Cancer

Who built it: The Dinosaurs
 

 
 
Why go there: The Guardian of Forever (Star Trek: TOS)
 

 
 
Goal of the architects: Control access to the Guardian
 
Who is in charge: The Medjai, led by Ardeth Bey (The Mummy)        
Mythic Monster: The last survivor of his timefaring civilization-- The Indominus Rex (Jurassic World 2)
 

 

Why go?
 
Much of the materials gathered by the Martians as they were investigating and planning the invasion of Earth are present in the arsenal.  This remarkably heterogeneous collection includes some very unexpected unique, irreplaceable things.
Santa Claus.  The real one.  In Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Santa was brought to Mars to deprogram young Martians.  Santa himself has said he was kidnapped and brought to Mars so they could adopt his manufacturing and delivery methods for their invasion.  Other records indicate he came to Mars to investigate outsourcing of his toy manufacturing and undercut his elf labor costs.  Whatever the real reason, Santa did come to Mars and in fact has never returned to Earth.  He's slimmed down, usually dresses in Hawaiian shirts, cut-off jean shorts, and retread sandals, and looks kind of like a more hung over than usual edition of Jimmy Buffet these days.  He can still do the "ho ho" thing and will give toys and candy to the kids, but very few children cross paths with him now.  At a glance he knows if you're naughty or nice (a trick he steadfastly refuses to explain) and gives immediate gifts appropriate to that status, so televangelists, pro-austerity politicians, stockbrokers, payday loan promulgators, and other self-aggrandizing individuals are advised not to cross his path.  Santa occupies a comfortable complex on Level 32 and is accompanied by a bevy of hot Red Martian babes. The capsule of the cryogenically frozen Philip J Fry.  The how and why of this artifact's presence in the arsenal is entirely unknown, but there is a coin-operated turnstyle allowing entry into a small room with the labeled capsule; Fry's frozen face is plainly visible through the viewing glass.  Its presence adjacent to a long-abandoned pizza counter in a defunct refectory on Level 22B is assumed to be an expression of irony. The rose brought by Gallinger to the Martian high priestess in A Rose for Ecclesiastes, and the hothouse rose garden she and her acolytes grew.  This is in a near-surface dead-end tunnel accessible from Level 19C. In a tiny closet on Level 11C is a still-operating low-power radio transmitter which sends single a very brief coded message every few hours.  The text selection part of the transmitter has long been damaged so its content cannot be changed; it seems to have originally been intended to be a coin-operated "Send Your Note" amusement device.  Translating the glyphs on the mangled display, the now locked-in text seems to be "Mars Needs Women". On Level 6 is a duty free shop for Radegast Distillery, perhaps the oldest still-operating whiskey maker on Mars. Level 38C seems to be a wing of timeshare condos owned by itinerant individuals who reliably but intermittently spend time on Mars, but generally live on other planets.  One apartment has been broken into and plundered (the resident seems to have been J'onn J'onzz).  Others (the names are above the doorbell buttons on the outside) include Dr. Manhattan, Mona the Monkey, Narab, Princess Marcuzan, and Uncle Martin, and a gated suite of several apartments labeled Capricorn One.  (Marvin the Martian's quarters are on a different level, behind a heavily-damaged zone with the sign "Off Limits".)

Highlight 2: Conservatory of the White Apes
 
Not within Face Mountain itself, but under the surrounding Cydonian Plain on which the mountain stands, in the upper levels of the Arsenal is a very large room, about 200 meters on a side and 70 meters tall.  There are shafts from its ceiling to the surface (all blocked by strong bars set in a number of places along the shafts) that open to the surface, admitting fresh air and indirect natural light.  Many structural beams run at random angles through the room, and hundreds of heavy eye bolts are set into beams and walls, intended as anchors for ropes and chains; many such lines are present, running at all angles.  There are many shrubs and vines growing from planters set from walls, beams, and heavy chains throughout the room.  Some of these plants are edible, some are poisonous, others are hazardous in other ways.  A few pools and fountains exist at a variety of levels through the room, providing water to keep everything alive.
 
Intended as a training zone for commandos who would be infiltrating Earth's jungles and dense forests, this room has always been called the Conservatory because of its dense foliage.  After the decommissioning of the Arsenal and the removal of its garrison, Martian white apes found their way in and adopted the Conservatory as their dwelling.  Though they evolved in the near-deserts of the dessicated, dying Mars, they quickly adapted to greenery and the three-dimensional lifestyle afforded by the ersatz jungle.  Now there are scores of them living there, in a loose tribal sort of arrangement that humans have not parsed out.  Eager to supplement their vegetable diet with whatever meat they can get, the apes are eagerly anthropophagous, and are skilled in assembling attack parties numbering upwards of a dozen, which converge quickly and violently from all directions (including, of course, directions not in the horizontal plane) upon intruders who get incorporated into the apes' meal of the day.  They cleverly use the sight-line obstructions of both architecture and foliage to gain surprise, bursting into their victims' sight only when literally within ape-arm's length.  This combination of music and scene (it's a still image) is almost appropriate.

Highlight 3: Variable gravity tank
 
This room -- spherical in shape, about 30 meters in diameter -- is one of the training simulator tools of the Arsenal, though it is not at all clear why the designers considered this important enough to build.  Within the room gravity changes in magnitude and direction throughout the room both in space (e.g., if one place with 1 gee downward relative to true Martian vertical), there may have another place three meters away where the gravity is 0.35 gees directed 120 degrees away from true Martian vertical) and in time (typically a change from one gee up to one gee down in one spot happens over about 10 seconds, though gravity in one spot may remain constant for intervals up to half a minute or so).  There are transient intervals of zero gravity throughout the room, albeit never all at the same time, as far as anyone knows; there are no known controls for the room.  It is speculated that this was intended to make the invading forces familiar, if not necessarily comfortable with, the descent from space to Earth's surface.  Finding controls for this facility is a high priority.
 
Whatever its original purpose, the variable gravity generator continues to operate within the room, the outer wall of which also rotates slowly and erratically with the sphere's various doors lining with a number of different corridors as the thing rotates.  The effect is terribly disorienting as well as vertigo-inducing.  Individuals near the walls can end up falling into a wall because of these gravity changes, but the distance and acceleration of such incidents is not usually sufficient to result in major injury.  Thrown objects rarely go where intended, and projectile weapons whose projectiles travel much slower than firearm bullets are usually too badly affected by the variable gravity field to be useful at ranges beyond about five meters.
 
Naturally flying creatures take a while to become accustomed to the situation, but after that adjustment interval they can manuver from door to door without much difficulty.
 
At intervals, small rocket-propelled drones emerge from one of the open doors and fly around the room apparently randomly before disappearing through another door.  These drones, about 30 cm in size, move at about 60 km/hr and are robust enough to survive impacts with each other, the walls, and creatures in the room, apparently without damage.  The mass and speed of these drones is sufficient to injure most humanoids, though it takes truly bad luck for a lethal impact.  The rocket exhaust can set easily flammable things on fire, like papers, clothing, hair, and so on, but it is not intense enough to ignite, e.g., wooden tools (like axe handles and so on).
 
Creatures of Barsoom wander into and out of the room occasionally.  The large dangerous ones, the white apes, banths, orluks, siths (which are thought to be unrelated to the Star Wars Sith, but you never know), zitidars, etc., usually are quite enraged once they've been in there for a couple of minutes, and will attack others thrashing in the room if they get the chance.  Combat between mutually hostile teams of humanoids is possible in the room, but the circumstances are so unpredictably bizarre that such combats tend to be lethal and random, unless circumstances are extreme (e.g., one side has rifles, the other has axes and swords).  Also, the inability of most humanoids to return to -- or perhaps even identify -- the door through which one entered can completely disrupt planned operations.
 
Common torches and other open flames are extremely dangerous in this room; flames in microgravity behave in a way which is entirely unfamiliar to most people, and harder to extinguish than one might expect.  It is remarkably common for someone carrying a torch to end up setting themselves on fire after a couple of minutes if they persist in carrying the torch, as the flame always tries to extend "up", and that direction will often intersect the torch carrier while they are in this room.  Carrying a torch while bearing a load of flammable or explosive material in a sack or backpack is probably wantonly suicidal.  Large quantities of water will "ball up" in microgravity due to surface tension, and it is possible that someone who collides with a large water ball may find themselves engulfed and be unable to breathe until gravity strong enough to pull the water away from nose and mouth recurs where the victim is.  That is unlikely to be long enough to drown a humanoid, but thirty seconds of inability to breathe is at best very distracting.
 

Highlight 4: Water Room
 
The Martians knew Earth has seas and lakes ... that's one of the big reasons they invaded.  But they didn't know what those were like.  The Arsenal being a training facility, deep in its catacombs is another large room, roughly a fifty meter cube, full of water, lacking any airspace inside.  If you pump air into the room through a hose running through a door, the bubbles rise to the top, but never accumulate to make even 3 cm of air gap there.  A few experiments with the doors (see below) involving balloons, sealed airtight containers, and nested arrangements of both, suggest that the force fields are permeable by air but not by water, so that air released in the room diffuses out quickly through the top-side force-field doors.
 
Force-field screens make for entry into the water, and there are about a dozen such entrances on each face of the room.  Water can be stolen from the room, but only in man-portable containers that must be sealed before leaving; this is adequate to supply dirty water to dungeon delvers, but not for much more, considering the difficulty of getting there from the surface and getting back.  No breathing apparatuses are available any more; their storage bays are obvious in the passageways adjacent to the doors but these are now empty, having been plundered long ago.  You can "peek into" the room by sticking your head through a door briefly and pulling it back out, but not many explorers do even that much.
 
Tha Martians had heard of fish, whales, and sharks, but while they had stories of these they had no specimens, so the robotic mock-ups of aquatic animals are bizarre and unpredictable in behavior.  The robo-sharks in particular behave like banths, attacking in teams using effective three-dimensional tactics, and they have no hesitation about killing.  Some other robot fish are aggressive in using converging swarm movement to charge at intruders and veering off at the last possible moment into a dispersal, maybe even explosion, of the swarm, and they are not shy about bouncing off their target, which makes for a full-body pummeling of the target, though the swarm merely flees after doing this and does not return to make any follow-up attack.  Unless your breathing apparatus is quite robust, all these encounters can be very dangerous.  The population of robots in the room seems to vary slowly on timescales of weeks, and a few explorers report episodes of seeing none at all.
 
The passages around the water room meander quite a bit, as the supporting pipes and machinery must take up a large amount of space, but it seems that you do not have to negotiate the water room to get anywhere: you can get from any force-field door to any other force-field door by dry passages; it may be a long, twisting walk, though.  The illumination level in the room varies slowly -- at least a few hours from well-lit to full dark -- but not in any clear sequence.  There are currents in the water that have yet to be mapped, and whose primum mobile has yet to be found.  The water is dirty, even muddy near the bottom, and while drinkable (it isn't obviously poisoned or tainted) it tastes bad, and no one has tried drinking it straight and untreated for longer than a day or two, so it might be toxic on longer times.  A rigorous chemical analysis has yet to be performed.
 
There are features here and nearby in the dungeon that suggest a second, much larger water room was originally planned but never built; some documents indicate that one was to be for training in submarines, and it was assumed that whales would be comparable in size, and react aggressively towards, the submarines.

Why go?
 
Much of the materials gathered by the Martians as they were investigating and planning the invasion of Earth are present in the arsenal.  This remarkably heterogeneous collection includes some very unexpected unique, irreplaceable things.
Santa Claus.  The real one.  In Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Santa was brought to Mars to deprogram young Martians.  Santa himself has said he was kidnapped and brought to Mars so they could adopt his manufacturing and delivery methods for their invasion.  Other records indicate he came to Mars to investigate outsourcing of his toy manufacturing and undercut his elf labor costs.  Whatever the real reason, Santa did come to Mars and in fact has never returned to Earth.  He's slimmed down, usually dresses in Hawaiian shirts, cut-off jean shorts, and retread sandals, and looks kind of like a more hung over than usual edition of Jimmy Buffet these days.  He can still do the "ho ho" thing and will give toys and candy to the kids, but very few children cross paths with him now.  At a glance he knows if you're naughty or nice (a trick he steadfastly refuses to explain) and gives immediate gifts appropriate to that status, so televangelists, pro-austerity politicians, stockbrokers, payday loan promulgators, and other self-aggrandizing individuals are advised not to cross his path.  Santa occupies a comfortable complex on Level 32 and is accompanied by a bevy of hot Red Martian babes. The capsule of the cryogenically frozen Philip J Fry.  The how and why of this artifact's presence in the arsenal is entirely unknown, but there is a coin-operated turnstyle allowing entry into a small room with the labeled capsule; Fry's frozen face is plainly visible through the viewing glass.  Its presence adjacent to a long-abandoned pizza counter in a defunct refectory on Level 22B is assumed to be an expression of irony. The rose brought by Gallinger to the Martian high priestess in A Rose for Ecclesiastes, and the hothouse rose garden she and her acolytes grew.  This is in a near-surface dead-end tunnel accessible from Level 19C. In a tiny closet on Level 11C is a still-operating low-power radio transmitter which sends single a very brief coded message every few hours.  The text selection part of the transmitter has long been damaged so its content cannot be changed; it seems to have originally been intended to be a coin-operated "Send Your Note" amusement device.  Translating the glyphs on the mangled display, the now locked-in text seems to be "Mars Needs Women". On Level 6 is a duty free shop for Radegast Distillery, perhaps the oldest still-operating whiskey maker on Mars. Level 38C seems to be a wing of timeshare condos owned by itinerant individuals who reliably but intermittently spend time on Mars, but generally live on other planets.  One apartment has been broken into and plundered (the resident seems to have been J'onn J'onzz).  Others (the names are above the doorbell buttons on the outside) include Dr. Manhattan, Mona the Monkey, Narab, Princess Marcuzan, and Uncle Martin, and a gated suite of several apartments labeled Capricorn One.  (Marvin the Martian's quarters are on a different level, behind a heavily-damaged zone with the sign "Off Limits".)

Tora Tora Tora is the source of the machine gun footage on the Falcon from Star Wars.
CES

Inside the Seattle Company Plotting Lab-Made ‘Coffee’ Without Beans

Highlight 4: Water Room
 
The Martians knew Earth has seas and lakes ... that's one of the big reasons they invaded.  But they didn't know what those were like.  The Arsenal being a training facility, deep in its catacombs is another large room, roughly a fifty meter cube, full of water, lacking any airspace inside.  If you pump air into the room through a hose running through a door, the bubbles rise to the top, but never accumulate to make even 3 cm of air gap there.  A few experiments with the doors (see below) involving balloons, sealed airtight containers, and nested arrangements of both, suggest that the force fields are permeable by air but not by water, so that air released in the room diffuses out quickly through the top-side force-field doors.
 
Force-field screens make for entry into the water, and there are about a dozen such entrances on each face of the room.  Water can be stolen from the room, but only in man-portable containers that must be sealed before leaving; this is adequate to supply dirty water to dungeon delvers, but not for much more, considering the difficulty of getting there from the surface and getting back.  No breathing apparatuses are available any more; their storage bays are obvious in the passageways adjacent to the doors but these are now empty, having been plundered long ago.  You can "peek into" the room by sticking your head through a door briefly and pulling it back out, but not many explorers do even that much.
 
Tha Martians had heard of fish, whales, and sharks, but while they had stories of these they had no specimens, so the robotic mock-ups of aquatic animals are bizarre and unpredictable in behavior.  The robo-sharks in particular behave like banths, attacking in teams using effective three-dimensional tactics, and they have no hesitation about killing.  Some other robot fish are aggressive in using converging swarm movement to charge at intruders and veering off at the last possible moment into a dispersal, maybe even explosion, of the swarm, and they are not shy about bouncing off their target, which makes for a full-body pummeling of the target, though the swarm merely flees after doing this and does not return to make any follow-up attack.  Unless your breathing apparatus is quite robust, all these encounters can be very dangerous.  The population of robots in the room seems to vary slowly on timescales of weeks, and a few explorers report episodes of seeing none at all.
 
The passages around the water room meander quite a bit, as the supporting pipes and machinery must take up a large amount of space, but it seems that you do not have to negotiate the water room to get anywhere: you can get from any force-field door to any other force-field door by dry passages; it may be a long, twisting walk, though.  The illumination level in the room varies slowly -- at least a few hours from well-lit to full dark -- but not in any clear sequence.  There are currents in the water that have yet to be mapped, and whose primum mobile has yet to be found.  The water is dirty, even muddy near the bottom, and while drinkable (it isn't obviously poisoned or tainted) it tastes bad, and no one has tried drinking it straight and untreated for longer than a day or two, so it might be toxic on longer times.  A rigorous chemical analysis has yet to be performed.
 
There are features here and nearby in the dungeon that suggest a second, much larger water room was originally planned but never built; some documents indicate that one was to be for training in submarines, and it was assumed that whales would be comparable in size, and react aggressively towards, the submarines.

30 years ago, the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the bay area, interrupting the World Series, closing the Bay Bridge and collapsing numerous structures ranging from Oakland to Santa Cruz.

For a perfect movie that should never be messed with.... I give you just back from his extended tour of world capitals and the 8th Dimension...Leader of the Hong Kong Cavaliers!!!!     BUCKAROO BANZAI !!!!!!!

A lengthier and more apocalyptic description of problems with the NFL

I Timothy 6:10

I Timothy 6:10

I Timothy 6:10

Seconded for Byrne, Willingham and Wood--and I will nominate:
 
William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman--perhaps not the first superheroine, but certainly the best known.
 
Mac Raboy--while he didn't create Captain Marvel Jr., his work on the character truly made him stand out.
 
Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man, one of the most unique heroes to see print on the comics page.

I think a sea change happened among journalism schools in the late 1970s.  The role Woodward and Bernstein had in helping to blow open the Watergate affair and pulling down the Nixon administration led a change in the kind of student that chose journalism as a career, and ultimately the way those students were taught; they began to define their successes in terms of how many people they had destroyed, not how well they informed the public about cases, or how they portrayed situations of which the public knew next to nothing.
 
I say this partly as someone who was faculty at a place with a major journalism school in the 1990s (and faculty at a different place again starting in 2005).  Yeah, I was faculty in a science department, but I taught a lot of distribution-type classes and saw a lot of those students, and their emphasis was different from what I had seen among journalism majors I had known as an undergraduate in the 1970s. 
 
(I was a grad student at another school with a major journalism program, but in grad school most people -- explicitly including myself -- go heads-down concentrating on their studies to a much greater extent than as an undergrad, and I can't say I had more than a couple of conversations with journalism people during those years.  But I was involved in our public outreach efforts with Star Date for six years or so, and gained some insights about science journalism which are different from general political news.  I can say this: In literally every situation where I've had first-hand knowledge as a scientist abotu the science that had made a major story in the popular media, at least one major aspect of the as-published treatment was wrong.  I have come to blame this not on malice -- usually -- but usually on the ignorance of editors, who change words and phrasing to grab more readers/viewers, without recognizing that word choice is catastrophically important in conveying scientific content.  Sometimes the ignorance is deeper, publishing something that isn't actually news ... it's just something the head editor hadn't heard before.  My bailiwick is astronomy, which has approximately zero direct political or economic impact: aside from the idiot UFO conspiracy fanboys, and the not-even-of-vegetable-intelligence young-Earth creationists, there's no "fake news" intentionally promulgated in this field.  )
 
The increase in the general cynicism level that began with the realizations of just how thoroughly the Executive Branch (all of them: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) manipulated news of the Vietnam mess through the 1960s and 1970s, emerged in the 1980s went hand in hand with the new goals of young journalists who came on board at that time.  The cynicism, the reveling in the power of the Fourth Estate, and the anger with the duplicity of the White House over more than a decade ... they weren't the same thing, but combined to devalue the emphasis on "complete", "fair", and "impartial" that had been the professed ideal of the generation of journalists who came of age with radio and migrated into television.
 
With more or less everything with ".com" address, and way too much from any other domain, feeding on clickbait, socioeconomic agendas, and herd mentality, I select my news sources with a combination of great care and as much randomness as possible.
 
You pays your money and you takes your chances. 

I think a sea change happened among journalism schools in the late 1970s.  The role Woodward and Bernstein had in helping to blow open the Watergate affair and pulling down the Nixon administration led a change in the kind of student that chose journalism as a career, and ultimately the way those students were taught; they began to define their successes in terms of how many people they had destroyed, not how well they informed the public about cases, or how they portrayed situations of which the public knew next to nothing.
 
I say this partly as someone who was faculty at a place with a major journalism school in the 1990s (and faculty at a different place again starting in 2005).  Yeah, I was faculty in a science department, but I taught a lot of distribution-type classes and saw a lot of those students, and their emphasis was different from what I had seen among journalism majors I had known as an undergraduate in the 1970s. 
 
(I was a grad student at another school with a major journalism program, but in grad school most people -- explicitly including myself -- go heads-down concentrating on their studies to a much greater extent than as an undergrad, and I can't say I had more than a couple of conversations with journalism people during those years.  But I was involved in our public outreach efforts with Star Date for six years or so, and gained some insights about science journalism which are different from general political news.  I can say this: In literally every situation where I've had first-hand knowledge as a scientist abotu the science that had made a major story in the popular media, at least one major aspect of the as-published treatment was wrong.  I have come to blame this not on malice -- usually -- but usually on the ignorance of editors, who change words and phrasing to grab more readers/viewers, without recognizing that word choice is catastrophically important in conveying scientific content.  Sometimes the ignorance is deeper, publishing something that isn't actually news ... it's just something the head editor hadn't heard before.  My bailiwick is astronomy, which has approximately zero direct political or economic impact: aside from the idiot UFO conspiracy fanboys, and the not-even-of-vegetable-intelligence young-Earth creationists, there's no "fake news" intentionally promulgated in this field.  )
 
The increase in the general cynicism level that began with the realizations of just how thoroughly the Executive Branch (all of them: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) manipulated news of the Vietnam mess through the 1960s and 1970s, emerged in the 1980s went hand in hand with the new goals of young journalists who came on board at that time.  The cynicism, the reveling in the power of the Fourth Estate, and the anger with the duplicity of the White House over more than a decade ... they weren't the same thing, but combined to devalue the emphasis on "complete", "fair", and "impartial" that had been the professed ideal of the generation of journalists who came of age with radio and migrated into television.
 
With more or less everything with ".com" address, and way too much from any other domain, feeding on clickbait, socioeconomic agendas, and herd mentality, I select my news sources with a combination of great care and as much randomness as possible.
 
You pays your money and you takes your chances. 

No one asks for the Swedish Inbörkisition!

You've all heard about it in chemistry/physics class. Here's how it looks like.
 
 

Potter made for better TV watching.  Blake was true to the original book and story: that one quite reasonable way to endure the madness of war is to become mad yourself in certain ways.  That was the whole point of the character in book and movie, but it can't really stand up in an extended TV series.  So from the point of view of TV, you're correct about Blake.  But for those of us who cue off the earlier work and its fundamental theme ... no, it would have been more appropriate if the TV series had ended with Radar reading the telegram in the operating room.

How's this for a Princess Bride remake?
 

Re: The Non Sequitor Thread
 
Climbing up on Solsbury Hill...

Yeah, of the two guys with double-R middle initials... As the expression goes, G cannot carry J's athletic supporter.