It's not just our current society--it seems to be part of the human condition.

"Germany and Japan surrendered because they knew I was about to be born."

You could actually see that play out in the 2016 R presidential primary. If the other candidates had quickly united behind a credible anti-Trump, even though they might not have stopped him they wouldn't have had that embarrassing defeat in detail.

This.

"Oh, yeah. He's fine--we took him to a nice White House upstate, where he can president all he wants."

*raises hand* I guess I'm one of today's "lucky" half-dozen.

Easier than Xianxia Law, where you need to have formed your Golden Core to even get to adjudicate a legal dispute.

AFAICT, Franklin might or might not have gotten it. What I do know, though, is that *no one else in the world* had figured out how to take that x-ray diffractogram. No one. Plenty of researchers besides W&C could've deduced the structure from that picture, but Franklin was the only one who took it.

Yeah, a more cogent or sensible person would have realized that getting out of the picture had the best optics--he vacates, and later says something like "I knew I couldn't help him, so I got out of the way."

I was wondering wtf those things were.

As Funranium noted elsethread, cosmogenic production of 14C from 14N depends on cosmic radiation--both from the sun and from extrasolar sources. So you'd have to know something about their home system's environment, plus assuming that all the aliens came from the same place.

10/10 would eat

We have reached a verdict: Not guilty.

I'm afraid you're right, but from the single photograph there's no way to tell how much of it is.

I almost did, but after DOE & contractors were restricted to only mission-critical travel the folks at the destination decided that they didn't really need me there until early next year. We'll see if they (and we) are still open for business then....

Was that the time traveler short story? I couldn't finish it, and it left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I haven't been able to read even his earlier writing that I used to enjoy.

That's what "The US is a Christian nation" really means--our culture has been formed by specifically Protestant Christianity, and those of us who were born here have been marinating in it since birth. Interrogating how that's shaped us and doing the work to move past it is not trivial.

"Never start a land war in Asia."