Irregular Webcomic!

Irregular Webcomic! #2602

"Fled" is a fun word. We don't use it enough.

Try to use it in a sentence today.

Irregular Webcomic! #2601

Dinosaur paleontology has changed a lot since I was a kid. (Which was much later than the '40s, thank you very much.)

The dinosaur books I grew up with described them essentially as big, dumb lizards: cold-blooded, slow-moving, stupid, and bad parents. Basically, it was no wonder they died out.

Nowadays we understand the messages held in the fossils much better. There's still a lot we don't really know, but it seems clear that dinosaurs were much more dynamic and lively, and better parents, than anyone thought a few decades ago. As with all animals, they were shaped by their environment into creatures superbly adapted for the rigours of life. Rather than being plodding no-hopers destined to die out, they dominated Earth for about 165 million years.

Circumstances finally overtook them 65 million years ago, and the most glamorous representatives of the dinosaur line did indeed die out*. But they were around for a long, long time. Here, take a look:

This diagram is drawn with the timespans to scale. The length of time dinosaurs existed is longer than the length of time between now and when the last dinosaurs died out. Think of the amount of time between right now, and when Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth. That time is shorter - much shorter - than the time between T. rex and the earliest dinosaurs.

And yet it still dwarfs the amount of time that humans have been around. Heck, dinosaurs were around longer than primates have been around, let along apes, or hominins, or human beings. Humans have been around for maybe 200,000 years. That's less than one eight-hundredth the amount of time that dinosaurs were on Earth.

Think about that until your mind is boggled. It shouldn't take long.

* Technically speaking, the dinosaurs never completely died out at all. Some of their ancestors still live on Earth. We call them birds.

Irregular Webcomic! #2600

I recruited help for the Romani translation. I tried to get the words off a transcript of the movie, but both of the different scripts I found don't actually have transcriptions of Vavra's words. (Probably because whoever transcribed the dialogue from the movie didn't understand Romani either.)

Irregular Webcomic! #2599

Seriously, if I had prison cells like these Nazis, I'd be looking really strongly at building new ones.

Irregular Webcomic! #2598

I think this is about the most perceptive Steve has ever been. Frighteningly enough.

If I suddenly found myself in London in 1940, I'm not really sure what I'd do to amuse myself. Probably try to get out of town as quickly as possible, I expect.

Irregular Webcomic! #2597

If the US Government actually admitted to having covered up the existence of aliens since the 1940s, it really wouldn't come as that much of a surprise to a lot of people.

Even the people who it did surprise wouldn't be very surprised. We've been nicely conditioned by the conspiracy mill to have a sort of cultural semi-belief that it's happened this way all along.

If you were a government looking to cover up some Earth-shattering news like this until a time when it could safely be revealed to the public without causing a panic, you'd create a seemingly discredited rumour mill, seed the popular fiction media with science fiction concepts, and prepare the public consciousness generally for the idea of aliens until we no longer think of them as anything all that unusual. In other words, exactly what has been done for the past 60 years...

Irregular Webcomic! #2596

That is a rather short gestation period for a humanoid being.

I always get confused when people refer to human pregnancies in terms of weeks. I have no idea how many weeks is a normal pregnancy. I know it's about nine months, but I actually have to do the arithmetic to figure out how much that is in weeks. Despite having done the calculation mentally several times when people have talked to me about someone being 37 weeks pregnant or whatever, I never remember the resulting number.

Thankfully I'm not an obstetrician or anything, and nothing serious ever rides on my inability to instantly recall this fact. So it's not a fetal mistake.