Even now, there is "standard gear" that is part of a horse artillery unit in the U.S. Civil War that no one today has any idea what it was supposed to be used for, but it is part of the tool set issued to every artillery battery during and after the Civil War, and just stopped being issued when newer technologies were introduced. So no modern gunner has any idea what it was for.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 01:58 pm: Edit

About a decade ago there were two engineers (my father knew one of them) in their late eighties still charging exorbitant consulting fees to deal with old ICBM systems built in the 1950s as they were the only ones left involved in the design process. They might be dead now.

The guy did not want to do it any more (he wanted to enjoy his retirement) so he just kept charging more and more and they just kept paying it.

By Richard Wells (Rwwells) on Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - 02:31 pm: Edit

In the comics that the movie was derived from, the plan was Death's and designed to balance the universe. Thanos went along with it as an expression of romance. It would have taken a lot of careful scripting to make the original plan make sense without Thanos seeming like a love-struck 10 year at the county fair trying to win a stuffed animal.

By Chris Nasipak (Ecs05norway) on Thursday, June 27, 2019 - 12:05 am: Edit

> Like the aging computer people that got called back to fix old programs in languages modern programmers never learn.

True, this. I remember learning to code in COBOL way back when. And I find mainframe apps still in use today at some banks that use it.

By Jon Berry (Laz_Longsmith) on Thursday, July 11, 2019 - 08:30 am: Edit

So, my brother was listening to "We are Legion (We are Bob)" on a road trip earlier, and as part of the story, rocks get thrown at planets. I commented that throwing rocks at planets has been a staple of Science Fiction since "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by RAH, and we then tried to figure out if there had been any earlier examples of that in SciFi. We could't think of any, but I was wondering if any of you guys could remember something like that earlier.

I mean, it could possibly be the Lensmen, but I remember next to nothing about that series.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Thursday, July 11, 2019 - 11:44 am: Edit

There was an old Russian novel from the 1800s that was about a comet hitting the Earth. The Year 4338: The Petersburg letters.

Or are you looking only for intentional impacts?

If so I guess you could say God in the Book of Revelation sending Wormwood to hit the Earth but I vaguely remember older religious stories with similar catastrophes.

By Nick Blank (Nickgb) on Thursday, July 11, 2019 - 01:48 pm: Edit

In Lensmen they threw planets at other planets.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Saturday, July 20, 2019 - 10:44 pm: Edit

A slew of new information has been revealed at SDCC 2019 for Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Movie-wise, Marvel have confirmed that The Eternals, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Widow, and Blade are in the works, along with new movies for the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and the Fantastic Four.

Streaming-wise, the rumoured Hawkeye series has been confirmed, which will be joined by The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, WandaVision, and WHAT IF...? on the upcoming Disney+ service.

By Xander Fulton (Dderidex) on Sunday, July 21, 2019 - 12:06 am: Edit

While a lot of TV series, I think last we'd heard these were all going to be short-ish 4 or 6 episode, single-arc, "miniseries" rather than typical broadcast 24-episode series. (And as that article notes, a few of them actually having crossover episodes)

Has anything come out that indicates a change in plans, there?

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 12:23 am: Edit

This made my head hurt: Terminator Timeline Accurately Explained (run-time = 24:00)


Garth L. Getgen

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 04:52 pm: Edit

Can't believe I missed this...

According to one of my favorite television series when I was a kid, yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of the Moon being blasted out of Earth orbit by a nuclear accident!

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 05:38 pm: Edit

Ah you kids, too young to remember the scourge of the monthly werewolf raids.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 09:37 pm: Edit

Jeffrey George Anderson is, of course, referring to "Space: 1999."

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 11:49 pm: Edit

SPP:

Yeah! Wasn't that a GREAT show? Loved the first season. Second season, less so...

Adm:

Full plaudits for linking the thread with our full moon.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Sunday, September 15, 2019 - 02:52 am: Edit

Jeffery George Anderson:

Truthfully, I doubt I have ever seen an episode. I am aware of it, but cannot at this time tell you why I did not see it.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, September 15, 2019 - 02:07 pm: Edit

And another thing they're running out of time with, there's only 3-1/2 months left to build Sea Lab.

By the way, where's my Flying Car? They didn't even give us JetPacks yet!

Well, on the plus side, they haven't turn Earth into a radioactive wasteland (yet).


Garth L. Getgen

By Tony L. Thomas (Scoutdad) on Monday, September 16, 2019 - 11:04 am: Edit

At least we survived Judgement Day...
or version one of it, anyway.

By Norman Dizon (Normandizon) on Monday, September 16, 2019 - 11:14 am: Edit

Judgement Day is EN-EEVE-ATT-IBLE!! (In Arnold's Voice)

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Monday, September 16, 2019 - 04:56 pm: Edit

Everyone knows the trigger to "Judgement day" is Steven Petrick exclaiming "I have the winning lottery ticket" (and actually having it, so there is nothing to fear from the simple statement itself), chaos, destruction, devastation, and ruin will follow immediately as night follows day.

By the way, just to be clear. I do not buy lottery tickets with any expectation that I will win the lottery. My attitude and belief is that if I was going to win the lottery, i would have already won the lottery, and since I have not won the lottery, I never will win the lottery.

I buy lottery tickets solely as "a dream permit." Having a lottery ticket gives me the license to dream "what if," and that is all.

By Norman Dizon (Normandizon) on Monday, September 16, 2019 - 07:35 pm: Edit

SPP: your exotic mystical words have beguiled my delicate fragile mind.

By Eddie Crutchfield (Librarian101) on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 04:37 pm: Edit

Garth remember Chernobyl was a low level experiment to see if it was feasible with the then present technology. The Japanese then used the Fukushima Daiichi reactors as a second test to see if it was viable without nuclear war. So far it appears they have only has a low level of success it these trials, I am sure more are to follow.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 05:04 pm: Edit

Eddie Crutchfield:

Well, you should also remember that we have successfully (apparently) survived "the Y2K bug," and can all laugh at those foolish Mayans and their 2012 prediction. (Not to mention some more recent fundamentalist Christian preachers and their predictions for "the end times," but that is an old standard and people actually ran into the hills in terror of the coming end of the world when Y999 was about to roll over to Y1000.)

Of course there have been many "Secular and Scientific" predictions that the world would end all through my (admittedly short) life span. I can well remember being bombarded with the new coming "ice age" when I was in grade school, before it shifted over to "global warming."

The result is, I am sorry to say, that I am very blase about the whole "end of the world" thing. Part of that is that I majored in history and have seen in the historical record that during the time Man has walked this ball of mud there has been freezing and warming before. Incidents that are trumpeted as foretelling imminent doom have happened in the past (England Warm Enough to Raise Grapes, horrors, except it was that warm in England when the Romans arrived).

If I have any concerns at all these days, it is Mother Nature going off on one of her rampages. (Yellowstone anyone? or how about Giant Rock fall from Sky?)

But the world was supposed to end any number of times in my life if we did not do what our betters told us to do. And we very disrespectfully have refused to lie down and die after not doing what our betters have told us to do to avoid our dooms.

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 05:26 pm: Edit

There was an event back around 1400 that some experts refer to as the "Little Ice Age." It was around this time that the English wine industry (that SPP mentioned) collapsed. It was also about this time that one of several waves of Plague hit Europe. I would suppose that many at that time thought it was the End of the World.

Meanwhile, here in North America, we also saw the collapse of two great cultures of that time, the Mississippian culture, renowned by modern archaeologists for their great mounds, and the Anasazi, from the Four Corners area. Aside from their relics, few is really known about either culture, so thoroughly were they wiped out by the change of climate.

Humanity took a hit, but survived.

SPP, you also brought up a Yellowstone eruption. Two references; Tambora of 1815, when an island in the Indonesian area blew up, resulting in the "Year Without a Summer" (quite literally, they had snow in Boston in July), and the Yellowstone scale Toba eruption, back around ten thosand years ago.

In the latter case, there were just a few humans, all of whom were in Africa, and even then the population was so badly hit that all humans can trace their lineages back through michtochondrial DNA to just a small handful of survivors. This is referred to by scientists who study these disasters as the Toba Bottleneck.

Again, humanity took a hit (in BOTH cases), but we survived.

In my opinion, if we fail to survive what next we run in to, it's only because we've become a weaker and less flexible people than our ancestors were.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 06:25 pm: Edit

Jeffrey George Anderson:

I have noted this before. The "truth" is that Mother Nature is not through with us yet. We are still "evolving." (Although frankly some of the ladies I have known in my life leave me convinced that we have already reached the pinnacle of our evolution, but I am probably quite biased on that score.) One of the examples of our continuing evolution is the problem many of us have with our "wisdom teeth" (and I am very aware of it since I went through considerable discomfort when three of mine tried to "come in" in my 30s and had to be extracted). But we are also supposedly moving toward an evolutionary discarding of our pinky fingers. Lower back problems for many of us are reflection of how much of a "kludge" the evolutionary sequence leading to our walking upright was.

So, we are still a "work in progress." A 1,000 years from now our descendants may wonder what anyone ever saw in Marilyn Monroe, or Arnold Schwarzengger.

But, as a species we may survive that long because we are a very diverse species. If the ice age comes, perhaps the surviving majority will take more after the Eskimo. If global warming takes off, perhaps Africans will be the dominant human offshoot. If we make it into space, perhaps women will be dominant because their smaller bodies are better able to stand the stresses, or maybe it will simply be that the Pygmy is the human norm.

As for me, when the time comes, expect me to be among those guarding the entrance to the bunker or access to the lifeboat, so that others might survive, but there is no place in either for me. I have the courage to face my end, but not the courage to face the hardships the survivors will endure to create civilization again.

By Mark Steven Hoyle (Markshoyle) on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 07:17 pm: Edit

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A 1,000 years from now our descendants may wonder what anyone ever saw in Marilyn Monroe,

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