of the injured are reportedly being treated at Temple Hospital. One is in good condition, the other critical.

The suspects, who stole a white Toyota 4Runner in North Philadelphia and crashed it at Germantown and Allegheny avenues at around 11 am today, escaped on foot and remain at large. Police are offering $40,000 for tips leading to their arrest, the Los Angeles Times reports.

A resident who attempted to resuscitate victims described the scene to the Inquirer:

"I ran across the street, and the boys were laying lifeless," said Karen Payne, who runs a summer camp at the nonprofit. She checked their pulses, she said - one boy had none; the other's was barely there.

"There were bodies all over the lot. . .," she said. "I'm certified in First Aid and CPR - my first instinct was to go to them," she said. "But I couldn't help."

[Image via @PhillyRover]

It had been a quiet summer in Tallahassee, Florida's capital. Lawmakers and students from the local universities were mostly out of town. But last week, one of the city's most notable and well-liked citizens was killed with a single shot to the head, and no one yet knows why.

Dan Markel, a Harvard graduate, criminal law professor at Florida State University, and creator of the popular PrawfsBlog, was found shot at his home shortly after police responded to a bang in his upscale neighborhood. It didn't seem typical of a robbery—no signs of forced entry, and he was shot midmorning on a Friday in one of Tallahassee's safest parts. But by the time Markel was pronounced dead in a local hospital the next morning, police believed they had a murder on their hands.

It's hard to find anyone willing to say a bad word about Markel, 41, whose law blog was nationally renowned, and whose students declared him exacting but brilliant. Accolades and memories have poured in from the legal and blogging communities. Yet the local police, stingy with many details, assured residents that Markel's was a calculated, targeted killing:

Detectives in Florida say Toronto-born law professor Daniel Markel was shot in the head, but won't say whether he was shot from the front or back.

They say he was gunned down at his home in broad daylight, but won't say if he was found inside the house or outside.

They released a photo of a vehicle of interest, but wouldn't confirm exactly where the car was seen or even the make and model.

But they have made one detail perfectly clear: Whoever did it wanted Markel dead.

The online rumor mill quickly focused on Markel's ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, with whom he'd had two children and recently participated in an acrimonious divorce with nearly 150 actions, filings, and counterclaims.

Markel gaily recounted on his blog how he'd proposed to Adelson on a trip to Israel, and the pair's joyful 2006 nuptials had been covered in the New York Times. Adelson, was a successful human rights attorney who earned a master's at Cambridge like her husband, who promoted her on his blog in 2011 when she published a book based on her work.

But Adelson (shown above in a Facebook image with her sons) filed for divorce the following year, and records indicate she may have wanted to relocate with the couple's children, possibly to her native South Florida—inflaming a flurry of legal battles.

Yet an attorney for Adelson says she is cooperating with authorities and has reason enough to be scared, both for her family's safety and her children's future:

"She's devastated by it," said Jimmy Judkins, her lawyer. "She's a basket case over the plight of her children now. She's scared because she doesn't know who did this or why it occurred and it's got her thinking the worst in so many different ways."

Everything seemed to be going well for Markel in the weeks leading up to his death, one friend told the Toronto Star:

New York University law professor Rick Hills, Jr., last saw Markel when the Florida resident stayed with him in New York just two weeks ago.

Markel had not told many of his friends yet, but he told Hills that he was happy in a new relationship with a woman after going through a divorce with the mother of his children in the past two years, Hills said.

"He was rebuilding his life after a really, really difficult period," Hills said. "I was watching him as he was in my apartment Skyping his kids and saying goodnight on his cellphone … he was so happy."

The incident report from Markel's death is heavily redacted, revealing only that detectives are looking for a silver or white Toyota Prius seen by a resident at the time of the murder.

They've put out dragnets for surveillance video footage that businesses and residents may have recorded around then. Beyond that, if the police have any leads, they've given no indication to the public or a reporter.

But the stakes couldn't be much higher for the Tallahassee Police Department, which has seen a string of high-profile cases and mishaps.

It is widely considered to have mishandled the high-profile rape allegation against a famous local football player last year. About the same time, the longtime chief resigned after video emerged showing his officers beating a woman at a DUI stop. And the community still stings from the time, in 2008, when police coerced a 23-year-old woman with a minor marijuana charge into running a sting operation for the department. She was sent in to buy an illegal pistol from some targeted suspects. She ended up shot dead with the gun she'd tried to buy. (Her death, and the cops' role in it, was investigated in a 20/20 episode.)

In the mystery of Dan Markel's death, however, they vow to see justice done. "TPD will work tirelessly to follow up on all leads and evidence in this case and our thoughts and prayers are with the Markel family as they endure this terrible tragedy," the new chief said.

Markel's friends—including keen legal minds—aren't all confident:

"It doesn't make sense on any level. But at least the initial theory was that it was some kind of robbery gone wrong, which is awful, but at least makes sense," said Michael McCann, a friend who teaches law at the University of New Hampshire and who recently collaborated with Prof. Markel on a journal article. "This has become a story that no longer makes sense. If, in fact, he was somehow targeted, I literally just cannot understand that."

[Photo credit: FSU]

News organizations treating The Onion's satire as reality is nothing new, but there's an especially tragic quality to the error when the dupe is one of the oldest science magazines in the country.

On Wednesday, Science News published an article about the sadism of children titled "Schadenfreude starts young" that, alongside this legit study from neuroscientist Simone Shamay-Tsoory, cited a paper by The Onion's more questionably accredited Dr. Leonard Mateo.

"A psychologist once even argued that most children under 10 would qualify as sociopaths if they were grown-ups," wrote Science News, linking to a 5-year-old Onion article titled "New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths."

After readers recognized the blunder, Science News scrubbed the citation, failing to note any correction had taken place. Of course, in a Google cache world, all deletions are strictly hypothetical.

It would be nice to think this incident might serve as reminder to media outlets about checking their sources, but in the words of one completely fictional child psychologist, "Sadly, experience has taught us there is little hope for rehabilitation."

[Image via Universal Pictures]

Proven theory: Nothing sets white commenters off faster than offhandedly mentioning the phenomenon of "mainly white people dancing to reggae music" in your Jimmy Cliff concert review.

If this wedding photo, hailed by various news outlets as the best ever, set off your bullshit detector, your instincts are good. Although the photo is genuine, the feel-good backstory that helped make it ubiquitous on Facebook earlier this month is mostly bogus.

Legend has it that the bride accidentally texted the details of her photo shoot to one of the teenagers in the photo, and when she tried to correct her mistake, he replied,"We still coming." And when he and his friends actually showed up, the couple welcomed them into the shot.

The photo became ubiquitous on Facebook, #westillcoming turned into a Twitter trend, and everyone lived happily ever after.

But that's not how it happened. BuzzFeed has tracked down the real story behind the photo and discovered the roles were completely reversed: The kids in the photo didn't crash the photo session; the happy couple crashed their rap video.

The bride and groom in the photo—Kirsten and Roger or Kristen and Roger, depending on which fake text message you read—are actually named Amy and Ian. According to their wedding photographer, Adam Sparkes, they showed up for photos in Detroit's theater district and found rap group 7262 shooting a video.

"We actually crashed their video. Frankly, they were hilarious, fun and totally inviting to the idea. Detroiters are always amazingly gracious and congratulatory to my bridal parties," he wrote in a Facebook comment.

And here's that video:

Sparkes found the fake story "cute," and speculated that it became so popular because "the ambiguity of it won everyone's attention and speculation[.] This is just made-up entirely, but hey, good for a laugh."

It seems whoever originally fed this into the viral meat grinder jumped to the conclusion that the black people in the photo were the uninvited guests (or assumed it would be more popular if they framed it that way) and fabricated some text messages to fit that narrative.

"Hey, you don't actually know the story behind that photo. You just entirely made it up!"

"We still posting."

[H/T BuzzFeed, Photos: Facebook]

Freshman Congressman Curt Clawson is new on the job. So when he saw senior U.S. officials Nisha Biswal and Arun Kumar at a Foreign Affairs committee meeting yesterday, he did what any Tea Party Floridian would do — he assumed they were members of the Indian government.

Instead of paying attention when the two were introduced (Biswal works for the State Department and Kumar works in Commerce), or checking the cheat sheet on his table which listed everyone in the meeting, he just told them, "I love your country."

John Hudson at Foreign Policy reports that Clawson referred to Biswal and Kumar as members of the Indian government throughout the entire meeting. No one corrected him. Hudson recorded the many things Clawson said to try to win their favor:

"I'm familiar with your country; I love your country. Anything I can do to make the relationship with India better, I'm willing and enthusiastic about doing so."

"Just as your capital is welcome here to produce good-paying jobs in the U.S., I'd like our capital to be welcome [in India]. I ask cooperation and commitment and priority from yourgovernment in so doing. Can I have that?"

Kumar smiled at that one, while Biswal tried to break the awkward silence: "I think your question is to the Indian government. We certainly share your sentiment, and we certainly will advocate that onbehalf of the U.S."

And here's a bonus:

During the hearing, [Clawson] repeatedly touted his deep knowledge of the Indian subcontinent and his favorite Bollywood movies.

There you have it: Clawson has deep knowledge of the Indian subcontinent, and lesser knowledge of non-white people working in the American government.

[Image via Foreign Policy]

Israel's cabinet rejected Secretary of State John Kerry's proposal for a weeklong truce in Gaza today. Now, Kerry's leaving the Middle East for Paris, where he'll try to try "to enlist additional European diplomatic help for the peace process," according to The Washington Post.

During a press conference in Cairo, Kerry said, "The whole world is watching tragic moment after tragic moment unfold and wondering when is everybody going to come to their senses." Israel apparently didn't like Kerry's plan because it would force the army to stop attacking Hamas's tunnel system. Previously, Hamas rejected an Egyptian cease-fire proposal because it didn't include an end to the blockade.

Violence in Gaza has only intensified this week, and protests in the West Bank today got ugly today when five Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces. Palestinian groups declared today a "day of rage."

[Image via AP]

The new American Dream was going so well: drop out, make an app for sending emojis that disappear after 5 seconds, and collect your check. But it turns out the app gold rush is broken for almost everyone.

A new, giant survey of 10,000 app developers from around the world reveals a hugely depressing reality: your app will almost certainly not succeed. Maybe it's a given that in such a crowded market, standing out is a tough feat. But the numbers are terribly dismal: 2 percent of all app developers pull in over 50 percent of all app revenue—"The revenue distribution is so heavily skewed towards the top that just 1.6% of developers make multiples of the other 98.4% combined." A staggering 47% of app developers either make literally no money, or less than $100 per month, per app. Hardly Instagram money, or even decent-Instagram-knockoff money.

It's easy to understand why. There are well over a million apps in Apple's App Store alone, and unless you're in the tippy-top of tippiest-top, odds are nobody will even notice you exist. Of course, the fact that it's considered gauche to even try to make money as a software business doesn't help:

Revenue is a feature. Some companies can add it later, others need to work it out early.

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 25, 2014

VisionMobile, which conducted the study, concludes that "It seems extremely unlikely the market can sustain anything like the current level of developers for many more years."

Good. The fewer people chase dreams of becoming the next Yo (a sentence that makes me want to sever my fingers, one by one), the more young talent can dedicate itself to building the next Washboard.

Image by Sam Spratt

Fresh from Comic-Con, here's a peek at the bloopers from the just-completed season 4 of Game of Thrones. Highlights include a near miss with a torch, a rare incident of Tywin Lannister cracking up, and an extended cut of the Peter Dinklage dance that spawned a thousand GIFs.

What's High Valyrian for "All men must forget their lines?"

[H/T EW]

This weekend we've got Airbenders in crisis, a fact-based search for the history and aliens of Atlantis, hauntings galore, sex and the science of sex, plus Oprah checks in with Nicole Richie, Tom Green, and complete lunatic Sharon Stone.

FRIDAY

At 8/7c. there's the last two episodes of Legend Of Korra to air before the chronically mistreated drama moves entirely online, and then at 9/8c. another What Would You Do?, the show that asks what you would do. I don't know why I love that show so much, I just feel like we all pretty much know what the right call is, so the question is more like, How Much Permission Have You Given Yourself To Be A Selfish Dick? And then you watch people wrestle with that, leveraging that, and it's wonderful. Sometimes gross, but often wonderful. Also: At 10/9c. I need you to understand that the H2 Channel—which one would assume exists because there is too much history on the History Channel to contain all the history—will be premiering a new series, In Search Of Aliens, by cutting right to the important shit: The Hunt for Atlantis. Nothing else matters tonight at 10/9c. We're going to solve this shit and it is, apparently, going to involve aliens also.

SATURDAY

The only important thing going on pretty much this entire weekend is that at 8/7c. there is an Original Lifetime Movie—practically a Lifetime Mic Drop, if you ask me—called The Choking Game. In the hours before 9/8c. the world belongs to the children, as it should be: Kid President on The Hub, new series Henry Danger on Nickelodeon, leadup to the Phineas And Ferb Star Wars special on Disney. By 9, it's all about Bad Teacher (two-part series finale), Mega Shark Vs. Mecha Shark (Syfy, naturally), and then at 10/9c. the first season of BBCA's hilarious sleeper Almost Royal finishes up in Nashville, La Toya and Sex Sent Me to the ER do their usual stuff, and LMN investigates The Haunting of Glee's Dot-Marie Jones. Love that lady. Hope she's unscathed by her experience of ghosts (which are not real)!

SUNDAY

At 8/7c. there's Big Brother, Real Housewives of New Jersey, and on PBS, Last Tango in Halifax. So I guess it just depends on what kind of sex you are into: Dumb people fucking, dumb and mean people fucking, or old people fucking. At 9/8c. there's your favorite show, so I'm not even going to bother to list it, but the rest of us will be watching the Poirot premiere, Oprah tracking down Where Nicole Richie, Fran Drescher & Tom Green Are Now, Sister Wives, and either Ray Donovan or True Blood, or are watching in 2014 and don't actually know or care when anything comes on. 10/9c., kind of the same deal. Obviously there's the show you very much enjoy and love—and nobody's trying to take that away from you, not that they could—but there's also Botched, Leftovers, Masters of Sex, and Vicious, as well as the premiere of WGN's very intriguing period piece Manhattan, and Oprah taking a Master Class from Sharon Fucking Stone.

[Image of Cara Delavingne being her usual awful self via Getty]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. What are you watching tonight? What are we missing out on? Recommendations and discussions down below.

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BuzzFeed has fired Viral Politics editor Benny Johnson for multiple instances of plagiarism.

Editor-in-chief Ben Smith explained the firing in a post on BuzzFeed:

After carefully reviewing more than 500 of Benny’s posts, we have 41 instances of sentences or phrases copied word for word from other sites. Benny is a friend, colleague and, at his best, a creative force. But we had no choice other than letting him go.

According to the accompanying list of corrected articles, Johnson lifted text from dozens of online sources, including About.com, Advertising Age, Associated Press, BabySaidWhat.com, The Boston Globe, The Catholic News Herald, CBS News, CNN, CreativeGuerillaMarketing.com, EverythingMouse.com, Fox News, The Guardian, the Federal Register, The Hill, Marketwatch, National Review, NBC News, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Pictorymag.com, Politico, the blog Prof. Boerner’s Explorations, U.S. News & World Report, Wikipedia, The Atlantic Wire, The Washington Post, Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! Finance. Johnson also copied material from a report published by Senator Tom Coburn, press releases published by Representative Sam Johnson and the United States Botanical Garden, the autobiography of Harry Reid, the textbook Principles Of Economics, and an unnamed government website.

One of Johnson’s posts, “24 Delightful Inauguration Firsts,” was lifted almost entirely from the website of the U.S. Senate:

This post has been corrected to remove phrasing that was copied from a U.S. Senate website, which should have also been cited as the source for almost all of the information in this piece.

Smith expanded on Johnson’s ouster in a Friday memo, which was provided to Gawker by BuzzFeed spokesperson Ashley McCollum:

From: Ben Smith
Date: July 25, 2014 at 8:50:29 PM PDT
To: Editorial
Subject: What we’re doing about plagiarism at BuzzFeed

All,

After a review of all of his work at BuzzFeed, we’ve decided to let Benny Johnson go.

This isn’t a decision we took lightly. Shani, Katherine, and I spent today reviewing about 500 posts. In them, we found 40 instances of sentences or phrases copied, word for word, from other sites, many of them inappropriate sources in the first place. This pattern is not a minor slip. This is a breach of faith with our readers; a violation of a basic rule of writing; and the reflection of an unserious attitude to our work that is wildly out of line with both our standards and our ambition.

The most important of these principles is that we owe our readers absolute honesty. When you write, the implication is that the words are yours; if they aren’t, you’ve tricked the reader. We are in the process of correcting and noting the plagiarism.

Today’s review has also been a reminder of how much we’ve grown. BuzzFeed started seven years ago as a laboratory for content. Our writers didn’t have journalistic backgrounds and weren’t held to traditional journalistic standards, because we weren’t doing journalism. But that started changing a long time ago.

Today, we are one of the largest news and entertainment sites on the web. On the journalistic side, we have scores of aggressive reporters around the United States and the world, holding the people we cover to high standards. We must — and we will — hold ourselves to the same high standards. BuzzTeam, too, has, over the last two years, raised its game dramatically, focusing on creative and ambitious work, and increasingly careful attribution.

We, Benny’s editors, also owe our writers more: We should have caught what are now obvious differences in tone and style, and caught this very early on. We will be more vigilant in the future. We will also change our onboarding procedures to make sure that the high standards of training that come with our fellowship program extend to everyone who arrives at BuzzFeed — and particularly to those without a background in traditional journalism.

Tonight’s decision is not a knee-jerk response to outside criticism, though we are genuinely grateful to the people who helped point out instances of plagiarism. Nor is it meant as a personal condemnation: Benny at his best is a creative force, and we wish him the best. Finally, it is not a warning that you’ll be fired for a small mistake or an isolated error. We will always have a more forgiving attitude toward bold failures, innocent errors, and misfired jokes than more skittish old media organizations.

We have more responsibility now than ever now to keep raising our standards and our ambitions, and to continue getting better.

Ben, Shani, Katherine, and John

Johnson apologized on Twitter on Saturday morning: “To the writers who were not properly attributed and anyone who ever read my byline, I am sincerely sorry.”

This post has been updated throughout.

To contact the author of this post, email trotter@gawker.com

Well, nerds, your favorite show is about to get favorite-r. While the current cast of HBO's Game of Thrones pranced around San Diego's Comic-Con on Friday, HBO took the time to announce all the new characters and cast members who will be appearing in season five. Exciting!

TIME has the full list:

Alexander Siddig as Doran Martell, the older brother of Prince Oberyn
Toby Sebastian as Trystane Martell, Doran's son
Nell Tiger Free as Myrcella Baratheon, Cersei and Jaime Lanniester's eldest child
DeObia Oparei as Areo Hotah, the captain of Doran Martell's palace guard
Enzo Cilenti as Yezzan, a former slave trader
Jessica Henwick as Nymeria Sand, second eldest of Oberyn Martell's bastard daughters
Rosabell Laurenti Sellers as Tyene Sand, another daughter of Oberyn
Keisa Castle-Hughes as Obara Sand, Oberyn's eldest daughter of
Jonathan Pryce as the High Sparrow a religious leader in King's Landing

But if that doesn't titillate enough, you can watch this clip of all the actors announcing their involvement in the world-famous television show, which has no official start date but is expected to begin again in April of 2015. These look like some goodies!

[Image via Getty]