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• Batteries have relatively low energy density (compared to gasoline). Gasoline stores about 36 kWh energy / gallon, or about 12 kWh/kg mass. Your best lithium ion batteries are currently around 150 Wh/kg.
• Batteries tend to have a relatively lower power density. They're happiest if they're discharged over the course of an hour or more. Push the current higher than that, and they tend to heat up, turning some of their stored energy into heat, which means less electrical energy actually comes out of the battery. Lookup Peukert numbers if you want more info on that.
• The amount of battery mass you have to add to get a decent range makes for a very heavy vehicle.

A large number of Lovecraft's short stories (maybe all of them?) are available free in HTML and PDF here. Check it out.

He could have, but the reason he didn't can be attributed as pure laziness.. rather than take a NEW picture of his watch, he reused one that was already on his site.

Creating a tank-like transmission might be hard.

Au contraire! (Pardon my French).
I took look around the guy's web site; he's got a page on tracked vehicle transmissions here.

The tank treads are apparently modeled after his watch band... as seen here... my question: couldn't he find a better picture than him picking up some like crap or something? Green sand, my ass... (Okay, bad expression).

I honestly don't know where you got the idea that Lovecraft thought that science would bring us rational explanations for things occurring around us that we don't understand. Maybe you need to go back and reread some of his stories more. Whenever science comes up in a Lovecraft stories, it is always in the role of the plot device that reveals the horrible truth behind reality that shatters the mind of the protagonist.

Two of Lovecraft's most famous quotes are:

"The most merciful thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

The latter one is straight out of "The Call of Cthulhu" itself! For more HPL science horror, read the classic mad scientist stories "From Beyond" and "Herbert West: Reanimator." You can read them and many others here.

Regarding Copyrights...

Of course, I would have to figure out which stories fell into the Sonny Bono Act black hole in order to figure out which ones could be published to a Website in violation(?) of copyright law.

Lovecraft, of course, died nearly penniless, never seeing any of the money that those who later claimed copyright on his works gained.

(I'm still a little miffed that the Cthuhlu Mythos aren't in my copy of Deities and Demigods.)

Okay, whoever you are, I'm curious as to how on earth that's flamebait.

I understand if you haven't read your Lovecraft, so I could understand maybe an "Offtopic," but how do you get flamebait? I'm being disrespectful to fictional Mythos creatures the world over?

Unless of course someone has a mod-point vendetta out for me, which I wouldn't rule out. Seriously. I'm curious as to your motives.

Nyarlathotep, now that would be a different story. It is not just a mindless beast like Cthulhu.

That's strange: the last time I checked, Nyarlathotep was an Egyptian scientist/magician/1337 hax0r who simply understood time travel. Sure, people who mocked him in his house paid dearly, given his disdain for people, mysterious toys, and contempt for social norms... hmm, sounds like most uber-geeks I know!
What I love best is the way some people confuse s/Nyarlathotep/programmers with being a Great Old One. Excuse me while I laugh at your^H^H^H^H their insolence - muhahahahaha.
I feel better already.

Solomon
Cult Leader of Great Old Ones reGurgitating Little Excerpts

The case of HP Lovecraft's fiction seems to confirm that current copyright laws do defeat the aim of promoting new works.

Lovecraft wrote wierd ficton up to his death in 1937. In his fiction, he develops what has become known as the "Cthulhu Mythos", an outlook and setting for cosmic horror. During his lifetime, he actively sought collaboration with others to work with this "mythos", and extend it.

Because of when he wrote much of his fiction, and due to details concerning how his estate handled the copyright of his body of work, much, if not all, of his fiction is today in public domain.

Partly because of how he actively sought other authors of wierd fiction to participate and extend his mythos, and partly because of the fact that his work is still in public domain, there have been very tangible results:

• Authors are still contributing to and developing his mythos,
• A pnp game company has based an RPG on his works (Call of Cthulhu), which has inducted so many new people to HPL's works (including me),
• Movies are made (though poorly), based on his works,
• and most importanly, people are still reading Lovecraft's fiction -- and it's available online, and in print.

Many years ago, I loaned out all my Lovecraft books, and inevitably, no longer have them. When I recently underwent a hankering to re-read these great stories, I downloaded them into my visor using Plucker. I've also gone out and restocked my library with printed versions of Lovecraft's works.

From this small sampling, I think it's very clear that Lovecraft's openess and the copyright status of his works have truly encouraged people to keep creating and building on his foundation.

There is a staggering number of books which are under copyright, but have long since gone out of print. How much knowledge is unavailable because of this, and how many new works which could have been built or inspired by them were never created?

I shudder to think that it would be quite possible that Lovecraft could today be out of print because of copyright. Had others not built on his work, I doubt as many people who are fans of his work would have had the chance to be exposed to him, and thus preclude demand for his fiction.

The case of HP Lovecraft's fiction seems to confirm that current copyright laws do defeat the aim of promoting new works.

Lovecraft wrote wierd ficton up to his death in 1937. In his fiction, he develops what has become known as the "Cthulhu Mythos", an outlook and setting for cosmic horror. During his lifetime, he actively sought collaboration with others to work with this "mythos", and extend it.

Because of when he wrote much of his fiction, and due to details concerning how his estate handled the copyright of his body of work, much, if not all, of his fiction is today in public domain.

Partly because of how he actively sought other authors of wierd fiction to participate and extend his mythos, and partly because of the fact that his work is still in public domain, there have been very tangible results:

• Authors are still contributing to and developing his mythos,
• A pnp game company has based an RPG on his works (Call of Cthulhu), which has inducted so many new people to HPL's works (including me),
• Movies are made (though poorly), based on his works,
• and most importanly, people are still reading Lovecraft's fiction -- and it's available online, and in print.

Many years ago, I loaned out all my Lovecraft books, and inevitably, no longer have them. When I recently underwent a hankering to re-read these great stories, I downloaded them into my visor using Plucker. I've also gone out and restocked my library with printed versions of Lovecraft's works.

From this small sampling, I think it's very clear that Lovecraft's openess and the copyright status of his works have truly encouraged people to keep creating and building on his foundation.

There is a staggering number of books which are under copyright, but have long since gone out of print. How much knowledge is unavailable because of this, and how many new works which could have been built or inspired by them were never created?

I shudder to think that it would be quite possible that Lovecraft could today be out of print because of copyright. Had others not built on his work, I doubt as many people who are fans of his work would have had the chance to be exposed to him, and thus preclude demand for his fiction.

"Secondly, take places like Lake Vostok [bbc.co.uk]. Possibly there is life in here, and if there is there is possibly life elsewhere entombed under a million years of ice. "

Oh dear me. You've gone and spoken about things man was not meant to know.

Be careful, the last expedition that explored ancient civilizations in the Antarctic didn't fare very well.

If you're a human and you hunt some game, you win, but if you kill just about everything, well...

Then you had better be a good farmer.

So, the question is--- is the "natural Darwinistic act" of an intelligent species evolving and destroying things before going extinct something that happens every several million years? If so, no problem!

There was a science fiction story a while back (~1975?) about time travelers who went back to try to determine what killed off the dinosaurs... what they found was small raptor-sized super-intelligent creatures with hunting rifles and nuclear weapons. The images fueled a lot of nightmares when I was 12.

First the sleestack, next us.

Similar. Check out HP Lovecraft's The Nameless City for yet another description of lizard-men whom evolution dealt with harshly... in TNC, they seem to be returning for a second act. Regardless, it seems to be a common theme in literature: the most terrifying creature is one that thinks, and the second most terrifying creature is one that is almost human. Combine the two abstractions and you get monsters like the lizard people/flying monkeys/slant-eyed hairless aliens depicted in everything from Oz to V to the X-files.

Rev Neh