Rita Repulsa was once imprisoned in a space dumpster by a sage named Zordon

After 10,000 years, she's free. It's time to conquer Earth.

Contrary to what some internet dwellers want, I will not be talking about a couple of irrelevant old sellouts called Mike and Jay at this time. Do some people really think that I spend my time on thinking about those guys or on watching their dumb videos? I mean, just about everyone on YouTube looks at my channel and at my blog, and I don’t have the time to watch the huge amount of dumb and offensive content that YouTube now offers. On the other hand, if someone were to ask me about Rich Evans, I’d have a different answer. Rich, who’s really the god Bragi in disguise, may spend his time living at a Milwaukee retirement home nowadays, but there is a good reason for this. In order to avoid the terrible battles against Thanos that his brothers Thor and Loki were involved in, Bragi disguised himself as an unassuming, average-looking American citizen and began living on Midgard, after leaving Asgard before it was destroyed in Ragnarok. Since Bragi is renowned for his wisdom, he knew that the other aesir and the Avengers would eventually triumph and defeat Thanos. Bragi didn’t even lift a finger when Thanos was named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. But Bragi is no slouch because he still took time to battle against the latest machinations of his long-time nemesis and former sweetheart, the evil space witch Rita Repulsa, in California. As universe-shaking as those events were, I will not be writing about them because they are so well known. I mean, just about everyone on the planet has seen the documentary films Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Instead, I will be quoting from 'Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology' (1996) by Robert McCormick Adams. I acquired this book at a used books store a few years ago, and, although I've read most of it already, I'm not done reading it yet. Still, I have come across plenty of information that I've highlighted. I don't like the book a lot because the author's writing style isn't appealing to me, but the book still contains plenty of information that I found to be interesting. The following is a quote from the second chapter. "The next great pulsation even more clearly attests to the context-dependent path of technological change and its many lines of intersection with wider cultural milieus. On present evidence the beginnings of civilization occurred first in Mesopotamia during the middle or latter part of the fourth millennium B.C. That seminal period was very quickly followed by similar developments along the Nile, and not long afterward in the Indus valley. There soon appeared - always with variations around a common core of greater hierarchy and complexity - similar patterns in China and the New World. One may reasonably postulate a greater degree of interconnectedness among these nuclear areas than with the beginnings of agriculture, but once again diffusion does not appear to have been a decisive factor. Particularly the original, Mesopotamian, manifestation has been not unreasonably characterized as an urban revolution, and likened to the Industrial Revolution. Like the latter, the former epoch was comparatively brief, spanning at most a few centuries and possibly much less. Alongside major, concurrent innovations in public institutions were others in the realm of technology. What we know of them is obviously still limited to relatively imperishable categories of material. However, it is noteworthy that they have in common qualities of technical precocity and high artistic creativity. Stone cylinder seals, for example, appearing first at this time, then remained a hallmark of Mesopotamian culture for millennia. This almost iconic class of artifacts was endowed, almost from its first appearance, with a “creative power… such that we meet among its astonishingly varied products anticipations of every school of glyptic art which subsequently flourished in Mesopotamia.” Their distinctive designs, when rolled across lumps of clay, could seal containers or even storerooms against illicit entry, and identify the civic or religious authority responsible for them. Thus they were an integral part of the technology of administration. Fashioned (and initially also partly decorated) with the bow-drill, they were also exemplars of the new technology of the wheel that is first manifested at roughly the same time in wheeled vehicles and wheel-made pottery. Similarly, an examination of jewelry and other metal objects from the so-called Royal Tombs of Ur, a few centuries later, has revealed “knowledge of virtually every type of metallurgical phenomenon except the hardening of steel that was exploited by technologists up to the end of the 19th century A.D. There were comparably far-reaching developments, reflecting most of the technical and stylistic patterns that prevailed for centuries or even millennia afterward, in monumental architecture, the mass production of ceramics, woven woolen textiles, and in all likelihood woodworking. Concurrent and more seminal still was the Mesopotamian invention of writing. While clearly an administrative advance of unmatched power and versatility, there may be some hesitancy in describing it also as a technological achievement. There is nothing to suggest, for example, that early writing was directly instrumental in the refinement or dissemination of other craft techniques, or that any specialists other than scribes and some priests and administrators were themselves literate. Smelted iron had long been known and used in very small quantities, so that the shift away from bronze cannot be attributed to the mere discovery of a new material with valuable inherent properties. At levels of metallurgical skill that had been attained at the beginnings of what is characterized as the Iron Age, iron’s relative hardness was not yet a reliably attainable characteristic. As it became so, new or improved tools - picks, shovels, axes, shears, scythes, chisels, saws, dies, lathes, and levers - cumulatively transformed craft capabilities in fields like transportation and building. But these developments follow, and hence cannot account for, the onset of the Iron Age. Progressive deforestation of much of the ancient Near East, as a consequence of pastoral overgrazing and wood-cutting for copper ore reduction as well as cooking, may have been a more significant factor. Contemporary iron ore reduction processes are not well understood, but were probably several times as fuel-efficient as that of copper. Also helping to explain the shift may have been the wider dispersal of iron ore deposits. The widespread substitution of iron for copper thus may have been economically driven. But it should be kept in mind that the production processes involved were of a pyrotechnological character. This may help to explain why much concurrent experimentation and innovation in other crafts, leading to improvements in glazes, glasses, and frits, and possibly also in metallic plating, had a pyrotechnological basis. The next succeeding punctuation of the technological lull occurred later in the first millennium B.C. Two contributory streams can be distinguished, although by Hellenistic times they had largely coalesced. Originating in the Near East were coinage and alphabetization, both stimulants to administrative advances and the long-distance movement of ideas in conjunction with commerce. As such, they constituted a kind of information infrastructure for the diffusion and utilization of proto-scientific as well as technological understanding. A second contributory stream was centered in the Aegean. Although the Greek world is much more widely heralded as the birthplace of a formal discipline of natural philosophy, it can be credited with some technological contributions as well. If we take into account not merely the number of innovations but the extent to which they found practical application, however, the overall record has to be characterized as a conspicuously limited one: “The Greeks and Romans built a high civilization, full of power and intellect and beauty, but they transmitted to their successors few new inventions. The gear and the screw, the rotary and the water-mill, the direct screw-press, glass-blowing and concrete, hollow bronze-casting, the dioptra for surveying, the torsion catapult, the water-clock and water-organ, automata (mechanical toys) driven by water and wind and steam - this short list is fairly exhaustive, and it adds up to not very much for a great civilization over fifteen hundred years.” Only one of these devices deserves special mention for its economic significance: water wheels for the milling of grain. These too are generally believed to have been very limited in number until a much later time. In all of classical antiquity, there are fewer than a dozen known literary references to any use of water power at all. The dismissal by most classical scholars of the importance of water wheels for grain-milling, relying on the literary evidence, is a conclusion on which Orjan Wikander and others have recently mounted a frontal attack. Criticizing the lack of effort “to establish the fundamental premise of the discussion: the actual technological standard of Roman society,” he holds that the orthodox impression of the extreme rarity of the water mill “has only been produced by the systematic disregard of the evidence for its existence in Antiquity.” Archaeologically attested examples of their use, he is able to show, slowly grew in number over time. The paucity of literary references to water-driven mills, in comparison with medieval ones, can be plausibly questioned on a variety of grounds. But even for the late classical period, the most that Wikander has been able to document for the third, fourth, and fifth centuries A.D. are from eight to eleven occurrences per century across the entire span of the empire. While further findings may well deepen the impact of this criticism, it has not yet displaced the prevailing tendency to identify the Roman agricultural regime with technological stagnation. The existing textual sources that are most informative take the form of compendia of ingenious devices. Evident in the works of authors like Vitruvius (died 25 B.C.) and Hero of Alexandria (who flourished during the late first century A.D.) are great versatility, critical acuity, and engineering competence, but they provide few clues to the context or frequency of use - or even the practicality - of what they describe. Hero of Alexandria’s descriptions of pneumatic and steam-operated toys, for example, are given without reference to the wider potential utilities of the principles involved in their operations. Also of little or no concern to them was the issue of priority of discovery, so that the degree to which technical discoveries or innovations fell into clusters, in space as well as in time, is almost impossible to ascertain. Greek and Hellenistic natural philosophy, for all of the seminal importance with which it is often invested as the source of a unilinear tradition leading to modern science, is of only marginal relevance to the history of technology. This is in no sense to deny its conceptual advances on its Babylonian and Egyptian antecedents. Essentially new was the comprehensive effort to categorize material phenomena and to give rational, lawful explanations for them. “The capricious world of divine intervention was being pushed aside, making room for order and regularity… A distinction between the natural and the supernatural was emerging, and there was wide agreement that causes (if they are to be dealt with philosophically) are to be sought only in the nature of things. But as Finley affirms with a commonplace, “the ancient world was characterized by a clear, almost total, divorce between science and practice. The aim of ancient science, it has been said, was to know, not to do; to understand nature, not to tame her.” As a prototypical applied mathematician, Archimedes of Syracuse (circa 287-212 B.C.) may stand as an exception. Brilliant mechanical innovations like the Archimedean screw for raising water are traditionally associated with his name. But it is suggestive of the isolation in which this was conceived that the principle of the screw apparently found no other applications for more than two centuries - until Hero of Alexandria’s description of the double-screw press and the female screw-cutting machine. A noteworthy feature of Archimedes’s reputed contributions is that so many of them were sophisticated ballistic devices that seem to have been developed only under the extraordinary stimulus of a Roman siege of his native city. Euclid’s (circa 300 B.C.) geometry, in the same vein, ultimately laid the foundations for cadastral surveys. However, he himself eschewed all practical applications. And when Galen (A.D. 129-210) in medicine and physiology and Ptolemy (circa A.D. 150) in cartography are rightly regarded as immensely influential, this largely reflects how they came to be viewed during the Renaissance rather than by their contemporaries." I will also quote from Robert Stawell Ball’s ‘The Story of the Heavens’ (1886), which is another book that I bought quite a long time ago but still haven't finished reading yet. "In our exploration of the beautiful series of bodies which form the solar system, we have proceeded step by step outwards from the sun. In the pursuit of this method we have now come to the splendid planet Jupiter, which wends its majestic way in a path immediately outside those orbits of the minor planets which we have just been considering. Great, indeed, is the contrast between these tiny globes and the stupendous globe of Jupiter. Had we adopted a somewhat different method of treatment - had we, for instance, discussed the various bodies of our planetary system in the order of their magnitude - then the minor planets would have been the last to be considered, while the leader of the host would be Jupiter. To this position Jupiter is entitled without an approach to rivalry. The next greatest on the list, the beautiful and interesting Saturn, comes a long distance behind. Another great descent in the scale of magnitude has to be made before we reach Uranus and Neptune, while still another step downwards must be made before we reach that lesser group of planets which includes our earth. So conspicuously does Jupiter tower over the rest, that even if Saturn were to be augmented by all the other globes of our system rolled into one, the united mass would still not equal the great globe of Jupiter. The satellites of Jupiter, the minor planets, and the comets, all tell the weight of the giant orb; and, as they all concur in the result (at least within extremely narrow limits), we cannot hesitate to conclude that the mass of the greatest planet of our system has been determined with accuracy. The results of these measures must now be stated. They show, of course, that Jupiter is vastly inferior to the sun – that, in fact, it would take about 1,047 Jupiters, all rolled into one, to form a globe equal in weight to the sun. They also show us that it would take 316 globes as heavy as our earth to counterbalance the weight of Jupiter. No doubt this proves Jupiter to be a body of magnificent proportions; but the remarkable circumstance is not that Jupiter should be 316 times as heavy as the earth, but that he is not a great deal more."