Cripes that's obscure. Says the author was considered insane by his colleagues...what are we up to here, 8 different fiction references? So here's a few more: Dinosaur Central: The Lost Worlds of Dinosaurs - Earth's interior

There's a whole bunch of Clonal plant colonies of great age.

Roger Zelazny wrote a novella about hauling ass cross country too. Dunno about its film adaptation. Did read somewhere it was supposed to be the blockbuster SF flick of 1977.

Interestingly enough the US imported more in 2012 from the Persian Gulf. We've mostly trimmed the amount of business we do with nations like Mexico, Nigeria, and Brazil, in response to our new gains in supply. This is just crude oil, a substantial part of US demand is met by imported petroleum products too, of course. U.S. Crude Oil Imports Mexico is due to begin declining in production in the next few years, and the Trans Alaska Pipeline may have to be shut down soon as well - this is more of a wildcard, estimates of how low the flow through can go before it becomes unprofitable to operate vary a great deal - so new sources of supply are going to be needed, even with US demand having peaked and declining slowly owing to less driving/more efficient new vehicles/the slow inroads made by EVs removing demand for gasoline entirely.

This has a few more: Found: A never-before-seen asteroid with six comet-like tails - latimes.com

I was under the impression Blockbuster was still around, but had become a museum. In fact, they should take that idea into consideration...maybe they could get Dennis Duffy to be a tour guide and sell some beepers on the side.

No, the Wilmington Field (pdf) in Long Beach CA apparently generated sharp quakes in the late 40s, while the oil being extracted caused ground subsidence, trashing all sorts of man made structures in the process.

When I was a kid in the 80s I remember reading about how many of the advancements in deepwater production or seismic imaging then common in the fossil fuel industry would have been considered science fiction in the 50s. It's always been my (admittedly casual) observation that the FF business is more cutting edge in testing out new techniques than many other sectors of industry - perhaps not as much as the computer sector, much more so than the automotive.

This doesn't really apply to on the ground occupations like roughnecks as it'll be ages before we can deploy bots that can climb gantries etc.

I read about it in Awake!

I've been wondering for a while if there couldn't just be some coarseness in these measurements and that most of these exoplanets they've detected will just turn out to be chimerical. NOTE: This is just curiosity on my behalf, haven't actually delved into the data, aren't capable of doing so really. But I'd like to know if anyone else has delved into this - which is undoubtedly the case - and if there aren't any solid arguments that many of these detected extrasolar bodies might someday prove to be actually non-existent.

Here's a rather acerbic anecdote about the original BSG from SF writer Mike Resnick, may be of interest, or amusement, or:

I did a Battlestar: Galactica novelization back in 1980. To this day I have never seen an episode of the show. I hope to go to my grave without ever learning what a Cylon is, and based on the script I was given I can't imagine why the show lasted all the way to the first commercial break of the first episode without being cancelled. There were more science errors, English errors, and plot errors than you would think anyone could possibly put into a 65-page teleplay. I tried Bob Hoskins' method: just transfer the dialog (after you convert it into something resembling conversational English), put in the descriptions, fix what laughably passes for logic, and presto, the book is done. But it didn't work that way; when I hit page 25 of a 275-page manuscript I was already on page 33 of a 65-page script. I wrote the book in four days, on the reasonable assumption that if I took any longer my brain would turn to porridge and run out my ears. A week later I had so thoroughly put the whole thing out of my mind that I couldn't have told you a single incident that was in the book. I knew the readers would hate it as much as I did, and that would be the end of my career as a science fiction writer.

Sigh --- of course it became my bestselling book.

From the book "The Business of Science Fiction", by Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg.

This evidence is compelling, but let's not...

[sunglasses]

Get ahead of ourselves.

[air boat, YAHHHHHHHHHHHH!]

More like kablammmmmmmmmmmm. And Walter White shows that all you need is a squeegee.

Get him one with an app that will. Give instruction on how to avoid creating. Sentence fragments. ;)

Oh, the bureaucrats I'm familiar with only appear singly, or perhaps in pairs in a pinch. Can't recall them slobbering, ever. Moving slowly, sure. Mindless - give you that. Well, one sort of mind. But otherwise, don't see it. "Hey Peter, what's happening. We need to talk about your TPS reports. That, and your BRAIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNS!"