I'm a few miles from the second largest chemical industrial hub in the world.

Watching MoS, it's clear that DC/Warner wanted to distance themselves stylistically from the Marvel films and decided they were going to make a more tense, gritty and sopomophisticated superhero film, for various reasons it turned out to be a grim, melodramatic and violent piece of film. And because Avengers they are…

The grey-haired man in the striped shirt was with me in the elevator and he was duly impressed as well.

Back in November 2009, I was visiting the USS Intrepid museum in New York. As I was waiting for the elevator, a bus pulled up and a guy wearing an earpiece got out and was soon joined by a Marine in full dress uniform. As the elevator doors opened, out came a large number of men wearing veteran badges accompanied by…

Kids were just as "dumb" back in your day or mine. Kids simply haven't amassed all that useful knowledge they might have as teenagers or young adults. I look back at myself and I am stunned how ignorant I used to be when I was a kid and I see the same thing in kids today, but if they are open and willing to learn,…

I second that they speak Dutch, feisty and fearless Ria speaks with a very folksy Southern Netherlands accent (which leans towards Flemish) which makes her sound even more awesome, rather than the vanilla "RP" of An.

There is a problem with many of those predictions. They seem to infer that people as a whole were completely blind to new developments, but they are in many cases the statements of individuals, possibly cherry-picked, we should see how many actually saw the value of these new inventions and made the right…

I wanted to make a point that good chain armour could give considerable protection in combat. Many people have this hierarchal belief in the value of armour, possibly stemming from D&D and other RPG's, with full plate being top tier, while chain is only average at best, but the gap is much less than many would think.

Actually there are documented instances where knights in chain were showered with arrows but were not significantly harmed. Chain it itself is a good way to protect yourself against cutting and slashing attacks, less so against direct blows or piercing weapons, but medieval knights would often wear heavy padding…

A lot of skilled artisans died in WWI, which meant that what they made became unavailable after the war or so expensive nobody could afford it. Stuff like the big naval guns on battleships is another example of lost technology. We might be able to replicate it given enough time and money, but we'd have to start…

Steel is pretty hard to make if you don't have the right equipment. A skilled smith can tell temperature by colour and knows how to work a certain amount of carbon into the metal to make it hard, but not brittle, but reliable, high quality steel is a fairly recent invention and current steel is light years ahead of…

But, but they BAYTTERIFIED it !!!!

Moving troops in the early 20th century was a huge problem. A single division on the march could take up several miles of road, so the less time spent in transit the better. Railways were the most effective way of moving troops, but railheads rarely end on the doorstep of the battlefield you picked. Cars and trucks…

The company I used to work until 2002 still has a ton of ancient machines they use for various jobs, they are eternally being scrounged and refurbished and most run on OS/2 ... They probably have enough stock of old parts to last another quarter century.

People make the mistake to think that once somebody publishes the results of their work, it's over as if Moses passed judgement. But that's only the beginning, if everybody else shoots it down it's probably because something doesn't quite mesh. It's a very hermetic world for an outsider to sort out and being served…

If we're really lucky WW's scenes will end up on the cutting room floor ... *sarcasm mode off*

Had one of those in my Fischertechnik set.

Tens of thousands of people across Florida saw the rockets lift off into the air, astronomers and radio amateurs the world over tracked it all into space, they then landed something on the moon that collected a huge amount of moon rocks and brought them back, put up a reflector. All this they didn't do once, but…

Genetic manipulation could have an interesting influence on the problem. Building people adapted to long duration travel. Also if I recall other books had a special caste of space crews called "the greys" who plied their trade at a high sub-c speed and drifted through space, using time dilation, living for many…

I had a collection of hundreds of video tapes, just chucked them out, probably watched 2-3% total ...