Once upon a time, I ventured an opinion about 3-D printed guns based on information that was severely out of date. A fellow by the name of @Ivan_Is_Back approached me with a ClueBat. After a brief argument, he wondered why he was even bothering with me. "Why is he even bothering with me? Who the hell does he think he... Oh." as his web page and a Google search came up in other tabs. I immediately knew he knew more of the state of the practice than I did, and that at a minimum I needed to learn a lot more to argue any more.

@straczynski In 1986 I was online one night on Q-Link, AOL's original service for Commodore 64s. A pregnant recent widow that some of us had adopted said she was going into labor. We tried to tell her to go offline and call an ambulance. She didn't have any local friends... @straczynski as her husband had passed shortly after they moved to that town and she'd been hiding from the world and being online. So I used my second phone line and got an operator to connect me to the police in her town. THEN I had to try to explain how I, in San Diego, knew about his town

50 years ago a few minutes from now we first landed on the moon. I was four weeks shy of my 15th birthday. To my parents it was a miracle. But unless we make an effort to learn, history always begins when we are born. I hadn't really learned yet, so I expected the moon landing. The night before my maternal grandfather died he and my dad took me outside to see "the American Sputnik." We didn't have a commonly-used word for satellites yet, so we had adopted the name of the first one. I suspect that may have worried some who understood the power of words.