(I might have to take that back. I think the USSR did something similar. Made a really pretty lake, if I recall, but they could never keep it stocked with fish. But I can’t find a link so it might be my imagination.)
After a quick perusal of the comments I haven't seen this mentioned yet.
Dude, you have a CCNA.
You aren't exactly clear what your experience has entailed so far, but, (if you enjoy networking) you should try to continue down that path.
You're already a considerable way down the networking road with the CCNA. If you have been getting hands-on experience with Cisco gear at your current job, I would definitely leverage that to try and get a more networking-intensive position somewhere, where SQL experience would be superfluous.
I don't have A+ myself, but I taught a course for it recently. Lots of hardware-related stuff on it, mixed bag of useful and non-useful things. Some of it is outdated. Lots of assorted information about the various PC components and how they work together.
Pretty much just a "do you know how a computer works?" and "can you memorize a bunch of seemingly arbitrary details?" It's not bad for someone just starting out, though it's redundant for someone with more than ~1year experience.
To get the cert you actually have to take TWO exams now, and in the newest version they added some stuff for mobile devices, though I haven't seen the material for this version yet.
A+ still satisfies the DoD 8570 baseline cert requirement for level 1 IA personnel (basically all DOD IT personnel, whether employed by the DOD or a contractor). Other government agencies and large corporations often have minimum certification requirements that include some of the entry-level CompTIA certs.
Saying "leave it off your resume" is silly. Lots of hiring is still done by non-technical managers who like to see the "letters and stuff" for certifications. Most technical people out there who actually are doing hiring, but (justifiably) don't have as much respect for the entry level certs won't penalize you for having one.
Sounds like you were never involved in hiring tech people in one of the big coastal cities... If your hiring requirement involves anything beyond "can do basic HTML" and you don't pay reasonable salaries, forget it.
This means bottle gourds would have been domesticated long before any known food-crop cultivation - sometime well before 14000 BP when the Bering land-bridge disappeared.
If you accept that the Beringia land bridge was necessary to the settlement of the Americas. I still have a suspicion that boat (kayak, raft) transport along the Asian coast, island hopping along the Aleutians, and across the Bering "Strait" could all have been happening at the same time along a migration front a thousand km wide. It's a racing certainty that the people who made this migration did have relevant technologies, because their ancestors had the technology (how did Indonesia and Australia get populated without some sort of boat?) and essentially all of their descendants retain the technology. (The Navajo may not have many seaworthy kayaks, but they're a recent minority.) But... almost all of the evidence is going to be under up to 100m of sea water, which renders archaeological prospecting decidedly difficult and expensive compared to working on even the wettest of dry land.
I would think sea-route migration during or after Beringia was very possible. It seems that current genetic evidence indicates that there was one major migration of peoples to the Americas, that evolved in isolation for some time. This of course does not rule out other migrations that died out and left no genetic evidence, and I believe there are various other theories that remain possible.
"Bottle" gourds ; now that name might just be a hint of why they'd be a useful crop to any hunter-gatherer tribe. If indeed, they're water-tight enough to be a usable bottle (never met one myself ; wrong continent). But that then raises the awkward question of why they're not found (TTBOMK, but this is a new wrinkle to me) in any of the Asian landmass where you'd expect them to have passed, if they came into the Americas across the Beringia land bridge. Are they "ancient" in any parts of Asia?
I am not familiar with all of the details, but yes they seem to be useful to carry water, and and they seem to have been cultivated in Africa, Asia, and the Americas for thousands of years. How they got to America is evidently still a big mystery.
There is also evidence for Taro domestication in New Guinea going back possibly as far as 25,000 BP. If true, this would make it the oldest still-cultivated food crop
Hmmm, that's a new one on me. Oldest clear evidence of cultivation by a considerable stretch. [Googles] A cursory search yields uncontroversial evidence going back to 9ka BP (The reference "Golson 1977"; I doubt that my local library has that on the shelves!). Ah, I see the 25,000 year BP claim made in the Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution, where it's attributed to "Denham, Tim et al (received July 2005) "Early and mid Holocene tool-use and processing of taro (Colocasia esculenta), yam (Dioscorea sp.) and other plants at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of Papua New Guinea" (Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 33, Issue 5, May 2006)" (I'm mostly making notes to leave some breadcrumbs for me to follow along.)
Good luck finding that article. I think the 25k BP claim is a little specious personally, though if true, very interesting. Cultivation at 9k BP in New Guinea, of all places, is impressive as it is.
I glossed over a lot with my short comment, as you noticed. I was mostly trying to give an idea of what kind of things were going on in the world around this time.
I didn't mean to imply that the appearance of Clovis caused the worldwide extinction of megafauna in the late Pleistocene, though I think they likely had an impact in the Americas. As you say, the true story is not at all simple.
The Wrangel mammoths are an (certainly interesting!) outlier population - as I noted the "mainland mammoths" went extinct around 10000 BP.
Near-east agriculture seems to have been in full-swing in Egypt and Mesopotamia by 10000 BP. Certainly our ancestors were not farming during the younger dryas.
But that's one where the evidence is under very active research at this moment. Knowing our luck, crucial evidence is having trenches and bomb craters smashed through it in Syria at this very moment. That'd be bloody typical, wouldn't it?
I am excited to see what we will find in the near-east in the coming years. I think the most exciting would be human DNA from that period. Though, as you say, who knows what key evidence has been and is still being destroyed there.
The changes that are needed are (1) shorten the end of the game by (2) NOT EVER rewarding someone in any way for fouling another player. No, you do not want to give a penalty when one is not called for, but this is the penultimate problem already conceded.
This actually reminds me that in the NBA (though not college) they recently implemented a very interesting rule called a "clear-path foul". If a defender fouls an opponent in open court who had a "clear path" to the basket, the offensive team shoots free throws AND retains possession of the ball. I would like to see this happen for all fouls in the final 2 minutes of the game. That would probably go a long way toward solving the end-of-game-slugfest problem.
Another thing we have not mentioned is video replay. This is becoming a bigger factor each day. Baseball, the sloth of sports when it comes to "advancing the game" is already using it, but will have to fully embrace it to simply make their game fair (and less open to betting-related corruption of the officiating). Every sport needs more video replay -- and heh, David S., you can fit in ad views while they are reviewing the replay!!!1!
I would rather a game be stopped to get the call right than for any other reason (aside from player injury, of course). Also, there are anti-flop rules in basketball that remove the temptation to fake contact.
I agree about getting the calls right. More video replay would slow down the game, which is bad, but it would help to get more calls right, which is good. There are other ways to reduce fouls and speed up the flow of the game that could make up for the delays from video replay.
I love having anti-flop rules, because nothing irks me more than a flopping...but unfortunately the anti-flop rules currently in place are remarkably ineffective. The refs currently can't go to the monitor to determine a flop after the fact, and players are exceedingly good at performing convincing flops that are difficult to detect in real-time. Currently, flops are determined outside of the games, and players are fined for it - but any player would gladly spend the fine money to give them an edge in the game, so this doesn't seem to reduce flopping at all as far as I can tell.
The main problem that makes anarchy untenable is that, if you can succeed in throwing off the proverbial "yoke of government taxation", there will be a power vacuum, which will soon be filled by power seekers of various types.
If you would rather fight your whole life to prevent being killed by the inevitable warlords and their "private security", as opposed to living in our current system, then our minds cannot meet.
The average football game is every bit as close at the end as any basketball game. The total number of scores per game is not relevant. Neither is the exact score differential.
I may not be explaining my point properly - in football (or most other sports) a single score is difficult to achieve, and often requires great effort by the entire team.
In basketball, scoring is comparably trivial, and games often hinge on a single foul call, which could be incidental, or commonplace. It is difficult to mete out appropriate punishment for fouls in the game, without impacting the game too much.
I certainly agree that the end of a basketball game is usually torturous, but I can't think of a great solution to the problem without changing some pretty fundamental things about the game. There are things that could be adjusted to improve it, but anything I can think of would only be a bandaid.
I kindof like the 'penalty box' idea (maybe only in the last 2 minutes of the game or something), but I think even that would be too much of an impact for trivial fouls.
Good points. Football games are often decided on the last throw, the last score as well.
Yes, but a single "score" in football (a 6pt touchdown) could be anywhere from 100% to 10% of the total team score. It is rare for a team to score even 60 points in football (10 touchdowns worth), and in those cases one team is generally far, far ahead. In basketball each individual goal seems like it shouldn't be that important, since they can make 50 in a game, but it IS that important if the game is closely played. It is just a very different scoring mechanic.
What I disagree with in how the end of basketball games is allowed to play out is that physical "contact" determines almost everything that happens (in close games, anyway). And this is the opposite of the grace in how a football game ends. "We have the ball, we have 3 downs, we are up by 5 points and we are going to run out the clock" is often how it all ends. It doesn't mean the previous 59 minutes weren't awesome. It just means the game is effectively over.
Basketball has the announcers saying "They have to foul them now" and "they have a foul to give" (what if instead they said "they have a punch to throw"?). Basketball could just say "There are 20 seconds to go, we have the ball, the lead and the 24 second clock to run out the game, and that is what we are going to do". The previous 47 minutes could still have been awesome. Don't end the game with violations that help the violators. NBA claims to be all about the message they send to kids, to a creepy extent. How ironic that the message they send at the end of each game is "Violence pays off".
Completely agree. Though throwing a punch in basketball is supposed to be an automatic ejection:)
Yes, people are weird! Still don't see why that means that students and universities need to subsidize some people's hobbies! Amongst my friends about half like to watch sports for entertainment and the other half feel the way I do and would rather stare at a blank wall than watch sports.
Your friends don't seem to be a representative group:)
Sports are hugely popular. There are historical reasons they are tied to post-secondary education here in the US, but "people like sports" is the maybe-too-short-answer.
Basketball is still my favorite sport to watch, but I agree that the foul system needs a serious revamp, especially to improve flow near the end of games. There are a lot of complications in basketball though, mostly due to the inherent format of the game.
Basketball is the rare sport where teams regularly score 100 points (that is FIFTY GOALS) and the game is frequently decided by a single point. This is a 1% swing in actual scoring that often decides games. This means that near the end of a close game, every movement of every player could potentially have a disastrous impact on the fate of the game. One foul can turn into 2 points, or 0 points, for the other team, and the results there can (and often do) make the game-winning difference.
Also, since basketball is a "free-movement" sport (players can stand and move anywhere, at any time) there is a lot of constant motion, and free-fighting for position. Imagine if in baseball the guy on base and the baseman both wanted to stand in exactly the same spot, and the result of the entire game could depend on which one of them was able to get to the spot, keep the spot, and/or force the other player to relinquish the spot at the right moment. It's chaos. Because of this you end up with a lot of borderline-illegal and definitely-illegal contact while players are vying for position. Not to mention the on-ball action! The method of scoring in basketball requires a player to take the ball and somehow get it into a goal which the ball can barely fit through, while the other guy is trying to physically prevent you from doing so. If you can brush a guy with your hip and affect his balance just a wee bit, though not enough for the referee to notice, that might win you the game.
There was a lot more long distance commerce and travel in ancient times than we currently are aware of, and some oddities, such as Chinese porcelain in Timbuktu or sweet potatoes in Polynesia, are really unexplainable any other way.
I agree.
You would like the 1421 book. It sounds similar to the Charles Hapgood book - interesting research, but specious and ultimately fictional conclusions.
The Ra expedition's main point was that anything thrown into the Atlantic far enough from shore that the current gets it WILL end up in the Caribbean. The seeds die if exposed to salt water, so the idea that they washed up on a beach and spontaneously started growing isn't really viable. That's especially true since the gourd skin is so tough that seeds in intact gourds almost never germinate since water can't get in. Even if the trip across the Atlantic were accidental the utility of being able to carry fresh water would be so obvious to any sailor that long distance voyagers would probably carry some seeds with them.
Indeed.
Have you seen the photos of the round Olmec sculptures? The West African features are pretty much unmistakable.
I'm familiar with the various Olmec theories. The scholarly consensus is that the Olmecs were 100% indigenous. There is no good evidence for the "Olmecs are African" theory (which mostly hinges on "the giant heads look African"), and substantial evidence against it. Facial features similar to those of the colossal heads are common among modern indigenous people in the Olmec heartland, and there is no evidence for African genetic contribution to the indigenous gene pool.
Admiral Piri Re'is captured a ship carrying cargo supposedly from the Americas before Columbus's trip (his map is based on one from that captured ship, IIRC).
Piri Reis sourced a map from Columbus (among many others) to create his map in 1513.
There are lots of interesting theories and "evidence" for pre-columbian contact, but most of it very weak. I've even read the 1421 book, which is interesting but basically fictional.
The most jarring evidence for non-Polynesian contact is probably the supposedly Roman Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head, though it's authenticity is uncertain.
I also don't doubt there are lawyers who do not use said tactics but their numbers are statistically insignificant.
I'm pretty sure a large portion of lawyers basically spend their careers drawing up contracts and filing bankruptcy's and other mundane things, with little opportunity to employ shady tactics.
But I'm being pedantic here - everyone gets your point.
MMA is not a "game". It's sortof a sport, and is certainly an "athletic competition". Difficult to compare with the mainstream sports (unless you include boxing in that group).
I would liken it more to skydiving - the goal is pretty much to avoid dying while looking awesome.
Another interesting example is fouling in basketball. You are legally not allowed to foul in the game, but fouling happens constantly and the players are only punished for a small fraction of the fouls that occur. Fouling is openly used in various strategies, and players often have trouble mitigating the advantages gained by fouling because free throws are difficult, and referees are not omniscient.
A really interesting thing about the bottle gourd is that the species cultivated in Africa and tropical America would ONLY grow in the tropics. The only way that it could have arrived was across the ocean, it could never have survived the trip across the tundras of Asia and North America. Thor Heyerdahl estimated its arrival in the Americas around 8,000 - 5,000 BPE, but I don't remember what he based that estimate on. Still later than maize and potato cultivation, but well within the time estimated for the earliest reed rafts in Africa (thus the Ra expedition).
Well, I believe the current theory is that it was brought (either on boats of some kind or across Beringia) in seeds. Supposedly the seeds can still germinate after a very long time (the original theory was that the gourds floated across on their own somehow and still germinated). Personally, it does seem implausibly fortuitous that the seeds were preserved across Siberia, Beringia, and Canada to be planted in Mexico and Florida..
The scientific community is slowly becoming more open to the idea of pre-columbian, post-beringian contact with the Americas. It seems likely now that there was contact and cultural exchange at some point, though there is certainly no consensus regarding who, when, and where. Most probably there was contact between Polynesia and South America at various times. The Sweet Potato at least was transferred somehow from the Americas to Polynesia before European contact with either group.
Despite the success of the Ra II expedition, I am skeptical of claims that any African cultures crossed the Atlantic, though it certainly can't be ruled out.
Yes, agriculture arose in several geographically diverse locations independently. During the Paleolithic there seem to have been many "false starts" when various crops were attempted to be cultivated and then abandoned. Millet is thought to have been domesticated in China sometime around 8000 BP, while Maize and Squash were probably domesticated in the Americas close to 10000 BP. Cultivation of various cereals and legumes is thought to have developed and become widespread in the fertile crescent from 11-9,000 BP.
The bottle gourd (Calabash) situation is interesting. They seem to have been native to Africa, but were already present in the Americas when Europeans arrived. Genetic research indicates that they were likely brought there by the Paleoamericans when they originally colonized the continents. This means bottle gourds would have been domesticated long before any known food-crop cultivation - sometime well before 14000 BP when the Bering land-bridge disappeared.
There is also evidence for Taro domestication in New Guinea going back possibly as far as 25,000 BP. If true, this would make it the oldest still-cultivated food crop.
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(I might have to take that back. I think the USSR did something similar. Made a really pretty lake, if I recall, but they could never keep it stocked with fish. But I can’t find a link so it might be my imagination.)
You are thinking of Lake Chagan, part of the "Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy" project that Russia did.
It does seem to be quite pretty.
Well, CISSP is a little heavy for someone applying for a Level 1 IA personnel (PC technician or whatever).
CISSP requires 5 years of experience before you sit the exam, and a reference from an isc2 member.
Security+ is probably more of an option for low-level personnel, though it's more advanced material than the A+.
After a quick perusal of the comments I haven't seen this mentioned yet.
Dude, you have a CCNA.
You aren't exactly clear what your experience has entailed so far, but, (if you enjoy networking) you should try to continue down that path.
You're already a considerable way down the networking road with the CCNA. If you have been getting hands-on experience with Cisco gear at your current job, I would definitely leverage that to try and get a more networking-intensive position somewhere, where SQL experience would be superfluous.
I don't have A+ myself, but I taught a course for it recently. Lots of hardware-related stuff on it, mixed bag of useful and non-useful things. Some of it is outdated. Lots of assorted information about the various PC components and how they work together.
Pretty much just a "do you know how a computer works?" and "can you memorize a bunch of seemingly arbitrary details?" It's not bad for someone just starting out, though it's redundant for someone with more than ~1year experience.
To get the cert you actually have to take TWO exams now, and in the newest version they added some stuff for mobile devices, though I haven't seen the material for this version yet.
A+ still satisfies the DoD 8570 baseline cert requirement for level 1 IA personnel (basically all DOD IT personnel, whether employed by the DOD or a contractor). Other government agencies and large corporations often have minimum certification requirements that include some of the entry-level CompTIA certs.
Saying "leave it off your resume" is silly. Lots of hiring is still done by non-technical managers who like to see the "letters and stuff" for certifications. Most technical people out there who actually are doing hiring, but (justifiably) don't have as much respect for the entry level certs won't penalize you for having one.
Sounds like you were never involved in hiring tech people in one of the big coastal cities... If your hiring requirement involves anything beyond "can do basic HTML" and you don't pay reasonable salaries, forget it.
FTFY
"Certainly" ? Dangerous word that. "Probably", and with a qualification about not carrying out a full crop cycle, is about as far as I'd go.
Haha, well, "certainly" might be too strong.. :)
If you accept that the Beringia land bridge was necessary to the settlement of the Americas. I still have a suspicion that boat (kayak, raft) transport along the Asian coast, island hopping along the Aleutians, and across the Bering "Strait" could all have been happening at the same time along a migration front a thousand km wide. It's a racing certainty that the people who made this migration did have relevant technologies, because their ancestors had the technology (how did Indonesia and Australia get populated without some sort of boat?) and essentially all of their descendants retain the technology. (The Navajo may not have many seaworthy kayaks, but they're a recent minority.) But ... almost all of the evidence is going to be under up to 100m of sea water, which renders archaeological prospecting decidedly difficult and expensive compared to working on even the wettest of dry land.
I would think sea-route migration during or after Beringia was very possible. It seems that current genetic evidence indicates that there was one major migration of peoples to the Americas, that evolved in isolation for some time. This of course does not rule out other migrations that died out and left no genetic evidence, and I believe there are various other theories that remain possible.
"Bottle" gourds ; now that name might just be a hint of why they'd be a useful crop to any hunter-gatherer tribe. If indeed, they're water-tight enough to be a usable bottle (never met one myself ; wrong continent). But that then raises the awkward question of why they're not found (TTBOMK, but this is a new wrinkle to me) in any of the Asian landmass where you'd expect them to have passed, if they came into the Americas across the Beringia land bridge. Are they "ancient" in any parts of Asia?
I am not familiar with all of the details, but yes they seem to be useful to carry water, and and they seem to have been cultivated in Africa, Asia, and the Americas for thousands of years. How they got to America is evidently still a big mystery.
Hmmm, that's a new one on me. Oldest clear evidence of cultivation by a considerable stretch. [Googles] A cursory search yields uncontroversial evidence going back to 9ka BP (The reference "Golson 1977"; I doubt that my local library has that on the shelves!). Ah, I see the 25,000 year BP claim made in the Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution, where it's attributed to "Denham, Tim et al (received July 2005) "Early and mid Holocene tool-use and processing of taro (Colocasia esculenta), yam (Dioscorea sp.) and other plants at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of Papua New Guinea" (Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 33, Issue 5, May 2006)" (I'm mostly making notes to leave some breadcrumbs for me to follow along.)
Good luck finding that article. I think the 25k BP claim is a little specious personally, though if true, very interesting. Cultivation at 9k BP in New Guinea, of all places, is impressive as it is.
I didn't mean to imply that the appearance of Clovis caused the worldwide extinction of megafauna in the late Pleistocene, though I think they likely had an impact in the Americas. As you say, the true story is not at all simple.
The Wrangel mammoths are an (certainly interesting!) outlier population - as I noted the "mainland mammoths" went extinct around 10000 BP.
Near-east agriculture seems to have been in full-swing in Egypt and Mesopotamia by 10000 BP. Certainly our ancestors were not farming during the younger dryas.
But that's one where the evidence is under very active research at this moment. Knowing our luck, crucial evidence is having trenches and bomb craters smashed through it in Syria at this very moment. That'd be bloody typical, wouldn't it?
I am excited to see what we will find in the near-east in the coming years. I think the most exciting would be human DNA from that period. Though, as you say, who knows what key evidence has been and is still being destroyed there.
The changes that are needed are (1) shorten the end of the game by (2) NOT EVER rewarding someone in any way for fouling another player. No, you do not want to give a penalty when one is not called for, but this is the penultimate problem already conceded.
This actually reminds me that in the NBA (though not college) they recently implemented a very interesting rule called a "clear-path foul". If a defender fouls an opponent in open court who had a "clear path" to the basket, the offensive team shoots free throws AND retains possession of the ball. I would like to see this happen for all fouls in the final 2 minutes of the game. That would probably go a long way toward solving the end-of-game-slugfest problem.
Another thing we have not mentioned is video replay. This is becoming a bigger factor each day. Baseball, the sloth of sports when it comes to "advancing the game" is already using it, but will have to fully embrace it to simply make their game fair (and less open to betting-related corruption of the officiating). Every sport needs more video replay -- and heh, David S., you can fit in ad views while they are reviewing the replay!!!1!
I would rather a game be stopped to get the call right than for any other reason (aside from player injury, of course). Also, there are anti-flop rules in basketball that remove the temptation to fake contact.
I agree about getting the calls right. More video replay would slow down the game, which is bad, but it would help to get more calls right, which is good. There are other ways to reduce fouls and speed up the flow of the game that could make up for the delays from video replay.
I love having anti-flop rules, because nothing irks me more than a flopping...but unfortunately the anti-flop rules currently in place are remarkably ineffective. The refs currently can't go to the monitor to determine a flop after the fact, and players are exceedingly good at performing convincing flops that are difficult to detect in real-time. Currently, flops are determined outside of the games, and players are fined for it - but any player would gladly spend the fine money to give them an edge in the game, so this doesn't seem to reduce flopping at all as far as I can tell.
The main problem that makes anarchy untenable is that, if you can succeed in throwing off the proverbial "yoke of government taxation", there will be a power vacuum, which will soon be filled by power seekers of various types.
If you would rather fight your whole life to prevent being killed by the inevitable warlords and their "private security", as opposed to living in our current system, then our minds cannot meet.
I'll take "stupid" people voting for liberty over "lazy" people voting for a living any day.
You put the scare quotes on the wrong words.
I'll take stupid people voting for "liberty" over lazy people voting for "a living" any day.
Fixed that for you.
The average football game is every bit as close at the end as any basketball game. The total number of scores per game is not relevant. Neither is the exact score differential.
I may not be explaining my point properly - in football (or most other sports) a single score is difficult to achieve, and often requires great effort by the entire team.
In basketball, scoring is comparably trivial, and games often hinge on a single foul call, which could be incidental, or commonplace. It is difficult to mete out appropriate punishment for fouls in the game, without impacting the game too much.
I certainly agree that the end of a basketball game is usually torturous, but I can't think of a great solution to the problem without changing some pretty fundamental things about the game. There are things that could be adjusted to improve it, but anything I can think of would only be a bandaid.
I kindof like the 'penalty box' idea (maybe only in the last 2 minutes of the game or something), but I think even that would be too much of an impact for trivial fouls.
Good points. Football games are often decided on the last throw, the last score as well.
Yes, but a single "score" in football (a 6pt touchdown) could be anywhere from 100% to 10% of the total team score. It is rare for a team to score even 60 points in football (10 touchdowns worth), and in those cases one team is generally far, far ahead. In basketball each individual goal seems like it shouldn't be that important, since they can make 50 in a game, but it IS that important if the game is closely played. It is just a very different scoring mechanic.
What I disagree with in how the end of basketball games is allowed to play out is that physical "contact" determines almost everything that happens (in close games, anyway). And this is the opposite of the grace in how a football game ends. "We have the ball, we have 3 downs, we are up by 5 points and we are going to run out the clock" is often how it all ends. It doesn't mean the previous 59 minutes weren't awesome. It just means the game is effectively over.
Basketball has the announcers saying "They have to foul them now" and "they have a foul to give" (what if instead they said "they have a punch to throw"?). Basketball could just say "There are 20 seconds to go, we have the ball, the lead and the 24 second clock to run out the game, and that is what we are going to do". The previous 47 minutes could still have been awesome. Don't end the game with violations that help the violators. NBA claims to be all about the message they send to kids, to a creepy extent. How ironic that the message they send at the end of each game is "Violence pays off".
Completely agree. Though throwing a punch in basketball is supposed to be an automatic ejection :)
People like sports...
Yes, people are weird! Still don't see why that means that students and universities need to subsidize some people's hobbies! Amongst my friends about half like to watch sports for entertainment and the other half feel the way I do and would rather stare at a blank wall than watch sports.
Your friends don't seem to be a representative group :)
Sports are hugely popular. There are historical reasons they are tied to post-secondary education here in the US, but "people like sports" is the maybe-too-short-answer.
Basketball is still my favorite sport to watch, but I agree that the foul system needs a serious revamp, especially to improve flow near the end of games. There are a lot of complications in basketball though, mostly due to the inherent format of the game.
Basketball is the rare sport where teams regularly score 100 points (that is FIFTY GOALS) and the game is frequently decided by a single point. This is a 1% swing in actual scoring that often decides games. This means that near the end of a close game, every movement of every player could potentially have a disastrous impact on the fate of the game. One foul can turn into 2 points, or 0 points, for the other team, and the results there can (and often do) make the game-winning difference.
Also, since basketball is a "free-movement" sport (players can stand and move anywhere, at any time) there is a lot of constant motion, and free-fighting for position. Imagine if in baseball the guy on base and the baseman both wanted to stand in exactly the same spot, and the result of the entire game could depend on which one of them was able to get to the spot, keep the spot, and/or force the other player to relinquish the spot at the right moment. It's chaos. Because of this you end up with a lot of borderline-illegal and definitely-illegal contact while players are vying for position. Not to mention the on-ball action! The method of scoring in basketball requires a player to take the ball and somehow get it into a goal which the ball can barely fit through, while the other guy is trying to physically prevent you from doing so. If you can brush a guy with your hip and affect his balance just a wee bit, though not enough for the referee to notice, that might win you the game.
There was a lot more long distance commerce and travel in ancient times than we currently are aware of, and some oddities, such as Chinese porcelain in Timbuktu or sweet potatoes in Polynesia, are really unexplainable any other way.
I agree.
You would like the 1421 book. It sounds similar to the Charles Hapgood book - interesting research, but specious and ultimately fictional conclusions.
The Ra expedition's main point was that anything thrown into the Atlantic far enough from shore that the current gets it WILL end up in the Caribbean. The seeds die if exposed to salt water, so the idea that they washed up on a beach and spontaneously started growing isn't really viable. That's especially true since the gourd skin is so tough that seeds in intact gourds almost never germinate since water can't get in. Even if the trip across the Atlantic were accidental the utility of being able to carry fresh water would be so obvious to any sailor that long distance voyagers would probably carry some seeds with them.
Indeed.
Have you seen the photos of the round Olmec sculptures? The West African features are pretty much unmistakable.
I'm familiar with the various Olmec theories. The scholarly consensus is that the Olmecs were 100% indigenous. There is no good evidence for the "Olmecs are African" theory (which mostly hinges on "the giant heads look African"), and substantial evidence against it. Facial features similar to those of the colossal heads are common among modern indigenous people in the Olmec heartland, and there is no evidence for African genetic contribution to the indigenous gene pool.
Admiral Piri Re'is captured a ship carrying cargo supposedly from the Americas before Columbus's trip (his map is based on one from that captured ship, IIRC).
Piri Reis sourced a map from Columbus (among many others) to create his map in 1513.
There are lots of interesting theories and "evidence" for pre-columbian contact, but most of it very weak. I've even read the 1421 book, which is interesting but basically fictional.
The most jarring evidence for non-Polynesian contact is probably the supposedly Roman Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head, though it's authenticity is uncertain.
MMA would be far more interesting if they flooded the arena and had mock naval battles.
bazinga!
I also don't doubt there are lawyers who do not use said tactics but their numbers are statistically insignificant.
I'm pretty sure a large portion of lawyers basically spend their careers drawing up contracts and filing bankruptcy's and other mundane things, with little opportunity to employ shady tactics.
But I'm being pedantic here - everyone gets your point.
MMA is not a "game". It's sortof a sport, and is certainly an "athletic competition". Difficult to compare with the mainstream sports (unless you include boxing in that group).
I would liken it more to skydiving - the goal is pretty much to avoid dying while looking awesome.
Another interesting example is fouling in basketball. You are legally not allowed to foul in the game, but fouling happens constantly and the players are only punished for a small fraction of the fouls that occur. Fouling is openly used in various strategies, and players often have trouble mitigating the advantages gained by fouling because free throws are difficult, and referees are not omniscient.
Short answer to all of these questions -
People like sports...
A really interesting thing about the bottle gourd is that the species cultivated in Africa and tropical America would ONLY grow in the tropics. The only way that it could have arrived was across the ocean, it could never have survived the trip across the tundras of Asia and North America. Thor Heyerdahl estimated its arrival in the Americas around 8,000 - 5,000 BPE, but I don't remember what he based that estimate on. Still later than maize and potato cultivation, but well within the time estimated for the earliest reed rafts in Africa (thus the Ra expedition).
Well, I believe the current theory is that it was brought (either on boats of some kind or across Beringia) in seeds. Supposedly the seeds can still germinate after a very long time (the original theory was that the gourds floated across on their own somehow and still germinated). Personally, it does seem implausibly fortuitous that the seeds were preserved across Siberia, Beringia, and Canada to be planted in Mexico and Florida..
The scientific community is slowly becoming more open to the idea of pre-columbian, post-beringian contact with the Americas. It seems likely now that there was contact and cultural exchange at some point, though there is certainly no consensus regarding who, when, and where. Most probably there was contact between Polynesia and South America at various times. The Sweet Potato at least was transferred somehow from the Americas to Polynesia before European contact with either group.
Despite the success of the Ra II expedition, I am skeptical of claims that any African cultures crossed the Atlantic, though it certainly can't be ruled out.
Yes, agriculture arose in several geographically diverse locations independently. During the Paleolithic there seem to have been many "false starts" when various crops were attempted to be cultivated and then abandoned. Millet is thought to have been domesticated in China sometime around 8000 BP, while Maize and Squash were probably domesticated in the Americas close to 10000 BP. Cultivation of various cereals and legumes is thought to have developed and become widespread in the fertile crescent from 11-9,000 BP.
The bottle gourd (Calabash) situation is interesting. They seem to have been native to Africa, but were already present in the Americas when Europeans arrived. Genetic research indicates that they were likely brought there by the Paleoamericans when they originally colonized the continents. This means bottle gourds would have been domesticated long before any known food-crop cultivation - sometime well before 14000 BP when the Bering land-bridge disappeared.
There is also evidence for Taro domestication in New Guinea going back possibly as far as 25,000 BP. If true, this would make it the oldest still-cultivated food crop.