I stand corrected! And looking at my old stack I realize where the writing went astray: Bill Mantlo.

Speaking as one who grew up on Claremont's first runs of X-Men and Alpha Flight, I think one of the things Claremont brought was dare I say it, a certain maturity. To New Mutants as well, I think (I believe he was on it for its initial run)?

The cylinder might not even be buildable — you see the idea is that the cylinder would be spinning at near light speed (certainly relativistic speeds). So in the "rest" frame (say you standing next to it) the mass of the cylinder would increase and the length (the dimension along which the particles in it travel)…

Alcubierre drive, yes. Those ran into problems because the bubble you make would need to be made of negative energy and the energy density is ridiculously high, to say nothing of the fact that nobody has the slightest notion of what negative energy would look like.

I always get lost on the "spoiling" thing.

and those ships were a LOT bigger than simple longships, which it seems to me the Iron Islanders are using.

Well, realistically, a viking ship took on the order of 25,000 hours to do (there was a recent reconstruction that gave that figure here :

Tipler's solutions actually don't require FTL, though, strictly speaking. That's why physicists take them seriously. (In manby solutions you aren't going faster than light in your own reference frame, you are just traversing bent spacetime — similar to how when you account for Lorentz contraction on a spaceship at…

Small nitpick: Tipler's weirder ideas liek resurrection are pseudoscience, but time travel is actually not. Tipler's analysis of some of the equations of general relativity is considered perfectly legitimate in the field and has been cited numerous times. This doesn't mean that physicists don't think he's likely wrong…

That makes sense — "Magic Power" which was one of their best singles, was released in 1981 so if you are talking about the period before that a bit… (I got into all that stuff in the early 80s, but it was a lot of background music for me in grade school, of course. All my friends' older siblings would have gotten it…

I was certainly a casual fan of Styx, Boston (partly because I am from that area and who the hell could resist that?), Meat Loaf (because of the Rocky Horror Picture Show) and less so Billy Joel. But weirdly I was also going through a phase where I was into the 80s college radio stuff and some punk rock — I had…

I was actually really, really worried that the Faith Militant had castrated Loras. We saw last season that they could do that kind of thing when they attacked Littlefinger's brothel. I wouldn't put it past any of them.

I'm sure Celine Dion is a nice person. Heck, I'd probably love to have her over for dinner or something, but "My Heart Will Go On" I can do without.

Yeah, I'd forgotten about that, that Theon had explicitly said he killed a farmer's kid, and that Ramsay had even suggested it (posing as Reek in the books I think).

Yes; but they don't know about the Vale. Either way, the Vale forces would add a small but important force; if they tack on an extra 2,000 soldiers they have a good shot at keeping Ramsay busy in the east while other Northern houses harass him from the north and west, depending on how many.

I thought it weird that Grey Worm — seasoned warrior that he is — couldn't seem to see the point in having your enemies underestimate you. You'd think he's be all over that even if it was only "the better to slaughter them all."

I remember Celine Dion's performance at the Oscars that year. I was watching it with my sister, who was something of a performer herself (some professional work as an actor and time in a talent agency). Her reaction "I do not believe a thing she is doing there. Is she like, thinking that she left the stove on, or…

No. It's a pretty simple methodology, actually, and the guy who did the study is an evolutionary biologist.

By the way, if you suspect that the diversity of music exploded around 1991, you may be right — according to science!

Nevermind for sure was in rotation on the college circuit; I was a senior and that was the year I got my daytime slot on the radio. Weirdly, I recall that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was not the track I liked playing, for some damned reason lost to memory, there were a couple of others I dug more, I guess.