splatt9990

There was also a plan to explode nuclear bombs on shorelines to create artificial harbors, and of course the infamous Project Orion, a manned interstellar spaceship powered by exploding hydrogen bombs. Doing unhinged shit with nukes was all the rage back then I guess

The doomsday clock is symbolic with the minutes (or seconds) to midnight symbolizing how close we are to doomsday. Traditionally, that has meant nuclear war, but I believe more recently, they've factored in climate change

Don't forget your lesson... Never. Forget. Your. Lesson.

Fun fact: it's pretty much impossible to get those bodies down and there's not really anywhere to bury them on the mountain so they're literally laying pretty much wherever they died. They call that section of the mountain "Rainbow road" because of the multi-colored winter coats of the corpses you have to walk past to get to the summit.

If anything was going to get Newton in trouble with the Church, it would have been his lifelong obsession with alchemy, not his three laws.

Oh, I'm not a historian, that's actually just a few vaguely informed wikipedia searches. The extent of my education on Islam and Islamic culture is just a world religions class back in HS.

The monkey's paw comes from a short story of the same name by W.W. Jacobs back in 1902. It seems the genie that grants three wishes dates all the way back to 1697 in "The Ridicuolous Wishes" by Charles Perrault.

In Islamic/pre-Islamic mythology (over simplifying greatly) genies are actually trapped demons forced into servitude long ago by human sorcerers. They must comply with your wish but use any ambiguity they can as a form of malicious compliance. It's also worth noting that the idea of genies granting 3 wishes is mostly a western invention and is also likely influenced by Christian ideas of "deals with the devil" (see Foust for how that usually works out for the wisher)

Sort of. Each book is usually it's own self-contained story (the exception being book #2 which is a direct sequel to #1) but many books follow up on characters that were introduced in previous books. You don't have to have read any of the previous books to understand the story you picked up, but there's some continuity and references if you have. It's kind of like several different novel series all set in the same shared universe rather than a true anthology though.

Malloc is a C function and wouldn't come around for another 15 years or so. They likely wrote memory allocation code directly in machine code/assembly which could and would just access raw memory directly.

"Do refrigerators still come in big cardboard boxes?" "Yeah, but the rents are outrageous"

they're saying that if the student was any dumber they'd be a houseplant