1. Actually, and speaking as an atheist myself, it seems to me that you'd still be off the mark if you do a blanket extrapolation that even all 2 billion christians fit your
Most religious expression, in my experience, involves someone telling everyone around them, with great force and repetition, that things for which they have no actual proof are indeed true. If I generalize this behavior to religions in general, is that a stereotype, or in some way inappropriate?
If you look over the pond to most of continental Europe, that's flat out false. In Germany I've had someone knock on my door to give me pamphlets exactly _once_ in my entire life so far. Ok, a couple more tried to give them to me on the street, but we're still talking once-in-a-couple-of-years events. There are like 3 churches within walking distance of my house, at least one built entirely with donations from the local community of that particular christian sect, so there must be _some_ religious people around. But I haven't had them come over to tell me what to believe in. Much less "with great force and repetition." Heck, it now occurs to me that I don't even know who those religious people are at all, because they just don't start talks about it.
Or in France, as far as I know, you can actually go to a catholic school and not once see a crucifix or even hear about Jesus. ('Cause if they even mention Jesus, they lose the government subsidy for schools.)
The predominant culture at the moment is, basically, secular: your religion is your own private matter. Or how George Carlin put it: thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself. If you're religious, good for you, but keep it to yourself.
2. Extrapolate it about _all_ religions? Heh. There are plenty of religions which don't even have a problem with your believing in other gods.
E.g., Buddhism is largely an atheistic religion, as paradoxical as that sounds. It doesn't actually have a god of its own, and it has no fundamental problem with you throwing your lot in with other religions' gods. Your place in the great cycle of reincarnation are determined by what you _do_ and how you live your life, not by who you believe in. You're saved or damned (so to speak, and even then not in the abrahamic religion sense) by yourself, not by whether you brown-nose the right deity. Buddhism is more of a "manual", so to speak. And if you think you can find your way without their teachings, well, suit yourself. It certainly is possible, at least theoretically.
So it would make no sense for a Buddhist to try to save you from worshipping the wrong guy.
That's just one example of a religion which doesn't fit your stereotype at all. I could give more, but it's a too long message already.
Am I stereotyping when I suggest your pastor would be horrified at the thought of two men having sex every day for a week, or is that simply the truth? [...] Try being gay in a christian, jewish or muslim community and see how you fare
I don't know, mate, it seems to me like again you try to paint all christianity through the prism of the USA bible(-thumping) belt. Try being openly gay in almost any community this side of the ocean, and the vast majority of people will just leave you alone. And if anyone gave you a bible-thumping lecture about it, most people would look funny at _him_.
I'll point you again at the alternative being starving to death. That's how the Neanderthals went extinct. A long painful starvation into extinction. And even for Homo Sapiens, there are plenty of severely malnourished skeletons around. The world used to constantly over-populate, and shed its excess population through starvation and warfare.
Basically methinks that you think it through modern day perspective, where there are better ways to earn your bread anyway. Nowadays, even if all else fails, what's the worst that can happen? Welfare? Losing a bit of face in the community for that?
Back then the alternative was literally that you and your children will starve to death. Ok, or you could also go kill the buggers from the next tribe for their food. And risk death or severe injury yourself. So basically imagine that you have the following choices, pretty literally. And yes they are the only choices:
A) well, get to doing that hard work in agriculture
B) you and your family starve to death,
C) you go raid the next tribe for their food, and you'll probably get killed sooner or later. The violent death rate in some tribes was as high as 80% at the extreme end, and still higher than the siege of Leningrad at the _lower_ end.
If you tell me that even then you couldn't be arsed to start agriculture because it's too hard, just how freaking lazy _are_ you?:P
It seems to me like it's a much more motivational thing than religion. Do you genuinely think that they just sat around and went "naah, it's too much work" after discovering agriculture, until they had to build a temple?:P
1. Pascal's wager, the way Pascal used it, is basically this:
- if you believe and you're right, there's an infinite reward
- if you don't believe and are right, well, whatever rewards you can possibly get are finite.
Ditto for penalties when you're wrong, could be added.
So basically it says _nothing_ about which is more probable to be right, and it has _nothing_ to do with . It just says that infinite is bigger than anything else. Even if the probability for christianity to be right were 0.00001% and the probability to be wrong were 99.99999%, infinite*0.00001% > anything_finite*99.99999%. So rewards times probabilities says that for an infinite jackpot, the best course of action is to bet on the jackpot.
2. Yes, the GP did claim that science supports faith. Re-read the message. It's right in there.
3. Even Pascal's use is, essentially, still a formalized way to use another classic fallacy: appeal to consequences.
4. The same infinite rewards and infinite penalties spiel can be used against it, because there is more than one religion, and virtually all promise that you only get the reward if you believe that one religion and nothing else.
E.g., what if judaism is right and christianity wrong? They do have several commandments against stuff ranging from worshipping other gods (prayed to Jesus lately?), to worshipping icons, to eating pork. On the other hand, most Christian denominations say (or used to, before we chose not to believe that any more) that you can _only_ be saved through Jesus. You have an incompatibility right there. So which of them do you choose? Both options A and B promise infinite rewards if you're right, and infinite penalties if you're wrong. Pascal's fancy maths stops working right there and then.
E.g., Norse religion promised you a place in Valhalla if you die attacking someone, or in Freya's halls if you die defending against an attack. Note that it doesn't say you have to be a good person. Pirates and mercenaries dead while assaulting some city to plunder it, would go to Valhalla just as well. Gangsters dead while having a shootout with the cops, would go to one of the two places too, just like the cops who died in the same shootout. The only criterion and goal there was proving to Odin that you're worthy of being a soldier in his Einherjar army, by having already fought to death once and not surrendering to save your life. On the other hand being a nice person and a peaceful death in your own bed, earns you a trip to the domain Loki's daughter. (Yep, you go to Hel;)
They had stuff like the Battle Of Bravalla, a monumental waste of human life, just so a king could go to Valhalla by getting an honourable death in battle... against his loyal vassal.
How do you reconcile that with Christianity? If the Norse were right, you should go die in a firefight, guns blazing, to get your reward. Go try to rob a police station if you're out of other ideas. If Christianity is right, you should be peaceful and love thy neighbour. Which do you choose? Again, Pascal's maths doesn't help you much there, because the consequences for choosing right or wrong are disproportionate for both choices.
Actually, sad to say, what you do there isn't "science in support of faith", it's "bullshit fallacies in support of faith."
E.g.,
since the majority of the humans alive today are religious, you are safer to accept the hypothesis that religion is not a hoax, than you are to accept the hypothesis that religion is a hoax
... is not science or rational thought at all, it's just a well known fallacy: appeal to numbers. Just because a majority believes in X, doesn't make X true.
E.g., at some point the majority believed that the Earth is flat. It didn't make it so. It didn't even make it a safer bet. That belief is completely orthogonal to how reality actually is.
Plus, "the majority of humans alive today are religious" is mis-leading right there. Those people believe wildly different and mutually-incompatible religions. Which of those religions do you believe? Hinduism can't be true at the same time as Christianity, for example. So painting it all with a "they're religious" brush creates a false majority there.
Taking Christianity for example, it claims some 2 billion adherents worldwide, though that's got more to do with what you've been baptized to, than whether you're actually a devout christian. Well, that's less than a third of the world's population. A majority of the world isn't christian, so by your reasoning, it stands to reason that it's more likely that Christianity is false.
Well, it actually gets me thinking. If all civilization started in that strip starting from Turkey to the southern tip of Messopotamia, and it was all because of religion, man, they must have had some good religion. Why are we worshipping this wus who got nailed by a couple of Romans, then? Let's go back to a religion so strong that it singlehandedly created agriculture and started humanity on the road to civilization.
E.g., Innana, daughter of Sin. Has a nice ring to it, and her cult was in the general area where it all started.
Goddess of war, wanton sex, and ritual prostitution. At least you got more than a receipt for your tithe, ya know what I mean?
Plus a bit into genocide and the like, if you read Enheduanna's (best known high priestess of Innana) writings. I guess a girl can have her hobbies, even if they involve turning major rivers red with the blood of the innocents;)
1. Well, if you aim that low with "city" and "temple", then it really doesn't say much.
There are hunter-gatherer tribes with more members than that, and they do have some huts/tents/etc somewhere. It doesn't really make it a city, but ok. They all have some totem pole, or sacred heap o' rocks, or some sacred tree or grove somewhere. You can probably find such tribal villages all the way to the first homo sapiens, 200,000 years ago, and the Neanderthals before built them too.
Humans were _never_ lone individuals, like, say, tigers are. There'd always be groups of 10-15 (or for that matter 100-200) clustered together for mutual protection.
If those are the "cities" we're talking about, you simply can't draw a line and say "they appeared 11,000 years ago." Humans always lived in groups like that.
The cities we're usually talking about are larger things.
2. Can you correlate those groups of 10-15 humans with starting agriculture? I don't see how, beyond basically "well, they needed food." But humans and such groups of humans already needed food anyway. The need for a larger and more stable food source was there for 200,000 years, and in fact for the Neanderthals before them too. There is evidence that there were episodes of chronic stavation all along the way, so the drive would be there already.
So basically if you found a sorce of food, you'd _use_ it, with or without a temple and city. If you're a 15 people tribe and you find some plentiful berries, you settle there and start eating them. And if you find some nice grass which produces lots of edible seeds, you start using it one way or another. Just because you need food.
The growth of the city or tribe then comes from having that source of food, not the other way around. You can't make the right type of grass or berries or whatever appear just because you placed a city there. It's not Civilization.
Actually, if you think about it, it doesn't even f-ing make any sense:
1. You can't have a city _before_ you have a stable source of food that doesn't move around.
2. Agriculture depended on a mutation in a species of grass, that made it have bigger grains. It first started with wild Rye, actually, but the mutation of emmer wheat was what really kicked things into gear. It's a tetraploid plant, meaning that at some point it acquired _two_ sets of chromosomes, and that mutation survived.
You can't cause a mutation by simply building a city or a temple.
3. The only major invention that happened in that time for agriculture was irrigation. At some point some guys in Egypt for example discovered that if you plant your seeds in the wet earth after the Nile's flood is over, you get a lot of grain to eat. I don't know how it happened in Messopotamia, and it could have been independent, but that's literally what they did: imitate a flood. They'd literally flood their fields with water from a river, later from a canal bringing water farther from a river, then close the gates and let the water dry, then plant grain.
That's it. That's the only change that happened to agriculture in thousands of years.
So how did cities and monuments drive it? It's not like any change happened to agriculture because of those cities. People still sowed and reaped in the exact same way as their ancestors did, and the only change was needing more and more land to feed more and more people. That's it.
4. By contrast it's easier to see the effects of agriculture on the cities. E.g., the rise to power and importance of priesthood in Egypt because they could tell you when the next flood starts, or of those who controlled the canals in Messopotamia, is a direct effect of agriculture. Or on religion? Well, Egypt had some half a dozen deities connected in some way with agriculture, and that's just off the top of my head.
Heck, even the fact that those cities grew walls and codes of laws and standing armies, is an effect of not being able to move freely in response to threats and invasions. You _had_ to stay there near the river you irrigated your crops with, no matter what, and you had to live with each other because there was nowhere else to go if half the tribe doesn't like the other half.
If you look at the tribes which didn't practice agriculture (e.g., northern Europe until very late), they were a lot more inclined to just pack their shit and move when they overpopulated. While we tend to draw an age of migrations around the age when the Roman Empire started getting shafted by them, they moved around a lot before that too. E.g., Caesar's eventual conquest of Gaul started when the Helvetii just packed their shit and wanted to pass through and plunder the territory of the Allobroges which were clients of Rome. E.g., the Teutons and Cimbri migrated through the whole f-ing Europe, before being stopped by the Romans in 101 BC and 102 BC. E.g., while everyone remembers the spanking that the Goths gave to the Byzantines, how do you think the Goths ended up in Dacia when starting from Scandinavia in the first place?
It's only when they got into agriculture that they started trying to build stone forts and defend their plots of land. Sure, some had to migrate later anyway, when someone else displaced them, but you can see the abrupt change in attitude before and after agriculture anyway. After agriculture it's no longer about some space to live in, but about the land itself. The very place you're in becomes worth defending.
Again, it's damn impossible to see an effect the other way around. Building a stone fort or a temple doesn't make your fields suddenly grow grain, or anything. Discovering a plant you can grow, or a plough that can work on your type of soil does. (The latter was what changed the situation in Europe, btw.)
Reminds me of the "test" if you need the Guardian's religion in Ultima 7. No matter how you answered the questions, there would be something wrong with you. E.g., if your mother and a small child are drowning, and you can save only one, who do you save? If you chose the child, you obviously are nuts, if you didn't choose the child you obviously are nuts.
Well, ok, maybe this one isn't in the same way, but it's broad enough to make a large chunk of the population "sick" even if they don't have a computer at all.
E.g., difficulty concentrating? Well, after working some 12 hours a day in a sweatshop, I would imagine that a lot of Chinese are rather too tired to really concentrate on much. Trouble sleeping? Well, too many worries will do the same to you. Etc.
Re:You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
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How Do Games Grow Up?
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I see your point, but
1. I was talking about MMOs, not about Final Fantasy 1 to 10.
2. I wasn't talking about the skill of grinding an RPG, per se, but about the skill and discipline of applying yourself to one task for several days or weeks, even if today you don't get a cookie at all. I.e., of working on something without those immediate rewards.
In the bad old pre-BC days of raiding MC on WoW, there were days where nobody in that 40-man team got anything they needed. There were days where you'd be there fully knowing that today you won't get any bloody thing because there are people ahead of you in the line for those items, the way most raiding guilds were organized. Today you'd help someone else get their reward, so maybe next time they help you get yours. You had to show up on time for their big day, so they show up on time for yours.
It has been said many times that at that point it stopped even being as much a "game" and became "work". And far from me to defend that kind of a game design, from a fun factor point of view. But in this case it is a prime example of something which is exactly the other way around than what you (correctly) describe for single-player RPG. It had all the aspects that you claim that games don't have (and, again, you're even correct about SP RPGs), and missed all the aspects that you learned that games have.
Re:You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
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How Do Games Grow Up?
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Except that games tend to have bright flashing lights and other "feel-good" techniques that make you feel immediate reward and pleasure just by interacting with it, even when you don't win. They encourage you by virtue of design to keep trying when you fail (by necessity, otherwise they wouldn't sell), whereas all the hobbies you've listed take a kind of self-discipline that in fact is useful in other contexts.
It seems to me that keeping trying even if you fail, is a valuable RL lesson. Most cultures have some saying along the lines of "if at first you don't succeed, try and try again," so it must have been useful before computer games too.
Also, there is some discipline to be learned from games too, especially in multiplayer ones. Whether it's a WoW raid in the endgame grind, or just playing Counter-Strike with your "clan" mates, there is a lot of point in acting disciplined, as team. And it can mean utter defeat if you act like an anarchistic yahoo.
Delayed rewards? Well, those two words would describe a MMO's endgame grind the best.
But even at lower levels, if you're say, the healer (but the same applies to any other role), for the next couple of hours you must do your role to the letter or the team will wipe out. No matter how much you'd like to blast a little instead, or compare dick sizes by killing another mob than the tank to see who does his faster, or whatever, you must stick to the plan and do your role. And you'll get your reward at the end of that couple of hours. Or not at all, if there were too many screw ups and the team split up in frustration.
Heck, for some people even the whole weeks or months of the levels 1 to 69 (used to be more like months before patch 2.4 in WoW) is essentially one big exercise in working for a delayed reward. They don't play the game for the road, but for the destination. They don't stop to appreciate those small immediate rewards along the game, they want that big final achievement already. I can't say I understand them, but they probably don't understand me either, and probably neither is right or wrong. But it _is_ an example of an exercise in working for weeks or months for the delayed final reward. And it probably takes some discipline to keep going.
There are lots of kinds of games out there, and not all can be painted with the same brush. Not all are single player games, for example. Not all teach discipline, and not all foster or require confidence in your skills, that much is clear. But some do.
Re:You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
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How Do Games Grow Up?
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Would you argue that this could be done more cheaply and efficiently in a gym, or does this promote the backcountry hobbies beyond killing time?
I would argue merely that you probably do it mainly because you find it fun, rather than for a cold impartial calculation of the costs of hiking vs the costs of buying a stepper and a couple of weights and exercising at home. And if you find it fun, by all means, keep doing it.
As I was saying in another post, my problem is merely with the "your hobby is more stupid than mine" attitude some people have. So obviously I'm not going to pull the same stunt on _your_ hobby:P
Then there are the "craft" hobbies. For example, I make custom knives. I do it as a hobby, but I usually have enough commissions in my backlog to keep me busy for as long as I'd like. It's enough to pay for the hobby, if I want to do it that way. (I don't -- I try to avoid taking commissions because I want to make what I like, not what someone else wants.) At this point, the hobby is self-supporting, and maybe adds income on the side. Would you argue that it's more efficient to just get a part-time job? I'm not sure that I'd agree, since craft hobbies can be done on your own schedule, and can pay more than a part-time job. Mine would, if I wanted.
Crafts are a special case, in that they basically _are_ a part-time self-employed job. Well, if you sell that stuff, anyway.
But I'll say the same basic idea I did before: do you really do it for the income or possibility of an income (if you wanted to), or just because you find it fun? It sounds like the latter to me. Right? If someone offered you a part time job that pays slightly more than you could make even with taking orders, but is not fun at all, would you rather do that or your crafting?
If you can admit that the main point is to have fun, rather than some purely utilitarian excuse, well, then we already agreed to my main point right there. We all spend some time, where the whole point and goal is to kill some time in a fun way. The utility value is at best incidental. I mean, if someone actually had a time machine or could otherwise see the future, and told you that in your whole lifetime you'll never break even on that hobby, and even make a minuscule loss... you'd still do it, right? Not for some pretence of investing in the future, but because that's what you like to do.
That's all I'm really trying to say. There is no shame in having fun and killing time. And there is no such thing as "your hobby is more stupid than mine."
You also learn music theory and music appreciation. Your world grows a little.
I learned a bit of logic, a bit of teamwork, a bit of leadership, and a few other skills starting from games too. My world grew a little.
Piano lessons as a kid might translate into guitar playing as a teen or becoming a professional musician.
Well, Fatal1ty became a professional gamer, and so did a few others. I could also point out that some of us got interested in what made those games tick, and became professional programmers.
There's an argument that its worth educating people even if it doesnt translate into dollars.
Looking around, I'd say there's equally a point that more people should be exposed to formal logic. Not a jab at you, but rather at the world we live in. There are people who can't even follow an "A => B", nor understand why you can't follow it the other way around. There are people who think Newton's laws of mechanics would be different if a woman had written them, or who think that demanding evidence in science is some kind of fascist plan to oppress independent thinkers.
So while I'll agree with your general idea, I'd say there's an equal argument to be made for why more people should be encouraged to mod games, as for why more people should learn music.
Honestly, I hate the attitude of "if it isnt making money then its stupid to do."
Actually the point is that neither is more stupid than the other. I'm sick and tired of the "your hobby is more stupid than mine" willy waving around. They're all hobbies. They're all, in the end done because we find something fun or interesting.
And, see above, I can come up with just as good a reason for my hobby as you can find for music. I could do the same exercise for cars (e.g., I saved money by learning to tune my own system instead of taking it to the Geek Squad), but the post is already too long.
1. When I take my holy-spec raiding in WoW, I make 24 people very happy too. Used to be 39 >;)
2. Actually, the point was that we should stop measuring it all by utility, money, investment, etc. We do things because they're _fun_. And that goes for both my gaming and your playing an instrument.
You probably didn't put years into it, just so one day you can make those people happy at that wedding. You did it because you _liked_ doing it, right? The utility came incidentally, but what kept you doing it was that you _liked_ it. (If it was as a hobby, and not as a job, that is.) Let's not make further pretenses and accept it as just that.
3. What I'm trying to say is basically this: there was once a society and a culture, where once you've "grown up", you're supposed to no longer have any fun. You must think only of making/saving money for your family's survival, and spend every waking hour dedicating yourself to . Hence, that if you have any fun, and can't justify it as some kind of investment, you're irresponsible, immature, or a few other choice insults.
Some people IMHO seem still stuck in that mentality: that if they do anything, they must justify it as some kind of investment in the future. It must be "building character", or "learning RL skills" or whatever other excuse.
And I'd have nothing against it, if that was actually what they did. E.g., if they actually took a course or a certification or whatever actually qualifies as learning actual skills.
But most of the time it's flat out a lie. They just went and had fun, and any utility is at best incidental or non-existent. But they still have to pack it in that socially-acceptable lie. God forbid that they'd admit that they did something just because they liked doing it.
And I'm saying: let's stop that pretense already. We're already a few generations past the point where that bleak, no-fun-ever existence was necessary or even justified. We can afford to kill some time with the things we like. Be it a computer game, or playing an instrument, or tuning a car. Let's for once just admit, basically, "I did it because I liked it, and to kill some time."
Re:You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
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How Do Games Grow Up?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And I was introduced via gaming to:
- the wonderful world of logic
- the worderful world of algorithmic thinking, and splitting a problem into (semi-)self-contained, manageable parts
- the wonderful world of painting (a texture) or storytelling and creative writing (e.g., a new quest arc)
- the wonderful world of taking decisions in split seconds, and of accepting that you don't always have the data or time for the perfect choice
And a few others.
Games aren't just about playing and achieving a high score, but also about trying to make your own (back when you could realistically make a ZX-81 game in a day or two) or modding (the more sane alternative nowadays.) I was programming assembly within a year of being exposed to my parents' ZX-81, for example. It's skills I still apply at work every day.
Which is also why I'll call it "looking down upon it", if your best answer is along the lines "gaming is only for killing time, and you should do some RL stuff instead." You don't have to give up gaming to start using your head and getting RL skills. You might, however start taking them a part a bit too, not just playing them. And if you're going to say it's still something done instead of gaming, well, not quite, it's more like complimentary. Unless you know what the game does and/or don't like it enough in the first place, you won't start modding it.
But even that might not be truly needed. There are games where you apply logic within the game, and I even remember two where they had a programming language integrated right into the game. And I don't mean for modding, but you could actually program the character's cybernetic implant to do something else and help you in some way while you run and gun.
You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
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How Do Games Grow Up?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That's your problem right there. Games only kill time. The skills you acquire as you progress in a game, generally speaking, can only be used in progressing within the game's framework.
I hope you do realize that the same applies to most of the RL skills waved around as "yeah, but look what _my_ hobby teaches me" proof that someone's pet hobby is better than gaming.
E.g., yes, your daughter's piano skills. (God knows how many kids have been tortured with _that_.) Unless her goal in life is an underpaid job in an orchestra that skill is useful for exactly one thing: more playing the piano. Usefulness for any other RL activity: zero.
And yes, you could say that she's going to be a great pianist and earn teh big bucks by being some concert's super-star. Guess what? His chances are about as good to make money as a gaming superstar. Or rather, your daughter's chances are just as bad. Not everyone gets to be Fatal1ty and not everyone gets to be a superstar musician. There are 1000 times more people wanting such a job, than people who actually get one.
But at any rate, the same chances apply to making living out of gaming. He can theoretically end up making a living out of being a top gamer, same as your daughter can theoretically end up a legendary pianist. Your daughter can end up a composer instead, and he can end up a game programmer with that experience. Your daughter can end up scraping by on a minimum wage playing in some orchestra or some unknown band in a bar, he can end up a minimum-wage game tester.
More likely, for most children who went through that, the only result is, ta-da, that they killed some time with it.
So remind me, exactly what do you base that snottiness on, when you look down upon his hobby? No, seriously.
But let's move on, let's see more poster children for "look at what a cool RL hobby I have" idiocies that get waved around all the time:
- mountaineering, camping, and other excuses to go out in the wild. Exactly what skills do people learn there, and when will they apply them IRL? Because it seems to me that the only times when you'll apply any of them, is... next time you go do that hobby. That's it. E.g., exactly when will you have to find north by the moss on the trees... in a city? If you want the actual useful version of that, get a GPS navigation system. No, let's make no bullshit pretenses, it's just a way to kill time.
- fishing. The chances you'll ever feed and clothe your family with a fishing pole, are practically nil. You'll never catch enough fish to sell them and, say, pay for your kid's clothes and education with it, because fish are freaking cheap. You'll never get a job to sit near a lake with a fishing pole, either. The way it's done nowadays is with big boats and nets, not with a fishing rod. And even, let's say, in a post-apocalyptic Fallout-type scenario, where are you going to fish? There just aren't enough rivers around to support even the most minimum population that way. Most have been depleted already, and you may notice that the fishing hobbyists go to some fish farm actually, where fish are artifficially fed and raised for that. So again, chance to ever get any other use out of that skill: zero. It's just a way to kill some time, and any skill you get there will only ever be used when you next go fishing.
- messing with one's car. I hate to break it to some people, but _very_ few even save any money there. Yes, everyone has some anecdote of that time they fixed the car themselves and saved a fortune. But almost everyone forgets those other times when they just made it worse and had to pay more to get it fixed, or the money spent on all those extra bits and pieces and tools that never actually got used enough to pay for themselves. And usually what they save is not worth the time spent there. There are people who practically live in the garage. Even if you saved $100 once (and you won't save more, unless you also smelt and forge your components too), if you spent 20 hours in
1. Well, you have to also realize that different environments might favour different configurations. For example an octopus doesn't use its noodly appendages in the same way as you use your legs, and not even like a fish uses its fins.
Each is optimized for its particular use. It's safe to assume that for a fish that particular tail and fin configuration is good, because it evolved several times from something different to that exact configuration. E.g., dolphins evolved to the same scheme, but so did Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs and Mosasaurs, plus a few of their relatives and ancestors. There are two different configurations of four legs which evolved into such a fish-like configuration that Ichthyosaur skeletons were first believed to be fish. So it's safe to assume that for that style of swimming, a fish-like configuration is optimal, and indeed better than four legs or even than two legs.
Two legs vs four legs also seems to be not that clear cut. The two-legged configuration evolved independently more than once, so it must have _some_ advantages. E.g., all dinosaurs are descendants of a two-legged ancestor. Some, however, returned to four-legged afterwards. Some evolved into birds instead. So again it's probably safe to say that each is good... for a given environment.
Insects are a funny case, because again they're used differently than you use your legs. Insect legs are autonomous. Each leg has its own autonomous "controller", or rather its own mini-brain. The insect's head just gives an order like "forward" and all legs independently start doing the movements for moving forward. That kind of a wiring would be totally unfit for bipedal use. Heck, even four would be more miss than hit. So an insect must necessarily have a larger number of legs. For the way an insect is built, really, six legs are good, two legs are bad.
2. But even that is over-thinking it, because the little guys in TFA didn't actually have arms or legs like you. They were really jellyfish with 8 long tubular appendages. There are no muscles there or bones or exoskeleton or anything usable for locomotion at all. The whole thing was really two thin layers of cells, little more than a microbial film, with an amorphous jelly in between. The "arms" were probably more to give it more surface and reach from which it can absorb nutrients, than for anything else.
We're talking _very_ primitive multi-cellular life forms.
I dunno, do you need to define virtual currencies at all? The way I see it, you can ignore it until you try to sell that virtual gold for RL money. (Or virtual items, same idea.) How's it different from any other RL sale for RL money? The guys selling any other stuff already paid VAT and income tax, so I fail to see why gold farmers wouldn't.
And to get even farther away from the "but it's virtual" aspect, think of it as a service. You pay me X dollars, I do service Y for you. In this case the service is helping you get a better equipped character. After all, when you take a taxi or book a flight, you don't get a tangible good either. You just got the convenience of getting from place A to place B faster than walking. I think the same can be used to describe power levelling, gold farming, item farming, etc: someone provided a service that saves you some time. RL time too. There's nothing virtual about X hours saved in WoW, because it means the same X RL hours.
We tax taxi companies, we tax airlines, we tax plumbers and mechanics, and we tax pizzerias. Probably the Chinese do too. Why wouldn't the same apply to someone whose service is related to a video game?
And yes, I'm pretty sure that income from stock trading is taxed already.
We still have the government largely under control, and the parties have to work for their votes. The very system is so geared that no party has an absolute majority, and the best they can manage is to form a fragile coalition that has the majority. But even then the coalition can form the other way around over night, moving a party from head of the majority coalition to head of the opposition. It doesn't happen often, but the threat is there. Politicians know better than to even hint at serving any other interests than their voters', and at the mere hint of something like that, if the guy doesn't resign by himself, the party will drop him like a hot potato.
It does have its own shortcomings -- nothing ever is perfect -- but by and large it still works for the people.
At any rate, the government is still under control, and it is a _tool_ we use. It's how a big community (say, country sized) organizes and governs itself.
It's a bit like, dunno, having a big dog. You could go, "OMG, I must keep it away from me and my family, it could go rabid when you least expect it!" That seems the American view, based on the limited sample I have. The European view is more that since it _is_ your dog, it's your job to make sure it doesn't.
There are clear laws about what the government can do with that stuff, and under what circumstances can most of that data even be accessed at all. E.g., while you can moan about "online surveillance", in practice even a law enforcement officer needs a warrant from a judge to acess those logs at all.
In practice it seems to me like actually that's more privacy than you'd expect in the unregulated USA, where companies routinely sell customer data to the highest bidder, and the government has already worked out backroom dels with telcos and ISPs to spy on its citizens. So, how's that better than in Germany? Do you really think your data is more private if you don't have some clear laws about what the government and everyone else can do with it?
As for the last jab at the German government, let's just say that it's record has actually been pretty damn good since 1945. Yes, the Weimar republic had some weaker safeguards and it did fail once. We learned from that mistake and fixed the system.
Actually, according to NASA, the Sun's total output has been increasing by about 0.05% per decade.
Quote from that link: "If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years."
Now again, I'm not saying that it covers the _whole_ global warming effect, but about 0.5 of that 1.2 increase is covered right there. It's almost half.
The moral of the story: yes, the Sun has been there for billions of years, but that doesn't mean it's been unchanged and perfectly constant output.
The whole global warming is about 1K or 1 degree Celsius in a century. Taking the average Earth temperature as about 300K (no need to go into more than 1 figure accuracy for a back-of-the-envelope calculation), the whole increase is about 0.3% of the absolute temperature.
Now I know that it means more than 0.3% for us, since we have a skewed scale in which we survive, so hold yer horses. I'm not trying to make it sound small, I'm just working in SI units, to try to figure out what could influence it and by how much.
Let's assume it was all due to external radiation. Not postulating that that _is_ the case, just doing a "what if" scenario. You can plug in your own factor afterwards.
Steffan Boltzmann says that radiated energy is proportional with absolute temperature to the 4th power. Equilibrium is reached when radiated energy equals incoming energy. So basically we'll stabilize at a higher temperature if the incoming energy increased, so we radiate as much right back. An increase of 0.3% in temperature, all else being equal, means an increase of about 1.2% in radiated energy. An increase in incoming energy by about 1.2% would completely offset it and explain it.
The sun however obeys the same law, and we get the same percentage of its radiated energy. You know, since the Earth's size and orbit didn't change. So even that converting to energy back and forth wasn't really needed, we just need (Tsun_now/Tsun_0)^4=(Tearth_now/Tearth_0)^4. Long story short, it only would have needed to increase its temperature by 0.3% too in the last century.
Now I don't think that the Sun is actually the cause of all that. NASA did measure a steady increase in Sun's temperature, but it's a bit slower than we'd need to give it the full blame. But just trying to make a different point there:
Yes, any changes in sun temperature are reflected in changes of Earth's temperatures. And, yes, very small influences on the Sun (0.3% isn't all that huge, after all) can affect Earth very significantly.
2. Also, we're not necessarily talking about energy it receives as such, but if some particles affect how fast it fuses hydrogen, the effects on the sun would be much larger than the effects on Earth. Since we don't fuse hydrogen down here.
1. I'll somewhat disaggree about RTS. Sure, in theory it sounds good, but I've yet to see a strategy game where the AI doesn't plain old cheat to stay alive.
Yes, it can "micromanage" better, in the sense of cycling through all units every frame or couple of frames. Sure, it can do a "for" loop better than a human. But actually allocate resources intelligently, apply smart tactics against a human who built in the unexpected place, etc, is where computers are still as stupid as it gets.
Again, we could argue about theoretically being easier to make them smarter, but way I see it, that's the basic rule of thumb: does it need to cheat? Does advancing in the storyline to face a new enemy, described as more cunning and ruthless, actually just mean the same retarded AI with a bigger pre-built base and more silos full of spice/tiberium/whatever and more reinforcements out of nowhere? Does it just mean that the new "cunning and ruthless" enemy just gets better units from the start? Does upping the difficulty actually just means that the AI gets even more money and a damage bonus, as opposed to just un-hobbling that supposedly super-AI a little?
If any of those are true, no, you have _not_ coded teh uber-AI and then dumbed it down for the player. You can claim to have a too smart AI when it can start just with a town centre and 2 peons, just like the player, and put up a better fight. And, oh, make it run just as long a way to the mines/geisers/spice-fields as the players, at that. Starting with 3 resource nodes in an already built base doesn't quite qualify as equal difficulty.
2. Yes, chess makes a good poster child, but that has had decades of real AI research into just that speciffic game, and at that by real AI researchers. A brand new game, with brand new rules, within 3 years, and with the cheapest team possible... heh... sorry. I can't take that seriously.
Most of the games so far have even trouble pathfinding, or keeping their flamethrower guys from frying their own team mates in front of them, etc. Or look at bigger scale strategy games, like Paradox's, where it takes several years of patching just to get the AI to no longer waste its whole army attacking Switzerland. And even then often the "fix" isn't as much AI, as just making fortifications randomly disappear in combat, so eventually the mountains around Switzerland just stop giving a defense bonus. You know, 'cause apparently 100,000 soldiers with rifles and grenades can demolish a mountain. And then invariably it becomes vulnerable in some other way, to some new exploit created by the previous fix.
3. Ditto for FPS. What the computer has as an advantage isn't really better AI, it's unerring accuracy. It's trivial to make a bot that never misses, and has faster reactions than any human, because it simply needs to calculate the angle and pretend it aimed accurately that way. It simply doesn't have the whole issue of moving the whole arm with the mouse, or the finite resolution of the mouse, or the whole lag of the pipeline from mouse to seeing the cursor move (the TFT alone introduces another 1-2 frames lag) which is already known to ruin one's accuracy because it lets you overshoot before seeing any results, etc.
Some cheat even further, by basically having eyes in the back of their head, or being able to see through walls, or just not having the issue of "does that 3 pixel tall figure over there look like one of our guys or one of theirs? Is it even a human?" It just doesn't have to parse an array of pixels, it already knows where everyone is. Even when you say "if you hear the player at position X", you're already cheating. A player can at most judge "I hear some footsteps in that general direction" (and even that at best in 30 degree increments), but not an exact position, nor know if it's a friend or foe or neutral there.
Give the computer a spread comparable to a human for the selected difficulty level, give it a similar lag in reacting and turning, and limit it to the exact same field of view, and that suppos
Depends on the change, I suppose. I can see your point if we're only talking about a temperature change of half a degree. Probably there are enough alleles for that.
In other cases, though, the changes are more dramatic. A lake can become outright anoxic within a record time, for example. I don't think it's even possible for fish to evolve to be anaerobic, and it'll take a lot more than 38 years.
Or as another example, let's put it like this, humans have used lead pipes, utensils, paints, cosmetics, etc, for millenia, and we haven't evolved immunity to lead yet. We've drunk alcohol for 5000 years or so (the Egyptians drank 4 litres of beer per day, including the women), but the liver didn't evolve to be immune to it. Duly noted, the frogs do reproduce a lot faster, but I still think that it's not that easy to just evolve immunity to a toxin.
Ah, more bullshit emotionally-charged rhetoric. "Free car"? No, really? Exactly which party proposed a law to give free cars? Oh, wait, it's just a bullshit strawman.
Or perhaps, the problem is that what is regularly proposed is stuff like "free medical care", or "adequate education" or such. And of course if you picked on _those_, you'd come out clearer as a greedy prick.
But ok, you really want to play emotionally charged fallacies? Ok. I see your "theft", and raise you, oh, "murder."
See that gal over there? She's got an early case of multiple-sclerosis. Go kick her out of the hospital yourself, don't try to pervert healt-care into doing that murder for you. Of course, she'll probably die on her own, but, hey, that saved you some money on the health insurance. Less people trying to "steal" your money to pay for those.
See that old guy with Alzheimer's and kidney problems in his own age? Same deal. It's guys like him who didn't smoke, didn't drink and stayed fit, that now suck a lot of money out of healthcare for a decade or two. The fat smokers died earlier and largely didn't get their insurance money out of that system. But that guy didn't. Go kick him off medical care yourself, don't try to pack it in fancy words about why it's stealing your money if we keep him alive.
That other guy over there? Genetic deffects. Dumbly enough, nobody found out until he was older, now he's on life support.
That other gal? Cancer. Lots and lots of fancy patented medicines, and if she's (un)lucky the chemotherapy will make it last for years, while it degrades the rest of her body more and more. You'd be surprised how many people get a cancer nowadays, that the other causes of death have been reduced. Go kick them out of the hospitals yourself.
In fact, be a sport and at least don't let them suffer. Go just put a bullet or two through their brains right now. It achieves the same result, with less suffering. And I'm _sure_ they'll understand that that's for such a worthy cause as you keeping a few more of your precious dollars.
Had enough of that? Good. Well, then tell you what: you drop that over-the-top bullshit about "theft" and I'll drop mine. Wake me up when we ca have a talk like civilized adults.
And just to clarify, I do have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to "OMG I found something stupid and it's not worth reading any further!" kinds of messages. Among many other ways to add noise to the signal. And I find that Slasdot already has too many of that already. If it's not that, it's the local grammar nazis, and if it's not those, it's the "OMG, you're not worthy to question the scientists" gang, and if anyone managed to avoid even those, there's seven more layers of silliness to be had before running into any usable content.
Ah well... I guess some things just can't be helped.
I thought that since the whole topic is about amphibians, I don't have to remind at every paragraph that I'm talking about organisms of comparable complexity. Even then, the paragraph before the one you quoted, made it IMHO quite clear that I'm talking about multi-cellular organisms, not bacteria.
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1. Actually, and speaking as an atheist myself, it seems to me that you'd still be off the mark if you do a blanket extrapolation that even all 2 billion christians fit your
If you look over the pond to most of continental Europe, that's flat out false. In Germany I've had someone knock on my door to give me pamphlets exactly _once_ in my entire life so far. Ok, a couple more tried to give them to me on the street, but we're still talking once-in-a-couple-of-years events. There are like 3 churches within walking distance of my house, at least one built entirely with donations from the local community of that particular christian sect, so there must be _some_ religious people around. But I haven't had them come over to tell me what to believe in. Much less "with great force and repetition." Heck, it now occurs to me that I don't even know who those religious people are at all, because they just don't start talks about it.
Or in France, as far as I know, you can actually go to a catholic school and not once see a crucifix or even hear about Jesus. ('Cause if they even mention Jesus, they lose the government subsidy for schools.)
The predominant culture at the moment is, basically, secular: your religion is your own private matter. Or how George Carlin put it: thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself. If you're religious, good for you, but keep it to yourself.
2. Extrapolate it about _all_ religions? Heh. There are plenty of religions which don't even have a problem with your believing in other gods.
E.g., Buddhism is largely an atheistic religion, as paradoxical as that sounds. It doesn't actually have a god of its own, and it has no fundamental problem with you throwing your lot in with other religions' gods. Your place in the great cycle of reincarnation are determined by what you _do_ and how you live your life, not by who you believe in. You're saved or damned (so to speak, and even then not in the abrahamic religion sense) by yourself, not by whether you brown-nose the right deity. Buddhism is more of a "manual", so to speak. And if you think you can find your way without their teachings, well, suit yourself. It certainly is possible, at least theoretically.
So it would make no sense for a Buddhist to try to save you from worshipping the wrong guy.
That's just one example of a religion which doesn't fit your stereotype at all. I could give more, but it's a too long message already.
I don't know, mate, it seems to me like again you try to paint all christianity through the prism of the USA bible(-thumping) belt. Try being openly gay in almost any community this side of the ocean, and the vast majority of people will just leave you alone. And if anyone gave you a bible-thumping lecture about it, most people would look funny at _him_.
I'll point you again at the alternative being starving to death. That's how the Neanderthals went extinct. A long painful starvation into extinction. And even for Homo Sapiens, there are plenty of severely malnourished skeletons around. The world used to constantly over-populate, and shed its excess population through starvation and warfare.
Basically methinks that you think it through modern day perspective, where there are better ways to earn your bread anyway. Nowadays, even if all else fails, what's the worst that can happen? Welfare? Losing a bit of face in the community for that?
Back then the alternative was literally that you and your children will starve to death. Ok, or you could also go kill the buggers from the next tribe for their food. And risk death or severe injury yourself. So basically imagine that you have the following choices, pretty literally. And yes they are the only choices:
A) well, get to doing that hard work in agriculture
B) you and your family starve to death,
C) you go raid the next tribe for their food, and you'll probably get killed sooner or later. The violent death rate in some tribes was as high as 80% at the extreme end, and still higher than the siege of Leningrad at the _lower_ end.
If you tell me that even then you couldn't be arsed to start agriculture because it's too hard, just how freaking lazy _are_ you? :P
It seems to me like it's a much more motivational thing than religion. Do you genuinely think that they just sat around and went "naah, it's too much work" after discovering agriculture, until they had to build a temple? :P
Actually, no. Not even close.
1. Pascal's wager, the way Pascal used it, is basically this:
- if you believe and you're right, there's an infinite reward
- if you don't believe and are right, well, whatever rewards you can possibly get are finite.
Ditto for penalties when you're wrong, could be added.
So basically it says _nothing_ about which is more probable to be right, and it has _nothing_ to do with . It just says that infinite is bigger than anything else. Even if the probability for christianity to be right were 0.00001% and the probability to be wrong were 99.99999%, infinite*0.00001% > anything_finite*99.99999%. So rewards times probabilities says that for an infinite jackpot, the best course of action is to bet on the jackpot.
2. Yes, the GP did claim that science supports faith. Re-read the message. It's right in there.
3. Even Pascal's use is, essentially, still a formalized way to use another classic fallacy: appeal to consequences.
4. The same infinite rewards and infinite penalties spiel can be used against it, because there is more than one religion, and virtually all promise that you only get the reward if you believe that one religion and nothing else.
E.g., what if judaism is right and christianity wrong? They do have several commandments against stuff ranging from worshipping other gods (prayed to Jesus lately?), to worshipping icons, to eating pork. On the other hand, most Christian denominations say (or used to, before we chose not to believe that any more) that you can _only_ be saved through Jesus. You have an incompatibility right there. So which of them do you choose? Both options A and B promise infinite rewards if you're right, and infinite penalties if you're wrong. Pascal's fancy maths stops working right there and then.
E.g., Norse religion promised you a place in Valhalla if you die attacking someone, or in Freya's halls if you die defending against an attack. Note that it doesn't say you have to be a good person. Pirates and mercenaries dead while assaulting some city to plunder it, would go to Valhalla just as well. Gangsters dead while having a shootout with the cops, would go to one of the two places too, just like the cops who died in the same shootout. The only criterion and goal there was proving to Odin that you're worthy of being a soldier in his Einherjar army, by having already fought to death once and not surrendering to save your life. On the other hand being a nice person and a peaceful death in your own bed, earns you a trip to the domain Loki's daughter. (Yep, you go to Hel;)
They had stuff like the Battle Of Bravalla, a monumental waste of human life, just so a king could go to Valhalla by getting an honourable death in battle... against his loyal vassal.
How do you reconcile that with Christianity? If the Norse were right, you should go die in a firefight, guns blazing, to get your reward. Go try to rob a police station if you're out of other ideas. If Christianity is right, you should be peaceful and love thy neighbour. Which do you choose? Again, Pascal's maths doesn't help you much there, because the consequences for choosing right or wrong are disproportionate for both choices.
Actually, sad to say, what you do there isn't "science in support of faith", it's "bullshit fallacies in support of faith."
E.g.,
E.g., at some point the majority believed that the Earth is flat. It didn't make it so. It didn't even make it a safer bet. That belief is completely orthogonal to how reality actually is.
Plus, "the majority of humans alive today are religious" is mis-leading right there. Those people believe wildly different and mutually-incompatible religions. Which of those religions do you believe? Hinduism can't be true at the same time as Christianity, for example. So painting it all with a "they're religious" brush creates a false majority there.
Taking Christianity for example, it claims some 2 billion adherents worldwide, though that's got more to do with what you've been baptized to, than whether you're actually a devout christian. Well, that's less than a third of the world's population. A majority of the world isn't christian, so by your reasoning, it stands to reason that it's more likely that Christianity is false.
Well, it actually gets me thinking. If all civilization started in that strip starting from Turkey to the southern tip of Messopotamia, and it was all because of religion, man, they must have had some good religion. Why are we worshipping this wus who got nailed by a couple of Romans, then? Let's go back to a religion so strong that it singlehandedly created agriculture and started humanity on the road to civilization.
E.g., Innana, daughter of Sin. Has a nice ring to it, and her cult was in the general area where it all started.
Goddess of war, wanton sex, and ritual prostitution. At least you got more than a receipt for your tithe, ya know what I mean?
Plus a bit into genocide and the like, if you read Enheduanna's (best known high priestess of Innana) writings. I guess a girl can have her hobbies, even if they involve turning major rivers red with the blood of the innocents ;)
1. Well, if you aim that low with "city" and "temple", then it really doesn't say much.
There are hunter-gatherer tribes with more members than that, and they do have some huts/tents/etc somewhere. It doesn't really make it a city, but ok. They all have some totem pole, or sacred heap o' rocks, or some sacred tree or grove somewhere. You can probably find such tribal villages all the way to the first homo sapiens, 200,000 years ago, and the Neanderthals before built them too.
Humans were _never_ lone individuals, like, say, tigers are. There'd always be groups of 10-15 (or for that matter 100-200) clustered together for mutual protection.
If those are the "cities" we're talking about, you simply can't draw a line and say "they appeared 11,000 years ago." Humans always lived in groups like that.
The cities we're usually talking about are larger things.
2. Can you correlate those groups of 10-15 humans with starting agriculture? I don't see how, beyond basically "well, they needed food." But humans and such groups of humans already needed food anyway. The need for a larger and more stable food source was there for 200,000 years, and in fact for the Neanderthals before them too. There is evidence that there were episodes of chronic stavation all along the way, so the drive would be there already.
So basically if you found a sorce of food, you'd _use_ it, with or without a temple and city. If you're a 15 people tribe and you find some plentiful berries, you settle there and start eating them. And if you find some nice grass which produces lots of edible seeds, you start using it one way or another. Just because you need food.
The growth of the city or tribe then comes from having that source of food, not the other way around. You can't make the right type of grass or berries or whatever appear just because you placed a city there. It's not Civilization.
Actually, if you think about it, it doesn't even f-ing make any sense:
1. You can't have a city _before_ you have a stable source of food that doesn't move around.
2. Agriculture depended on a mutation in a species of grass, that made it have bigger grains. It first started with wild Rye, actually, but the mutation of emmer wheat was what really kicked things into gear. It's a tetraploid plant, meaning that at some point it acquired _two_ sets of chromosomes, and that mutation survived.
You can't cause a mutation by simply building a city or a temple.
3. The only major invention that happened in that time for agriculture was irrigation. At some point some guys in Egypt for example discovered that if you plant your seeds in the wet earth after the Nile's flood is over, you get a lot of grain to eat. I don't know how it happened in Messopotamia, and it could have been independent, but that's literally what they did: imitate a flood. They'd literally flood their fields with water from a river, later from a canal bringing water farther from a river, then close the gates and let the water dry, then plant grain.
That's it. That's the only change that happened to agriculture in thousands of years.
So how did cities and monuments drive it? It's not like any change happened to agriculture because of those cities. People still sowed and reaped in the exact same way as their ancestors did, and the only change was needing more and more land to feed more and more people. That's it.
4. By contrast it's easier to see the effects of agriculture on the cities. E.g., the rise to power and importance of priesthood in Egypt because they could tell you when the next flood starts, or of those who controlled the canals in Messopotamia, is a direct effect of agriculture. Or on religion? Well, Egypt had some half a dozen deities connected in some way with agriculture, and that's just off the top of my head.
Heck, even the fact that those cities grew walls and codes of laws and standing armies, is an effect of not being able to move freely in response to threats and invasions. You _had_ to stay there near the river you irrigated your crops with, no matter what, and you had to live with each other because there was nowhere else to go if half the tribe doesn't like the other half.
If you look at the tribes which didn't practice agriculture (e.g., northern Europe until very late), they were a lot more inclined to just pack their shit and move when they overpopulated. While we tend to draw an age of migrations around the age when the Roman Empire started getting shafted by them, they moved around a lot before that too. E.g., Caesar's eventual conquest of Gaul started when the Helvetii just packed their shit and wanted to pass through and plunder the territory of the Allobroges which were clients of Rome. E.g., the Teutons and Cimbri migrated through the whole f-ing Europe, before being stopped by the Romans in 101 BC and 102 BC. E.g., while everyone remembers the spanking that the Goths gave to the Byzantines, how do you think the Goths ended up in Dacia when starting from Scandinavia in the first place?
It's only when they got into agriculture that they started trying to build stone forts and defend their plots of land. Sure, some had to migrate later anyway, when someone else displaced them, but you can see the abrupt change in attitude before and after agriculture anyway. After agriculture it's no longer about some space to live in, but about the land itself. The very place you're in becomes worth defending.
Again, it's damn impossible to see an effect the other way around. Building a stone fort or a temple doesn't make your fields suddenly grow grain, or anything. Discovering a plant you can grow, or a plough that can work on your type of soil does. (The latter was what changed the situation in Europe, btw.)
Reminds me of the "test" if you need the Guardian's religion in Ultima 7. No matter how you answered the questions, there would be something wrong with you. E.g., if your mother and a small child are drowning, and you can save only one, who do you save? If you chose the child, you obviously are nuts, if you didn't choose the child you obviously are nuts.
Well, ok, maybe this one isn't in the same way, but it's broad enough to make a large chunk of the population "sick" even if they don't have a computer at all.
E.g., difficulty concentrating? Well, after working some 12 hours a day in a sweatshop, I would imagine that a lot of Chinese are rather too tired to really concentrate on much. Trouble sleeping? Well, too many worries will do the same to you. Etc.
I see your point, but
1. I was talking about MMOs, not about Final Fantasy 1 to 10.
2. I wasn't talking about the skill of grinding an RPG, per se, but about the skill and discipline of applying yourself to one task for several days or weeks, even if today you don't get a cookie at all. I.e., of working on something without those immediate rewards.
In the bad old pre-BC days of raiding MC on WoW, there were days where nobody in that 40-man team got anything they needed. There were days where you'd be there fully knowing that today you won't get any bloody thing because there are people ahead of you in the line for those items, the way most raiding guilds were organized. Today you'd help someone else get their reward, so maybe next time they help you get yours. You had to show up on time for their big day, so they show up on time for yours.
It has been said many times that at that point it stopped even being as much a "game" and became "work". And far from me to defend that kind of a game design, from a fun factor point of view. But in this case it is a prime example of something which is exactly the other way around than what you (correctly) describe for single-player RPG. It had all the aspects that you claim that games don't have (and, again, you're even correct about SP RPGs), and missed all the aspects that you learned that games have.
It seems to me that keeping trying even if you fail, is a valuable RL lesson. Most cultures have some saying along the lines of "if at first you don't succeed, try and try again," so it must have been useful before computer games too.
Also, there is some discipline to be learned from games too, especially in multiplayer ones. Whether it's a WoW raid in the endgame grind, or just playing Counter-Strike with your "clan" mates, there is a lot of point in acting disciplined, as team. And it can mean utter defeat if you act like an anarchistic yahoo.
Delayed rewards? Well, those two words would describe a MMO's endgame grind the best.
But even at lower levels, if you're say, the healer (but the same applies to any other role), for the next couple of hours you must do your role to the letter or the team will wipe out. No matter how much you'd like to blast a little instead, or compare dick sizes by killing another mob than the tank to see who does his faster, or whatever, you must stick to the plan and do your role. And you'll get your reward at the end of that couple of hours. Or not at all, if there were too many screw ups and the team split up in frustration.
Heck, for some people even the whole weeks or months of the levels 1 to 69 (used to be more like months before patch 2.4 in WoW) is essentially one big exercise in working for a delayed reward. They don't play the game for the road, but for the destination. They don't stop to appreciate those small immediate rewards along the game, they want that big final achievement already. I can't say I understand them, but they probably don't understand me either, and probably neither is right or wrong. But it _is_ an example of an exercise in working for weeks or months for the delayed final reward. And it probably takes some discipline to keep going.
There are lots of kinds of games out there, and not all can be painted with the same brush. Not all are single player games, for example. Not all teach discipline, and not all foster or require confidence in your skills, that much is clear. But some do.
I would argue merely that you probably do it mainly because you find it fun, rather than for a cold impartial calculation of the costs of hiking vs the costs of buying a stepper and a couple of weights and exercising at home. And if you find it fun, by all means, keep doing it.
As I was saying in another post, my problem is merely with the "your hobby is more stupid than mine" attitude some people have. So obviously I'm not going to pull the same stunt on _your_ hobby :P
Crafts are a special case, in that they basically _are_ a part-time self-employed job. Well, if you sell that stuff, anyway.
But I'll say the same basic idea I did before: do you really do it for the income or possibility of an income (if you wanted to), or just because you find it fun? It sounds like the latter to me. Right? If someone offered you a part time job that pays slightly more than you could make even with taking orders, but is not fun at all, would you rather do that or your crafting?
If you can admit that the main point is to have fun, rather than some purely utilitarian excuse, well, then we already agreed to my main point right there. We all spend some time, where the whole point and goal is to kill some time in a fun way. The utility value is at best incidental. I mean, if someone actually had a time machine or could otherwise see the future, and told you that in your whole lifetime you'll never break even on that hobby, and even make a minuscule loss... you'd still do it, right? Not for some pretence of investing in the future, but because that's what you like to do.
That's all I'm really trying to say. There is no shame in having fun and killing time. And there is no such thing as "your hobby is more stupid than mine."
I learned a bit of logic, a bit of teamwork, a bit of leadership, and a few other skills starting from games too. My world grew a little.
Well, Fatal1ty became a professional gamer, and so did a few others. I could also point out that some of us got interested in what made those games tick, and became professional programmers.
Looking around, I'd say there's equally a point that more people should be exposed to formal logic. Not a jab at you, but rather at the world we live in. There are people who can't even follow an "A => B", nor understand why you can't follow it the other way around. There are people who think Newton's laws of mechanics would be different if a woman had written them, or who think that demanding evidence in science is some kind of fascist plan to oppress independent thinkers.
So while I'll agree with your general idea, I'd say there's an equal argument to be made for why more people should be encouraged to mod games, as for why more people should learn music.
Actually the point is that neither is more stupid than the other. I'm sick and tired of the "your hobby is more stupid than mine" willy waving around. They're all hobbies. They're all, in the end done because we find something fun or interesting.
And, see above, I can come up with just as good a reason for my hobby as you can find for music. I could do the same exercise for cars (e.g., I saved money by learning to tune my own system instead of taking it to the Geek Squad), but the post is already too long.
1. When I take my holy-spec raiding in WoW, I make 24 people very happy too. Used to be 39 >;)
2. Actually, the point was that we should stop measuring it all by utility, money, investment, etc. We do things because they're _fun_. And that goes for both my gaming and your playing an instrument.
You probably didn't put years into it, just so one day you can make those people happy at that wedding. You did it because you _liked_ doing it, right? The utility came incidentally, but what kept you doing it was that you _liked_ it. (If it was as a hobby, and not as a job, that is.) Let's not make further pretenses and accept it as just that.
3. What I'm trying to say is basically this: there was once a society and a culture, where once you've "grown up", you're supposed to no longer have any fun. You must think only of making/saving money for your family's survival, and spend every waking hour dedicating yourself to . Hence, that if you have any fun, and can't justify it as some kind of investment, you're irresponsible, immature, or a few other choice insults.
Some people IMHO seem still stuck in that mentality: that if they do anything, they must justify it as some kind of investment in the future. It must be "building character", or "learning RL skills" or whatever other excuse.
And I'd have nothing against it, if that was actually what they did. E.g., if they actually took a course or a certification or whatever actually qualifies as learning actual skills.
But most of the time it's flat out a lie. They just went and had fun, and any utility is at best incidental or non-existent. But they still have to pack it in that socially-acceptable lie. God forbid that they'd admit that they did something just because they liked doing it.
And I'm saying: let's stop that pretense already. We're already a few generations past the point where that bleak, no-fun-ever existence was necessary or even justified. We can afford to kill some time with the things we like. Be it a computer game, or playing an instrument, or tuning a car. Let's for once just admit, basically, "I did it because I liked it, and to kill some time."
And I was introduced via gaming to:
- the wonderful world of logic
- the worderful world of algorithmic thinking, and splitting a problem into (semi-)self-contained, manageable parts
- the wonderful world of painting (a texture) or storytelling and creative writing (e.g., a new quest arc)
- the wonderful world of taking decisions in split seconds, and of accepting that you don't always have the data or time for the perfect choice
And a few others.
Games aren't just about playing and achieving a high score, but also about trying to make your own (back when you could realistically make a ZX-81 game in a day or two) or modding (the more sane alternative nowadays.) I was programming assembly within a year of being exposed to my parents' ZX-81, for example. It's skills I still apply at work every day.
Which is also why I'll call it "looking down upon it", if your best answer is along the lines "gaming is only for killing time, and you should do some RL stuff instead." You don't have to give up gaming to start using your head and getting RL skills. You might, however start taking them a part a bit too, not just playing them. And if you're going to say it's still something done instead of gaming, well, not quite, it's more like complimentary. Unless you know what the game does and/or don't like it enough in the first place, you won't start modding it.
But even that might not be truly needed. There are games where you apply logic within the game, and I even remember two where they had a programming language integrated right into the game. And I don't mean for modding, but you could actually program the character's cybernetic implant to do something else and help you in some way while you run and gun.
I hope you do realize that the same applies to most of the RL skills waved around as "yeah, but look what _my_ hobby teaches me" proof that someone's pet hobby is better than gaming.
E.g., yes, your daughter's piano skills. (God knows how many kids have been tortured with _that_.) Unless her goal in life is an underpaid job in an orchestra that skill is useful for exactly one thing: more playing the piano. Usefulness for any other RL activity: zero.
And yes, you could say that she's going to be a great pianist and earn teh big bucks by being some concert's super-star. Guess what? His chances are about as good to make money as a gaming superstar. Or rather, your daughter's chances are just as bad. Not everyone gets to be Fatal1ty and not everyone gets to be a superstar musician. There are 1000 times more people wanting such a job, than people who actually get one.
But at any rate, the same chances apply to making living out of gaming. He can theoretically end up making a living out of being a top gamer, same as your daughter can theoretically end up a legendary pianist. Your daughter can end up a composer instead, and he can end up a game programmer with that experience. Your daughter can end up scraping by on a minimum wage playing in some orchestra or some unknown band in a bar, he can end up a minimum-wage game tester.
More likely, for most children who went through that, the only result is, ta-da, that they killed some time with it.
So remind me, exactly what do you base that snottiness on, when you look down upon his hobby? No, seriously.
But let's move on, let's see more poster children for "look at what a cool RL hobby I have" idiocies that get waved around all the time:
- mountaineering, camping, and other excuses to go out in the wild. Exactly what skills do people learn there, and when will they apply them IRL? Because it seems to me that the only times when you'll apply any of them, is... next time you go do that hobby. That's it. E.g., exactly when will you have to find north by the moss on the trees... in a city? If you want the actual useful version of that, get a GPS navigation system. No, let's make no bullshit pretenses, it's just a way to kill time.
- fishing. The chances you'll ever feed and clothe your family with a fishing pole, are practically nil. You'll never catch enough fish to sell them and, say, pay for your kid's clothes and education with it, because fish are freaking cheap. You'll never get a job to sit near a lake with a fishing pole, either. The way it's done nowadays is with big boats and nets, not with a fishing rod. And even, let's say, in a post-apocalyptic Fallout-type scenario, where are you going to fish? There just aren't enough rivers around to support even the most minimum population that way. Most have been depleted already, and you may notice that the fishing hobbyists go to some fish farm actually, where fish are artifficially fed and raised for that. So again, chance to ever get any other use out of that skill: zero. It's just a way to kill some time, and any skill you get there will only ever be used when you next go fishing.
- messing with one's car. I hate to break it to some people, but _very_ few even save any money there. Yes, everyone has some anecdote of that time they fixed the car themselves and saved a fortune. But almost everyone forgets those other times when they just made it worse and had to pay more to get it fixed, or the money spent on all those extra bits and pieces and tools that never actually got used enough to pay for themselves. And usually what they save is not worth the time spent there. There are people who practically live in the garage. Even if you saved $100 once (and you won't save more, unless you also smelt and forge your components too), if you spent 20 hours in
1. Well, you have to also realize that different environments might favour different configurations. For example an octopus doesn't use its noodly appendages in the same way as you use your legs, and not even like a fish uses its fins.
Each is optimized for its particular use. It's safe to assume that for a fish that particular tail and fin configuration is good, because it evolved several times from something different to that exact configuration. E.g., dolphins evolved to the same scheme, but so did Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs and Mosasaurs, plus a few of their relatives and ancestors. There are two different configurations of four legs which evolved into such a fish-like configuration that Ichthyosaur skeletons were first believed to be fish. So it's safe to assume that for that style of swimming, a fish-like configuration is optimal, and indeed better than four legs or even than two legs.
Two legs vs four legs also seems to be not that clear cut. The two-legged configuration evolved independently more than once, so it must have _some_ advantages. E.g., all dinosaurs are descendants of a two-legged ancestor. Some, however, returned to four-legged afterwards. Some evolved into birds instead. So again it's probably safe to say that each is good... for a given environment.
Insects are a funny case, because again they're used differently than you use your legs. Insect legs are autonomous. Each leg has its own autonomous "controller", or rather its own mini-brain. The insect's head just gives an order like "forward" and all legs independently start doing the movements for moving forward. That kind of a wiring would be totally unfit for bipedal use. Heck, even four would be more miss than hit. So an insect must necessarily have a larger number of legs. For the way an insect is built, really, six legs are good, two legs are bad.
2. But even that is over-thinking it, because the little guys in TFA didn't actually have arms or legs like you. They were really jellyfish with 8 long tubular appendages. There are no muscles there or bones or exoskeleton or anything usable for locomotion at all. The whole thing was really two thin layers of cells, little more than a microbial film, with an amorphous jelly in between. The "arms" were probably more to give it more surface and reach from which it can absorb nutrients, than for anything else.
We're talking _very_ primitive multi-cellular life forms.
I dunno, do you need to define virtual currencies at all? The way I see it, you can ignore it until you try to sell that virtual gold for RL money. (Or virtual items, same idea.) How's it different from any other RL sale for RL money? The guys selling any other stuff already paid VAT and income tax, so I fail to see why gold farmers wouldn't.
And to get even farther away from the "but it's virtual" aspect, think of it as a service. You pay me X dollars, I do service Y for you. In this case the service is helping you get a better equipped character. After all, when you take a taxi or book a flight, you don't get a tangible good either. You just got the convenience of getting from place A to place B faster than walking. I think the same can be used to describe power levelling, gold farming, item farming, etc: someone provided a service that saves you some time. RL time too. There's nothing virtual about X hours saved in WoW, because it means the same X RL hours.
We tax taxi companies, we tax airlines, we tax plumbers and mechanics, and we tax pizzerias. Probably the Chinese do too. Why wouldn't the same apply to someone whose service is related to a video game?
And yes, I'm pretty sure that income from stock trading is taxed already.
Actually it's not that hard to explain:
We still have the government largely under control, and the parties have to work for their votes. The very system is so geared that no party has an absolute majority, and the best they can manage is to form a fragile coalition that has the majority. But even then the coalition can form the other way around over night, moving a party from head of the majority coalition to head of the opposition. It doesn't happen often, but the threat is there. Politicians know better than to even hint at serving any other interests than their voters', and at the mere hint of something like that, if the guy doesn't resign by himself, the party will drop him like a hot potato.
It does have its own shortcomings -- nothing ever is perfect -- but by and large it still works for the people.
At any rate, the government is still under control, and it is a _tool_ we use. It's how a big community (say, country sized) organizes and governs itself.
It's a bit like, dunno, having a big dog. You could go, "OMG, I must keep it away from me and my family, it could go rabid when you least expect it!" That seems the American view, based on the limited sample I have. The European view is more that since it _is_ your dog, it's your job to make sure it doesn't.
There are clear laws about what the government can do with that stuff, and under what circumstances can most of that data even be accessed at all. E.g., while you can moan about "online surveillance", in practice even a law enforcement officer needs a warrant from a judge to acess those logs at all.
In practice it seems to me like actually that's more privacy than you'd expect in the unregulated USA, where companies routinely sell customer data to the highest bidder, and the government has already worked out backroom dels with telcos and ISPs to spy on its citizens. So, how's that better than in Germany? Do you really think your data is more private if you don't have some clear laws about what the government and everyone else can do with it?
As for the last jab at the German government, let's just say that it's record has actually been pretty damn good since 1945. Yes, the Weimar republic had some weaker safeguards and it did fail once. We learned from that mistake and fixed the system.
Actually, according to NASA, the Sun's total output has been increasing by about 0.05% per decade.
Quote from that link: "If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years."
Now again, I'm not saying that it covers the _whole_ global warming effect, but about 0.5 of that 1.2 increase is covered right there. It's almost half.
The moral of the story: yes, the Sun has been there for billions of years, but that doesn't mean it's been unchanged and perfectly constant output.
1. Actually, here's something worth thinking about:
The whole global warming is about 1K or 1 degree Celsius in a century. Taking the average Earth temperature as about 300K (no need to go into more than 1 figure accuracy for a back-of-the-envelope calculation), the whole increase is about 0.3% of the absolute temperature.
Now I know that it means more than 0.3% for us, since we have a skewed scale in which we survive, so hold yer horses. I'm not trying to make it sound small, I'm just working in SI units, to try to figure out what could influence it and by how much.
Let's assume it was all due to external radiation. Not postulating that that _is_ the case, just doing a "what if" scenario. You can plug in your own factor afterwards.
Steffan Boltzmann says that radiated energy is proportional with absolute temperature to the 4th power. Equilibrium is reached when radiated energy equals incoming energy. So basically we'll stabilize at a higher temperature if the incoming energy increased, so we radiate as much right back. An increase of 0.3% in temperature, all else being equal, means an increase of about 1.2% in radiated energy. An increase in incoming energy by about 1.2% would completely offset it and explain it.
The sun however obeys the same law, and we get the same percentage of its radiated energy. You know, since the Earth's size and orbit didn't change. So even that converting to energy back and forth wasn't really needed, we just need (Tsun_now/Tsun_0)^4=(Tearth_now/Tearth_0)^4. Long story short, it only would have needed to increase its temperature by 0.3% too in the last century.
Now I don't think that the Sun is actually the cause of all that. NASA did measure a steady increase in Sun's temperature, but it's a bit slower than we'd need to give it the full blame. But just trying to make a different point there:
Yes, any changes in sun temperature are reflected in changes of Earth's temperatures. And, yes, very small influences on the Sun (0.3% isn't all that huge, after all) can affect Earth very significantly.
2. Also, we're not necessarily talking about energy it receives as such, but if some particles affect how fast it fuses hydrogen, the effects on the sun would be much larger than the effects on Earth. Since we don't fuse hydrogen down here.
1. I'll somewhat disaggree about RTS. Sure, in theory it sounds good, but I've yet to see a strategy game where the AI doesn't plain old cheat to stay alive.
Yes, it can "micromanage" better, in the sense of cycling through all units every frame or couple of frames. Sure, it can do a "for" loop better than a human. But actually allocate resources intelligently, apply smart tactics against a human who built in the unexpected place, etc, is where computers are still as stupid as it gets.
Again, we could argue about theoretically being easier to make them smarter, but way I see it, that's the basic rule of thumb: does it need to cheat? Does advancing in the storyline to face a new enemy, described as more cunning and ruthless, actually just mean the same retarded AI with a bigger pre-built base and more silos full of spice/tiberium/whatever and more reinforcements out of nowhere? Does it just mean that the new "cunning and ruthless" enemy just gets better units from the start? Does upping the difficulty actually just means that the AI gets even more money and a damage bonus, as opposed to just un-hobbling that supposedly super-AI a little?
If any of those are true, no, you have _not_ coded teh uber-AI and then dumbed it down for the player. You can claim to have a too smart AI when it can start just with a town centre and 2 peons, just like the player, and put up a better fight. And, oh, make it run just as long a way to the mines/geisers/spice-fields as the players, at that. Starting with 3 resource nodes in an already built base doesn't quite qualify as equal difficulty.
2. Yes, chess makes a good poster child, but that has had decades of real AI research into just that speciffic game, and at that by real AI researchers. A brand new game, with brand new rules, within 3 years, and with the cheapest team possible... heh... sorry. I can't take that seriously.
Most of the games so far have even trouble pathfinding, or keeping their flamethrower guys from frying their own team mates in front of them, etc. Or look at bigger scale strategy games, like Paradox's, where it takes several years of patching just to get the AI to no longer waste its whole army attacking Switzerland. And even then often the "fix" isn't as much AI, as just making fortifications randomly disappear in combat, so eventually the mountains around Switzerland just stop giving a defense bonus. You know, 'cause apparently 100,000 soldiers with rifles and grenades can demolish a mountain. And then invariably it becomes vulnerable in some other way, to some new exploit created by the previous fix.
3. Ditto for FPS. What the computer has as an advantage isn't really better AI, it's unerring accuracy. It's trivial to make a bot that never misses, and has faster reactions than any human, because it simply needs to calculate the angle and pretend it aimed accurately that way. It simply doesn't have the whole issue of moving the whole arm with the mouse, or the finite resolution of the mouse, or the whole lag of the pipeline from mouse to seeing the cursor move (the TFT alone introduces another 1-2 frames lag) which is already known to ruin one's accuracy because it lets you overshoot before seeing any results, etc.
Some cheat even further, by basically having eyes in the back of their head, or being able to see through walls, or just not having the issue of "does that 3 pixel tall figure over there look like one of our guys or one of theirs? Is it even a human?" It just doesn't have to parse an array of pixels, it already knows where everyone is. Even when you say "if you hear the player at position X", you're already cheating. A player can at most judge "I hear some footsteps in that general direction" (and even that at best in 30 degree increments), but not an exact position, nor know if it's a friend or foe or neutral there.
Give the computer a spread comparable to a human for the selected difficulty level, give it a similar lag in reacting and turning, and limit it to the exact same field of view, and that suppos
Depends on the change, I suppose. I can see your point if we're only talking about a temperature change of half a degree. Probably there are enough alleles for that.
In other cases, though, the changes are more dramatic. A lake can become outright anoxic within a record time, for example. I don't think it's even possible for fish to evolve to be anaerobic, and it'll take a lot more than 38 years.
Or as another example, let's put it like this, humans have used lead pipes, utensils, paints, cosmetics, etc, for millenia, and we haven't evolved immunity to lead yet. We've drunk alcohol for 5000 years or so (the Egyptians drank 4 litres of beer per day, including the women), but the liver didn't evolve to be immune to it. Duly noted, the frogs do reproduce a lot faster, but I still think that it's not that easy to just evolve immunity to a toxin.
Ah, more bullshit emotionally-charged rhetoric. "Free car"? No, really? Exactly which party proposed a law to give free cars? Oh, wait, it's just a bullshit strawman.
Or perhaps, the problem is that what is regularly proposed is stuff like "free medical care", or "adequate education" or such. And of course if you picked on _those_, you'd come out clearer as a greedy prick.
But ok, you really want to play emotionally charged fallacies? Ok. I see your "theft", and raise you, oh, "murder."
See that gal over there? She's got an early case of multiple-sclerosis. Go kick her out of the hospital yourself, don't try to pervert healt-care into doing that murder for you. Of course, she'll probably die on her own, but, hey, that saved you some money on the health insurance. Less people trying to "steal" your money to pay for those.
See that old guy with Alzheimer's and kidney problems in his own age? Same deal. It's guys like him who didn't smoke, didn't drink and stayed fit, that now suck a lot of money out of healthcare for a decade or two. The fat smokers died earlier and largely didn't get their insurance money out of that system. But that guy didn't. Go kick him off medical care yourself, don't try to pack it in fancy words about why it's stealing your money if we keep him alive.
That other guy over there? Genetic deffects. Dumbly enough, nobody found out until he was older, now he's on life support.
That other gal? Cancer. Lots and lots of fancy patented medicines, and if she's (un)lucky the chemotherapy will make it last for years, while it degrades the rest of her body more and more. You'd be surprised how many people get a cancer nowadays, that the other causes of death have been reduced. Go kick them out of the hospitals yourself.
In fact, be a sport and at least don't let them suffer. Go just put a bullet or two through their brains right now. It achieves the same result, with less suffering. And I'm _sure_ they'll understand that that's for such a worthy cause as you keeping a few more of your precious dollars.
Had enough of that? Good. Well, then tell you what: you drop that over-the-top bullshit about "theft" and I'll drop mine. Wake me up when we ca have a talk like civilized adults.
And just to clarify, I do have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to "OMG I found something stupid and it's not worth reading any further!" kinds of messages. Among many other ways to add noise to the signal. And I find that Slasdot already has too many of that already. If it's not that, it's the local grammar nazis, and if it's not those, it's the "OMG, you're not worthy to question the scientists" gang, and if anyone managed to avoid even those, there's seven more layers of silliness to be had before running into any usable content.
Ah well... I guess some things just can't be helped.
I thought that since the whole topic is about amphibians, I don't have to remind at every paragraph that I'm talking about organisms of comparable complexity. Even then, the paragraph before the one you quoted, made it IMHO quite clear that I'm talking about multi-cellular organisms, not bacteria.