There was also a plan to explode nuclear bombs on shorelines to create artificial harbors, and of course the infamous Project Orion, a manned interstellar spaceship powered by exploding hydrogen bombs. Doing unhinged shit with nukes was all the rage back then I guess

The doomsday clock is symbolic with the minutes (or seconds) to midnight symbolizing how close we are to doomsday. Traditionally, that has meant nuclear war, but I believe more recently, they’ve factored in climate change

Fun fact: it’s pretty much impossible to get those bodies down and there’s not really anywhere to bury them on the mountain so they’re literally laying pretty much wherever they died. They call that section of the mountain “Rainbow road” because of the multi-colored winter coats of the corpses you have to walk past to get to the summit.

Sort of. Each book is usually it’s own self-contained story (the exception being book #2 which is a direct sequel to #1) but many books follow up on characters that were introduced in previous books. You don’t have to have read any of the previous books to understand the story you picked up, but there’s some continuity and references if you have. It’s kind of like several different novel series all set in the same shared universe rather than a true anthology though.

they’re saying that if the student was any dumber they’d be a houseplant

ligatures are when you join two or more glyphs into a single one. For instance, instead of having the two characters = and > to form => if you had ligature support you would see ⇒. Some terminals have support to recognize sequences like => (and others obviously) and turn them into their corresponding ligatures (only for display though, the actual file contents remain umchanged)