Who would win in a fight: Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Who would win in a fight: Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan?

If you built a time machine and forced Alexander the Great's army to fight Genghis Khan's, who would win? The answer: It's not even close. A thousand years separate those two forces, and they include a few striking technological achievements.

Image via Ethically Challenged.

Over at Slate's Quora blog, they break down the bloodshed, and it comes down to the invention of steel, better saddles, and gunpowder. Some salient quotes:

In Alexander the Great's time, steel was either unheard of or incredibly rare. (It's disputed.) In Genghis Khan's time, it was mass-produced by the ton to arm and armor entire armies...

Riding a horse without a solid saddle means all of your weight is on the animals' back. With a solid saddle, the weight of the rider is distributed over a larger area to the horse's flanks...

At this point in time, Chinese soldiers made use of flame throwers, shrapnel bombs, and breech-loading guns. At the height of Genghis Khan's reign, he had vanquished the northern Chinese Jin dynasty and absorbed their heavy cavalry and gunpowder armed infantry into his forces.

In other words, it's not even close. You have one army with steel weapons, good armor and flamethrowers, and the other army fighting with flimsy weapons and basically wearing no protection. The whole thing is a fascinating read. [Slate]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Who would win in a fight: Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan?

Great Lost Manuscripts of Science Fiction and Fantasy onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Great Lost Manuscripts of Science Fiction and Fantasy

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Some of the greatest authors of science fiction and fantasy have put words on paper — only to see those words lost or destroyed. Before there were computers, manuscripts got burned or lost in the mail all the time. Here are the famous authors whose books were lost, destroyed, misplaced or erased.

Actually, some of these books were rediscovered, years or even decades later. But many of these are books you'll never be able to read.

Top image: Paris in the Twentieth Century, art by Gilles Roman.

L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum was best known as a children's writer and the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but he also wrote books for adults. Four of his adult novels have been lost, apparently by his publisher. The lost books include Our Married Life, Johnson, The Mystery of Bonita, and Molly Oodle. Baum's son claimed in his biography of his father that his mother, Maud Baum, burnt the unpublished manuscripts — but many people speculate that he lied, after being cut out of her will. In addition to the four lost novels, many of Baum's short stories and movie scripts have also been lost. Most of his early scripts were destroyed in a theater fire in 1880.

Poul Anderson

After the intended publisher failed to publish Star Ways (Later retitled The Peregrine), Poul Anderson's agent offered it to Avalon. Before publication — and much to Anderson's distress — they cut the novel down to 50,000 words. No copy of the original manuscript exists, so we'll never know just how much was changed, or what happened in the sections that were cut.

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick is one of the most beloved and prolific science fiction writers of the 20th Century — but even he has lost, unpublished manuscripts. Three of his early novels written during the 1950s were lost. All that remains of A Time for George Stravros, Pilgrim on the Hill, and Nicholas and the Higs are index card synopses from the publishers who originally rejected them and comments that Dick made later about the missing books. He reused some of the characters in later books, and he may have reused parts of Pilgrim on the Hill in 1965's Dr. Bloodmoney. Dick intended A Time of George Stravros and Pilgrim on the Hill not to be science fiction books, while Nicholas and the Higs was a blending of literary fiction and science fiction.

Isaac Asimov

In 1972, Asimov listed 12 short stories that had been rejected by publishers and then lost during the 1930s and 40s. These stories include "Cosmic Corkscrew", his first short story, "This Irrational Planet", "Paths of Destiny", "Knossos in Its Glory", "The Decline and Fall"," Life Before Birth", "The Brothers", "The Oak", "Masks", and "Big Game". "Big Game" was later found and published in the Anthology Before the Golden Age. And Asimov later realized that "The Weapon" had actually been published under a pseudonym.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson's wife, we will never know what the first draft of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was like. Stevenson wrote the first draft of the famous novel in less than a week, sometimes writing 10,000 words a day. His wife dismissed the book as "a quire full of nonsense" and destroyed the book in a fire. That didn't stop him from rewriting the book — reportedly in three days — and it went on to be a bestseller.

Roger Zelazny

A few years after his death, Zelazny's agent was looking through boxes of papers in a warehouse when she came across an unpublished manuscript for a completed mainstream fiction novel, The Dead Man's Brother. He had written the book in 1971 and decided to publish it later, although he never returned to the story and it was found in a box marked "Save, no submissions at this time at Roger's request."

Jules Verne

The novel Paris in the 20th Century was thought to have been destroyed during WWII, like so many other great works of art across Europe. Happily for us, Jean Verne found it in a trunk in his garage in 1991. This novel was written in 1863 and is set in Paris in the 1960s. His publisher refused to publish the book because he believed its claims about the future were too unbelievable, although to modern readers it seems eerily accurate.

CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien

The beginnings of a collaboration between these two giants of fantasy was discovered in 2009. This was going to be a book about the meaning of language. The manuscript was never finished.

Roald Dahl

One recently found incomplete short story was never intended to be finished. Dahl wrote the first half of "The Eyes of Mr. Croaker" for The Do-It-Yourself Children's Storybook. The book was never published, and it was long thought that the manuscript had been lost. In 2010, it reappeared on ebay.

Robert Heinlein

In 1939, Robert Heinlein's For Us, the Living was considered too racy to publish. It was rejected, and then lost/destroyed by the family. After finding references to the work, Robert James tracked down a photocopy of a photocopy of the retyped original manuscript. The lost book was published at last in 2003.

Star Trek, Various Authors

There are dozens of lost, unpublished, or never completed Star Trek related books out there. This webpage lists them and tells the story for each of them. There's a lot of interesting material that has either been destroyed or will never see the light of day — including more books in the "Yesterday Saga" by A. C. Crispin. In a 2003 interview, Crispin said that she was putting finishing touches on a new trilogy, but in 2004 it was announced that the project had been canceled.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Great Lost Manuscripts of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Astronomers once thought there was life on the sun onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Astronomers once thought there was life on the sun

We think we live in the age most obsessed with the discovery alien life. In fact we missed that time by several hundred years. In the 1700s, astronomers thought life existed everywhere - including the sun.

Life on other planets has been a matter of speculation from the time that people were aware of the objects in the sky as anything more than points of light, but when telescopes proliferated, people really started going alien-crazy. In the 1600s, Czech astronomer Anton Schyrleus speculated that there could be life on Jupiter. In the 1800s, Percival Lowell claimed he saw evidence of civilizations on Mars, but it fell to William Herschel, in the 1700s, to make the wildest claim of all. Heschel was sure that there was life on the sun.

Herschel was not a raving amateur. A gifted astronomer, he discovered Uranus, and was the first to realize that sunlight included infrared light as well as visible light. His sister, Caroline, became famous in her own right for discovering comets, so he did not lack for intelligent conversation. He just had his own theories. Herschel believed that life existed on every celestial body in the universe. He was aware that the sun people saw was too hot to support life. He just assumed there was something underneath that burning atmosphere. When he observed sunspots, he believed that they were openings in the atmosphere, or perhaps mountains, and that if people could get a close look at the planet beneath, they would be able to spot signs of life. Herschel was not alone in his beliefs - as more information on the sun turned up, astronomers speculated on how it would affect life on the surface of the sun, and what kind of life might survive in those environments.

It as only toward the 1800s, when people realized there was no solid surface to the sun, that the idea of life on the sun was given up for good. Mars and the Moon became better prospects, and that is why there aren't any movies out there about the Earth getting invaded by the Sun People.

[Via ADS, Wired.]

Image: NASA APOD

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Astronomers once thought there was life on the sun

Spider-Man's greatest foe isn't Green Goblin or Venom, it's this onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Spider-Man's greatest foe isn't Green Goblin or Venom, it's this

Spider-Man has fought some of the toughest villains in the Marvel universe, often at the same time. But they're one force he can't stand up against, as revealed in this action-packed, but emotionally charged video.

Okay, it's just a dumb joke, but it's perfectly executed. The way Spidey looks around embarrassed after he drops the box just slays me.

[Via Geeks Are Sexy]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Spider-Man's greatest foe isn't Green Goblin or Venom, it's this

This gigantic amazing Lego recreation of Rivendell will blow your mind onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This gigantic amazing Lego recreation of Rivendell will blow your mind

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Damn. This fantastic piece measures 10 x 5 feet, uses over 200,000 Lego bricks, and was created by David Frank and Alice Finch, the latter of which you might remember for making that tremendous (and even bigger) Lego Hogwarts. You won't believe what they've managed to achieve.

Now, you might be thinking this is the Lego Rivendell that popped up a few years ago. It's not. That was pretty impressive, but this is mind-blowingly amazing. The buildings, the foliage, the water... you've got to check this out:

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And just for scale:

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You can check out all of the pictures (and in greater details) at over in a massive gallery at Alice's Flickr page, and The Brothers Brick has a great interview with the duo here, if you want to learn more about how they made this masterpiece.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This gigantic amazing Lego recreation of Rivendell will blow your mind

NASA plans to grow turnips and basil on the Moon onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com NASA plans to grow turnips and basil on the Moon

Will remembering to water the plants be just as difficult in space as it is on earth? We're about to find out. NASA has announced plans to plant the first garden on the moon in 2015 — and it might mean we're one small step closer to space-colonization.

Besides turnips and basil, the garden will also include Arabidopsis (a type of flowering cress, favored by research scientists). The seeds would initially be kept in a sealed growth chamber, with about a week's worth of air and a reservoir of water to get them started. Robert Bowman, one of the scientists working on the project, talked to NPR's Rachel Martin about the garden — and just what it could mean for space-colonization:

We want to show that crop plants that ultimately will feed astronauts and moon colonists and all, are also able to grow on the moon. So, we've chosen a spectrum of species that are important crop plants - turnips and basil . . . This is the first time that really we've exported earthly life to another planet. You might say, well, you know, the astronauts walked on the moon. That's true, but they walked on the moon, they turned around and came home. We're going to go to the moon and we're going to grow and germinate and thrive there. And ultimately, it's going to take this kind of thing to happen in order for people to becoming colonizers and go to the moon, go to Mars, go to other places in deep space.

The impact of the moon garden on space colonies is probably pretty far off into the future. But, there's also plenty of questions it can get started on answering right now, like what lunar gravity and radiation might do to plant germination and growth, whether there would be any effect on taste (uncertain, according to Bowman), and just what exactly might one make with turnips and basil?

Image: 1986 artist's conception of what a colony on the moon would look like, from NASA/Dennis M Davidson

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com NASA plans to grow turnips and basil on the Moon

Spider-Man's made his plans for New Year's Eve, as he'll be webslinging his way across NYC's Times S onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Spider-Man's made his plans for New Year's Eve, as he'll be webslinging his way across NYC's Times S

Spider-Man's made his plans for New Year's Eve, as he'll be webslinging his way across NYC's Times Square to participate in the annual ball drop to promote The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Expect an exclusive clip to premiere on Times Square's many screens, possibly a bit of stunt work, and a shit-ton of bad jokes based around the words "webs" and "amazing."

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Spider-Man's made his plans for New Year's Eve, as he'll be webslinging his way across NYC's Times S

Screencaps Reveal All the Secrets in the Amazing Spider-Man 2 Trailer! onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Screencaps Reveal All the Secrets in the Amazing Spider-Man 2 Trailer!

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The Amazing Spider-Man 2 trailer pretty much overwhelmed us with spectacle. And supervillains. Did you catch all of the amazing villain reveals, and weird clues? We've got you covered, with our complete roundup of screencaps!

First, let's pause and check out this high-res banner — we showed you a blurry version of it last week — which includes the three major villains in the movie, the Rhino, the Green Goblin and Electro:

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And now, let's take those one by one, from the screencaps:

Electro:

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Really digging the look of Electro's powers in these scenes.

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Note the electric eels in the left side of the frame. Guessing those have something to do with Electro's powers?

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And here he is getting his powers.

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And later in the trailer, a high voltage bioelectric facility explodes, with water flying everywhere.

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Pretty sure this is Dr. Kafka (Marton Csokas), the head of the Ravencroft Institution for the Criminally Insane. And he appears to be helping Electro with his transformation.

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Pretty. Badass. Ravencroft can't hold him any more.

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Trouble at Ravenscroft. All the guards are summoned.

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Is that a containment suit? Or just a fancy suit?

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Insert obligatory J.J. Abrams joke. There is a lot of lens flare here.

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He can apparently generate a bubble of electromagnetic energy.

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Jamie Foxx is favoring whisper-acting here.

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Where is this? Ravenscroft again?

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Or some kind of power plant?

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The Rhino:

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See Paul Giamatti's head in the cockpit...

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...of this ridiculously insane rhino mecha.

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And here he is without the rig, probably earlier in the film.

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You can't see it, but it's the Rhino driving that truck.

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Approximately 100 NYPD cars are destroyed in this trailer.

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Manhole attack!

Green Goblin:

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Is that a closeup of Dane DeHaan's eye? It looks too old, but then I'm not sure who else it could be, and it seems to lead into the shot below. Another possibility: It could be Dr. Kafka (Marton Csokas) observing Electro's transformation.

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Our first glimpse of the Green Goblin armor.

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He's got a touchscreen with all Oscorp's evil experiments on it. Including "Synthetic Plants." Hmm.

Update: Commenter Laurence shares a list of the whole bunch:

Nano Drug System, Weapons System 8A, Venom Storage 7-U, Exoskeleton 232, Plutonium Lab, Research SGOP 520, Transmitter Test 9, Carbon Fiber Test 7, Oscorp Lab 231, Internal System Test 2, Labs 2345 – 4748, Oscorp Tower File 23.

Synthetic plants, Experiment OCT 32A, 67B – Bio-Lab, Eel Lab – Report 29, Ravencroft, Oahu Facility, Document 9303-D, Power Station – NY, OS – Suit (Mark III), London Lab – 0930, Australia Project, Dr Connors File, Dr Morbious File

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Harry descends into a secret lair...

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Where a bunch of sinister doors begin to open.

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Harry visiting a hidden and long-forgotten lab.

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Guessing this is another glimpse of the Goblin armor.

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Here's Harry's dad Norman, who's in bad shape — in the first movie, OsCorp was searching for a cure for him.

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Harry's concerned about what will happen to Peter Parker, but his dad tells him not everybody gets a happy ending.

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Note the Goblin Glider.

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Looks sort of like Sting in Dune here.

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Whatever they do to Harry, it's not fun.

Doctor Octopus and the Vulture?

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Tell me those aren't the Vulture's flying harness and Doc Ock's arms, side by side. And who's this mysterious figure entering an OsCorp vault?

The Parker Family Mystery

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So Oscorp had all the Parkers under surveillance, Harry reveals.

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Peter interrogates Aunt May about his parents, while standing in front of a Conspiracy Theory wall. One sticky seems to say "BACH HEAD". ???

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More Conspiracy Wall.

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Hidden lair under abandoned subway station. The Tomorrow People should sue.

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Looks like it's a converted subway train.

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Richard Parker's secret is.... that he was a UNIX sysadmin.

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Just kidding. The video decompresses and Richard Parker reveals he had to hide his research because OsCorp would abuse it. Too bad Peter handed it over in the first movie.

The Jet Set Piece:

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An airplane pilot is fighting with some other guy. Could be Agent Berkley (Frank Deal). Not sure.

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It's a luxury plane.

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And it's going down.

The Times Square set piece:

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He swings down from the skyline, lands on the roof of a car that's flipping over, and catches it before it smushes a cop. Pretty nifty.

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Buildings are actually crashing down.

Other stuff:

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What airplane is Spidey falling out of here? Is it the same airplane we see being trashed?

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Uncle Ben's grave? Or Captain Stacy's? Someone else's?

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The Daily Bugle has a Tumblr! Hope there are lots of animated "threat or menace" GIFs.

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Gwen is in trouble. In some old building with massive gears. Clocktower? (Or a suspension bridge?)

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More of those gears.

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Spidey swings past the evil Oscorp tower while being chased by a helicopter. Seriously, everything evil in this movie seems to come back to Oscorp. Kind of sad that it's all one evil corporation, instead of a bunch of standalone maniacs, but probably better in terms of creating a cohesive world.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Screencaps Reveal All the Secrets in the Amazing Spider-Man 2 Trailer!