When I was younger - like about Grade 6 or 7 younger - I had a life-sized plastic replica M16 rifle (you don't see stuff like _that_ anymore) that I picked up at a yard sale. At one time it had some internals that presumably made noise when you pulled the trigger, but those were long gone by the time I got it. It was just a hollow shell.
It was, however, *awesome* for playing "guns" with my friends - a game that was essentially line-of-sight "tag". If you got "shot", a "medic" would have to drag you to a "medic station" (usually a tree) and you would have to count to some pre-established number (out loud) before you were considered "revived" and able to fight again.
This, along with "kick the can" was one of our favourite games. There was a lot of honour involved. If you knew that you had been shot dead to rights, you were expected to die with no arguing. There were the occasional "mutuals" with the inevitable "I shot you first!" arguments, but these were usually solved by both parties agreeing to die.
For all the simulated violence, this was actually a very structured and honourable game. It was on your honour to play along and die gloriously when called upon to do so.
A few years later, I went to high school, and joined my school shooting team. Now I had my hands on a real firearm, and the rules changed. It became TOTALLY unaceptable to ever point a rifle at another human being; unacceptable to even let the line of the muzzle cross another human. This was enforced by actual physical violence - point a gun at somebody, even by accident, and an adult would clock you HARD in the head.
The message sank home VERY quickly. This was no game; this was for keeps, and the seriousness of the situation was such that the normal rules of who could hit you and how hard were superceded. You learned respect for the rifle and its potential very, very quickly.
A few years later on, I joined the Army, and it took me a VERY long time to overcome my aversion to pointing a rifle at another human (even in training, where we had blanks, and plugs in the muzzles to prevent any actual discharge of projectiles) And firing? Forget about it!
I remember very distinctly, during basic training, I was guarding a "prisoner encampment" (full of instructors playing at enemy) when one of them lept the wire and took off. I yelled at him to stop, raised my FN, sighted in perfectly centre of mass on his retreating back... and held that sight picture as he ran off into the distance. Just couldn't do it - even though I KNEW that I had blanks loaded, that nobody was in any danger, and I was going to be in a world of hurt for letting a "prisoner" escape. (Which I was, lemme tell you)
It took a couple of *years* of near constant practice to overcome that.
So I'm of the opinion that "pretend violence" is not a particularly big deal, so long as the distinction is made between pretend and real. Kids can and do learn the difference.
I'm also of the opinion that kids need to be exposed to firearms safety courses VERY early in life (even though I'm not particularly pro-gun) I think being exposed to firearms early removes some of the mystery and curiosity that encourages kids to go hunting for any guns that might be in the house, I think it teaches familiarity such that accidents are reduced if a gun DOES (heaven forbid) land in a child's unsupervised hands, and I KNOW it teaches enormous respect for what a gun is capable of doing to another human being.
I think you'd be suprised at just how mobile a tank or LAV really is. It's not something you see a lot on TV.
The only things from a terrain perspective that I ever really worried about were swamps (tanks don't go where the bullrushes grow), large boulders hiding in bushes, and basements. Small trees were no obstacle, large trees we avoided, as tanks have an aversion to anything that provides a movement/sight restriction.
Things like mountains and rockfields you can't really enter, but that terrain isn't a gimme for a legged vehicle either. It would have to have enough intelligence to place each foot in an individually selected spot - can you run flat-out across a mountain?
And your legged vehicle is way worse in soft ground than a wheeled or tracked vehicle - and EVERYTHING is soft ground when masses of armour traverse it.
You're limited to 2 freeway lane widths (1.5 is more like it) wide, or you can't fit on roads, bridges, or tunnels. You can't get much taller than about 13 feet high, or you can't fit under overpasses, or into airlifts. You can't mass much more than about 80 tons or you chew up roadways, sink into soft terrain, etc.
Never ever ever underestimate the power of logistics to win battles. "America's 3 most powerful generals are General Foods, General Motors, and General Electric"
Disclaimer: I'm a retired real-life Armoured officer - and incidently, a former hard-core Battletech (board game!) player.
Sadly, there's a few reasons why we're unlikely to ever see 'mechs striding the landscape:
1) Vulnerability. Modern anti-armour weapons, especially guns, are insanely powerful. The 120mm gun in the M1A2, when equipped with the latest APFSDS ammo, has a muzzle velocity of over 1800 m/s, and a penatrative capacity of 960mm of Rolled Homogeneous armour - yes, nearly a full metre of solid steel. 1 cubic metre of steel weighs roughly 17,000 lbs
Tanks get away from this by using armour that has greater protection capacity at thinner thicknesses, and heavily armouring only the portions of the tank likely to see fire - the turret, and the front of the tank. Tank commanders are heavily trained to use terrain and situational awareness to keep the armour pointed at the enemy. The punishments for getting caught "tracks up to the world" or "broadsides" were severe (although not as severe as what the enemy could dish out)
Ideally, the only part of the tank visible to the enemy at any given point in time is the gun muzzle and the front of the turret.
Effectively, the armour on the turret is worth about 800-900mm of RHA, and the glacis is between 500-600mm. The sides, top, and rear are much, much less - and the way that you generate those high effective thicknesses is through the use of super-dense materials like depleted uranium - lighter than the equivelent resistive thickness of steel, but still not exactly light.
Your Atlas, even if the front arcs are more heavily armoured than the rear, stands so much taller than a tank that concealment and the use of terrain will be much tougher, if not impossible. That means that the forward arcs will have to be *at least* as well armoured as the turret of an M1, and it has a MUCH larger surface area to cover. That's going to weigh a LOT more than 100 tons.
2) Mobility: Given the massive weight of the chassis (dictated by the armour it needs to carry) and the high ground pressure (dictated by the bipedal form factor) this thing is going to tear up terrain like nobodies' business. Tanks, with low ground pressure and (typically) rubber-padded tracks, still rip the shit out of roadways and open country. Your Atlas is going to be far, far worse. It will be difficult to move any number of them from place to place without transforming the roadway into an untraversable morass, and bridges will be right out of the question.
Even assuming ideal conditions, mobility is still going to suffer. In a world dominated by line-of-sight projectile weapons, the proper place for a biped is on his stomach - or squatting. Soldiers walk and run, yes - but only for short distances. A quick burst of speed to the next position of cover, and then dive on your face.
I doubt your Atlas will dive more than once.
There are other reasons... but the basic problem is one of scale. Bipeds do not scale well past a certain size.
So let me ask you this - if we assume the possibility that such a field could exist, how long would it have to stay operative in order to have enough matter accumulate to form a black hole?
I asssume there's some sort of volume effect here... the "virtual particle" generation rate per cubic centimetre of space. Is there an actual estimate for that?
Where might one find out the specifications for black holes? (minimum mass required to produce one, the rate of evaporation, the amount of matter infall required to offset said evaporation, etc)?
Slightly offtopic, but (I hope) interesting, and something you may actually know about:
I've got a piece of technology I've worked out for a story I'm working on.
As I understand it, one theory behind the vacuum is that it is filled with "virtual particles" that pop into existance with their anti-particle somehow nearby. They collide, cancel each other out (with no release of energy? How does THAT work?) and vanish.
Is that right?
So this fictional technology (it's a warhead, actually) creates a field that supresses the generation of one of the two types of virtual particles. That generates a sudden, theoretically infinate (but practically limited ) "burst" of particles within the field limits.
Supress "normal" virtual particles, and you get a ball of antimatter, which immediately contacts the normal matter of the field generator, and BOOM!
Supress "anti" virtual particles, and you get a super-dense ball of regular matter - dense enough to create a small black hole. Trigger this near a planet or a star, and you get enough matter infall to counteract the rate of it boiling away via Hawking radiation, and chomp!
If we handwave away the mechanism behind which the field works, is the rest of this plausible?
Please discuss. I'd love to hear your take on this.
A coomon misconception about evolution is that the process is in some way "directed" or "progressive".
Any given feature on any given creature is there because it conferred some sort of survival or reproductive advantage on itself or on an ancestor (where it might not confer an advantage today, but probably isn't a disadvantage)
Tracing the origin of any given feature or structure can indeed be a question of guesswork and (hopefully) intellegent speculation. Life has been around long enough now that evolution has had time to produce some very complex creatures and structures.
So yes, the "how", from a historical sense, can be a bit murky. There just isn't enough data out there that describes the history of how any given creature/structure developed in sufficiant detail (although a lot CAN be determined through careful work)
But from a *proceedural* or *process* perspective, the "how" is very well understood. Sexual reproduction and inherited traits make "evolution" not just possible, but inevitable.
Problem: noticable adaptations are believed to occur over MANY generations and it would be rare for an average person to observe this during their lifetime. Also, correlation does not prove causality.
Ah, but this has been accounted for.
As you state, part of the problem with convincing people that evolution works is that it takes literal generations to effect change in a species. Given that most of the animals and plants we deal with on a regular basis have lifespans that are signifigant fractions of the human lifespan, changes occur too slowly to be noticed.
But if you study animals whose lifespans are very short (like fruit flies) it becomes possible to observe generations on a much more compressed timescale, and actual physical evolution becomes something you can test and (heh) reproduce in a lab.
And then you get casuality - you can artificially generate conditions that should cause evolutionary change, cycle through a few dozen generations of these short-lived creatures, and observe it happen.
Given that the underlying mechanism behind the process (sex, DNA, inherited traits that may or may not confer a survival/reproductive advantage) is the same from plankton up to you and I, it's easy to show that the process must really be universal.
As far as I am aware, there is no single part of the evolutionary process that has not been independantly confirmed under artificial conditions in the lab. There is considerable debate over the nature and exact path of the historical progression from species to species, but all of the _process_ has been proven out.
That passes your "Science demands that the results need to be reproducible" test.
to date, no one has been able to create life from loose material. The starting point had to evolve from something, right?
Well, a number of basic building blocks of life *have* been "assembled from loose material". That, admittedly, is not the same thing as life, and I agree that this is a process yet to be understood. We don't know everything yet.
What we do know is that the raw materials of life were present on the primordial Earth, and that these raw materials had an enormous amount of time (and plenty of external sources of energy) such that random combinations of chemical processes *could* have given birth (heh) to a form of life. Once that happens - like starting a stubborn lawnmower - Vroom! Off it goes on its own.
Now I suppose that, given the lack of evidence (for or against) that position, one could label it an article of faith that that's what happened. That phrase "article of faith" is heavily overloaded with meaning......but the sentiment at its core is not far from the truth.
Where this differs, and very strongly, from religeous "faith" is that my belief that primitive life effectively spontaniously generated on the primeval Earth is based on my understanding of chemical processes, what the Earth was likely to have been like at the time, and by the fact that random chance hat a lot, and I do mean a LOT of time in which to stumble across the correct process. The million monkeys on typewriters had a couple of billion years in which to generate Shakespere (and even then, they didn't need to generate full-fledged Shakespere, they needed to generate something simple that could start the evolutionary process running)
This, to my mind, is a far more likely process than to conjure up an invisible, supernatural, unverifiable boogeyman who wishes life into existence. Especially when one considers that of all the mechanisms and procesess and occurences that happen in the world all around us, not a single ONE of them has ever been shown to have a supernatural cause.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but "our" side has the monopoly on proven theories, and has rational and reasonable explinations for those remaining items not yet proven.
Re:You mean, just like 3 out of 4 men?
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Women Leaving I.T.
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I happen to be a race car driver. I also happen to be male.
And I agree with you, to a certain extent. All men come out of the womb thinking that they are naturals at driving, fucking, and shooting. Having instructed two of those three (which two is left as an exercise for the student), It Just Ain't So.
Driving a race car in competition in particular is an unnatural act. Nothing you have ever done in your entire life is *remotely* close to the skills you need to develop in order to be able to drive a race car at the limit of adhesion.
Time after time, I've seen the triumph of testosterone over talent. Most who try get their egos bruised so badly that they never return. An extra facet is that ego is often tied to which car you own. so when your mighty Porsche or Corvette is humbled by, say, a Neon... well, there are those who who never recover from that particular shock.
Those that can face facts, admit to themselves that driving is indeed a LEARNED, not inherited skill, and start from square one tend to be the future champions. The sport is full of drivers who are full of sound and fury, but don't actually produce.
But having said that....
You still need to be able to tap into that testosterone fueled agression in order to do REALLY well. My best runs are always done in a state that can only be described as carefully controlled rage. Racing requires aggression - not wild, berserker aggression, but the ability to attack the course and push the limits while still maintaining control.
Interestingly enough, by particular flavour of motorsports actually has a large number of female participants. We have classes specifically for women. Women may choose to run with the men in the "open" classes, but historically few do so.
And it is undeniable that the women are, on average, a good deal slower than the men - often, in the same cars (husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend teams often compete in the same vehicle)
There really isn't, in this day of power brakes and power steering, a good physical reason for that. I expect that the men's Olympic shot put or weightlifting teams will probably always outperform the women - that's just physical size and strength talking. But in what we do, there is no physical reason why the women should be slower, on average, than the men. But they are.
That's not to say that the women are SLOW - there are lots of women who, had they run in the open class for the same car, would finish mid-pack or slightly better. I know some women who are very quick indeed. But they tend to lack that special something that puts them over the top from "good" to "great".
I think it's the testosterone. I think that same drive to master everything, no matter how much it hurts or how much it scares you, it what gives the top men that little extra push over the top women. A good part of what goes into championship-level success is the ability to keep on keepin' on, even when everybody else thinks you're nuts.
So don't be dissin' the testosterone sister.:) Carefully harnessed, it has its uses.
As a coder, your first priority is to optimise for human legibility. Ideally, you should be able to use any code snippet you write as a tutorial on that particular algorithm for a complete newbie.
This is an investment in the quality of the code after it has been released. The easier it is to read and understand, the easier it will be to fix the bugs that are ALWAYS discovered once code reaches the users.
Incidently, it may not be some faceless nobody who benefits from your forward-thinking - it may be YOU. Prolific, expert coders work on a LOT of different projects, and what is second-nature today may be long forgotten tomorrow. That obscure obfuscated nifty hack may come back to bite you some day.
Most of the production stuff I wrote during my tenure at a Big 3 auto manufacturer was done in perl. There is a language that lets you be as clever and obscure as you wish. Not once did I ever regret choosing to optimise for legibility - and besides, it's cool to have some junior coder come up to you one day and tell you that your code, that he inherited, taught him how to use the language.
And an odd side effect... I can't prove this rigourously, but it seems sometimes that code optimised for legibility seems to compiler-optimise particularly well. Subjectively, not only are your intents clear to some future maintainer or collabirator, but also to the COMPILER itself. After all, what's a program if not a conversation between yourself and the compiler?
I agree with you, both in the claim that this phenomenon is not psudoscience, and that calling it a "sixth sense" is somewhat sensational.
The article spells out the test methodology in detail, and it seems solid.
But I have personal experience with this.
I have had extensive navigation training, first as a pilot, and then later in a military career. The Army in particular had very high standards for needing to know exactly where you were at all times (to within 100m) without the aid of something like a GPS.
So you learn to keep a visualization of your surroundings in your head, and to cross-reference that visualization against whatever tools you have (like a map, compass, or odometer) at regular intervals to keep the internal representation in sync with the real world. After some practice, this becomes second nature - muscle memory stuff.
But there's an odd side-effect, at least there is with me. If I make a wrong turn, miss an exit, or make some sort of navigational mistake, something in my subconscious will pick up on it well before I'm ever consciously aware of it (especially if my conscious is somehow distracted away from navigation) It's hard to put into words... but I will get a profound sense of "wrongness", like an inaudible alarm bell. The more I ignore it, the worse it gets.
I have learned not to ignore it. If that alarm goes off, I'll immediately make navigation the highest-priority mental task - and without fail, I will have just goofed somehow.
Unfortunately, this ability does not convey any other information other than "you are no longer on the planned course". There is a recognition function in there, but no follow-on advisory function. It's still up to conciousness to correct the problem once discovered.
When it happens though... it's really a very odd feeling, and it's quite strong.
I don't know about you, but I've never written a perfect program.
I assume that anything that gets released with source will have that source tweaked by someone to fix some bug somewhere.
I want those bugfixes to make their way back into the "general release" source. A bug fixed by one should be a bug fixed for all.
So for me at least, it's not that I'm afraid of the program being "stolen", but rather that I want to encourage the bugfixes to come back to me, and not be locked up in a box somewhere.
I'm totally with you on the ability of people to recognise patterned behaviour, typically far faster than a game designer might suspect.
But people can also discover "emergant" patterns that aren't necessarily explicitly programmed in.
I remember playing Sargon III Chess on my C-64. I accidentally discovered that the AI couldn't see - I'm no chess geek, so I'm sure there's an official term - "indirect" attacks. Rather than move piece A to sqaure Q ro threaten enemy piece X, I'd move some other piece B onto the line of attack that I wanted to make A->X, blocking the attack. Then piece A would be moved into attack position on Q, and piece B moved out of the way, unblocking the A->X attack.
The AI seemed to be able to predict that a straight move to Q by A would threaten X, and it would be very good at countering those moves. But attacks from a third piece by moving some other piece out of the attack line were invisible to it.
Once discovered, this lead to strategies that involved setting up elabourate attacks that hinged upon "reveals". It'd drive the AI nuts. Sadly, actual humans do not suffer from this blind spot and ol' Sargon did not improve my RL chess playing ability one bit.
Here's another example of a different kind:
One summer, a group of my friends played a TON of the original Battletech board game aginst each other. We'd start after supper and go to the wee hours of the morning, day after day after day.
In so doing, we developed a particularly effective strategy. We'd have a 4-lance company. The first lance was composed of stripped-down lightweights equipped with maximum jump jet capacity and a single weapon - a flamer. The second lance was of superheavy, very low-mobility, weakly-armoured, long-range rocket artillery units. The third was ultra-heavy, low mobility, heavily armoured massive close-in-damage units, and the fourth was the reserve unit of heavy cannon equipped hovercraft.
As is typical for wargames, the faster you move, the harder you are to hit. There was a further negative modifier if the 'mech was jumping. Our lightweights, if they jumped full distance every turn, accumulated so many negative to-hit modifiers that they were unhittable. They would fan out over the game board, spotting the enemy and setting fire to terrain - which in the game rules, happened 100% with the use of the flamer - and which caused vision blocking due to smoke, plus there was a chance for the fire to spread to adjacent hexes.
The lightweights could also spot for the indirect fire lance with minimal penalties. The indirect fire lance would never move; it would just fire salvo after salvo of long range missiles. The hit rate wasn't great and the distribution of LRM fire tends to spread damage easily, but enough would hit as to ablate off some enemy armour - and the psychological effect of taking damage from an unseen source without the ability to retaliate... it was maddening.
Meanwhile, the heavy, close-in units would slowly advance up to intercept positions. Thanks to the madly-hopping lightweights and the smoke, we'd know where the enemy was but the enemy wouldn't know where we were.
The enemy would thus blunder up against the close-in units, which did monster amounts of damage with a high hit probability (the enemy unit was often moven slowly, due to the smoke, and the close-in unit would be stationary). It was not unusual to destroy an enemy unit in a single turn.
If things got sticky for whatever reason, the hovercraft would race in from the flank/rear and could disrupt the most cleverly planned counterattacks.
With all the practice we got, these tactics became drills - they could very easily have been scripted.
We put this to the test at a wargame convention, and we slaughtered everybody, without losing a single 'mech in any battle. Towards the end, the organizers were matching us upwards of 3 to 1; we just could not be beat.
One of my favourite demos with my old Amiga 2000 back in 1989 or so was to have a C program compiling on the Bridgeboard, a Pascal program compiling in a shell window, and then drag down the Workbench screen about halfway to reveal F/A-18 Interceptor running behind. I'd then play the game (with no slowdown) while the compilers kept churning away.
For its time, it was an amazing bit of hardware.
I always liked AmigaDOS because it combined the best features of UNIX (in the shell, and with AREXX scripting) and MacOS's GUI features.
Nowadays, the GUI on Linux has gotten to the point where it is far superior than anything the Amiga ever had. A modern RedHat/Fedora box really is the spiritual successor to the Amiga.
The only thing I miss (two things actually):
1) Every Amiga application worth its salt has an AREXX port, because it was trivial to implement. That meant you could script EVERYTHING, including moving data back and forth between applications. It was awesome; you could batch-process every single application on the box.
2) The speech synth chip. This was awsome in Netrek, because you could play the team chat window through it and turn it into a radio - get all the team communications without having to take your eyes off the galaxy map.:)
Both Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are outstanding books (and I would add Xenocide to that list), just for different reasons. They speak to different things.
Sadly, Children of the Mind slips a bit, and the follow-on, return-to-the-well "Shadow" series is just horrible.
My advice is to purchase:
"Ender's Game" "Speaker for the Dead" "Xenocide" "Children of the Mind"
and then stop. Pretend he died shortly thereafter.
You may wish to do some more reading - might I suggest www.snopes.org ? Every facet of the process of evolution (including speciation) has been observed and proven out. There are NO holes.
Holes in the progression from some ancestor species to some decendant species, yes - many. But all the processes of both "macro" and "micro" evolution have been proven and documented.
The "hot dog" analogy was not one of evolution, but rather on the need for "faith" in science. "Faith" is unecessary when the entire process can be observed in action.
The big difference between cruelty in the name of science and cruelty in the name of religon is that religon supposedly has a supernatural guardian who is dictating the words - if a certain passage in the Bible promotes cruelty, that's not a *human* failing (as is cruelty in science) but rather the explicit Will of God. If people do horrible acts in God's name based on God's Word, and especially if they meet with success, then that must mean they are carrying out God's Will, no?
So let me ask you then - those people who burned hundreds of young girls alive for the crime of witchcraft, were they carrying out God's Will or not?
If so, how can a good and just God countenance such cruelty?
If not, why didn't God step in to prevent the perversion of His Word? It's not like the witch-burners were _evil_ - they were just carrying out the orders given to them in the Bible. They thought they were carrying out their pious duty to God.
And what if said crucial passage turns out to be mistranslated? Who then bears the responsibility?
I'm thankful your God doesn't exist. If he did, he'd be a right asshole.
Except that every precept of evolution in operation - including both "micro" and "macro" - has been observed happening. There is no portion of the evolutionary process that has not been tested and proven out.
The only portion "missing" is the direct historical record by which any particular given species (most commonly, homo sapiens) came about. We do not know the exact progression from form to form, species to species, that eventually produced us.
A very large portion of that progression can be deduced, both from observations of the fossil record, and from biochemical forensics. These give clues towards how our species developed - for example, we are biologically nearly identical to certain primates, which means we share a recent, common ancestor. Exactly WHICH ancestor that might be, we may never know - and really, it's not all that important, because the PROCESS is so very well understood.
If you have a hot dog, tracking the component parts of that hot dog back to the original cow that produced its raw materials is a difficult proposition. But given that the process for turning a cow into a hot dog is well documented and easily demonstrated, it takes no faith at all to know that every hot dog has as its ancestor a given cow (or cows)
Similarily, even though the exact progression from single-celled organism to me sitting at this computer is unknown, the fact that such a progression took place requires no faith at all - because I can see and understand the underlying mechanism (which has been observed so thouroughly)
Interestingly enough, one might describe the Bible as an "evolutionary" work, as it is changed through a succession of translators and editors. Its meaning changes all the time. Does God change His mind? If we discover that the word "witch" in "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (the root of all those witch burnings - you remember, when people were burned alive with religous sanction) was actual a mistranslation of, oh, say "poisoner", does that mean that all those people were needlessly horribly tortured and murdered in the name of God, or that God has decided that witches are now OK?
The various flavours of Creationism rely on the infallibility of the Bible - the Bible says that it is true, thus, it is true.
If, however, he has to tweak the Bible in order to fit its words into established reality, via the mechanism of "mistranslation", then the Bible becomes fallible, and EVERY word in it is suspect.
The Bible is either the correctly transcribed, perfect word of God, or it is not. If it has to be "corrected" to match known reality, then that is a strong argument that perhaps the wiser course would be to study that reality and ignore the obviously flawed book.
Incidently, you have a flawed assumption of your own in there. Evolution, simply stated, is a process whereby organisms use sexual reproduction to pass inherited traits to their offspring. If those traits promote some sort of reproductive advantage, they tend to survive and get passed along to the next generation. If those traits provide some sort of reproductive disadvantage, then they tend to be culled before they can be reproduced and passed along.
This is a necessary side-effect of the way DNA and sex works.
But there is no "direction" to evolution. Evolution does not "seek" "higher" forms.Instead, the pressures of evolution tend to select organisms who are better survivors in their particular environment.
If your environment is an underwater hot mineral vent, you are probably better off as a microbe or a worm than as a bird or a monkey. And if those vents suddenly shut off, the selective pressures of your new environment will probably work against you rather than for you.
So your underlying assumption that "evolution moves to a higher state" is false. Evolution seeks no such thing. Evolution seeks to adapt organisms to their environment - HOW that happens is strictly a matter of chance.
I'm a former Armoured soldier, and morover, I own this book. It's outstanding.
One of the major points raised in the book is that historically, there were support networks baked into units that helped deal with the residual mental stresses.
To use the WW2 example, a unit would be in for the duration, which means that the personel in it would remain fairly constant with time. There would be some turnover with casulties and promotions, but for the most part, the men in the unit would have trained together, fought alongside each other, and gone home together.
I don't know about the Americans so much, but Canadian units (historically, not so much any more) were often formed from distinct population centres. The guys you went to war alongside were your friends and neighbors.
The "gone home" part is very important. There was a time delay when units were pulled off the field and sent home, and the trip home was by boat, which is slow. So the men would have an opportunity to be in each other's company and aclimatise to the transition between incipient death/kill or be killed, and normal civillian life.
That probably sounds all Oprah... and it's not like they sat around having group hugs and circle cries. But you know soldiers - they talk to each other. By the end of the war, they were closer than brothers. They'd be able to help each other deal with some of the mental damage (even though I doubt any of them would _express_ it that way)
Presumably, the same sort of thing has happened throughout history. If you marched across Europe in a war of conquest (be it armed with stone axes, bronze spears, steel swords, or muskets) you're gonna be marching home again too. You'll be spending a lot of time in each other's company without the threat of death or needing to kill hanging over you.
Compare, however, to Vietnam, with the 1 year in country tour programme. No longer was the goal to "win the war so we can all go home" - now you just had to stay alive for your year. Unit turnover was constant, so bonding between soldiers was not as common and not as profound. And it was entirely possible to be in the jungle in the morning, and be discharged and back in the US in the evening - no support network.
And what war has the reputation for the greatest number of post-discharge mental problems? Vietnam.
As far as the Rwanda example goes, they're living in their support structure. You and your buddies from the same tribe went out and killed people from the other tribe - together - and then you go back to your village and stay in each other's company. you can work out your residual stresses amongst themselves.
I'm simplifying of course, but you get the idea. The book does a far better job discussing it.
There is, however, a side-effect of this whole "finding the story" process that you have (accurately) described.
The tone of the book is very much "Hobbit" like in the first chapters, but as we wend our way towards Rivendell, the tone grows darker and more "adult".
This winds up mirroring a similar journey for the hobbits, who start off as childlike and neive (like the tone) but get much more worldly as they get exposed to the real world.
Bombadil works in the book, because he shows up near the start when the hobbits are still in juvenile fairy-tale mode. If he were a denizen of Ithlien, he would seem jarring and out of place.
And I agree that it made perfect sense to cut him from the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of data points.
When I was younger - like about Grade 6 or 7 younger - I had a life-sized plastic replica M16 rifle (you don't see stuff like _that_ anymore) that I picked up at a yard sale. At one time it had some internals that presumably made noise when you pulled the trigger, but those were long gone by the time I got it. It was just a hollow shell.
It was, however, *awesome* for playing "guns" with my friends - a game that was essentially line-of-sight "tag". If you got "shot", a "medic" would have to drag you to a "medic station" (usually a tree) and you would have to count to some pre-established number (out loud) before you were considered "revived" and able to fight again.
This, along with "kick the can" was one of our favourite games. There was a lot of honour involved. If you knew that you had been shot dead to rights, you were expected to die with no arguing. There were the occasional "mutuals" with the inevitable "I shot you first!" arguments, but these were usually solved by both parties agreeing to die.
For all the simulated violence, this was actually a very structured and honourable game. It was on your honour to play along and die gloriously when called upon to do so.
A few years later, I went to high school, and joined my school shooting team. Now I had my hands on a real firearm, and the rules changed. It became TOTALLY unaceptable to ever point a rifle at another human being; unacceptable to even let the line of the muzzle cross another human. This was enforced by actual physical violence - point a gun at somebody, even by accident, and an adult would clock you HARD in the head.
The message sank home VERY quickly. This was no game; this was for keeps, and the seriousness of the situation was such that the normal rules of who could hit you and how hard were superceded. You learned respect for the rifle and its potential very, very quickly.
A few years later on, I joined the Army, and it took me a VERY long time to overcome my aversion to pointing a rifle at another human (even in training, where we had blanks, and plugs in the muzzles to prevent any actual discharge of projectiles) And firing? Forget about it!
I remember very distinctly, during basic training, I was guarding a "prisoner encampment" (full of instructors playing at enemy) when one of them lept the wire and took off. I yelled at him to stop, raised my FN, sighted in perfectly centre of mass on his retreating back... and held that sight picture as he ran off into the distance. Just couldn't do it - even though I KNEW that I had blanks loaded, that nobody was in any danger, and I was going to be in a world of hurt for letting a "prisoner" escape. (Which I was, lemme tell you)
It took a couple of *years* of near constant practice to overcome that.
So I'm of the opinion that "pretend violence" is not a particularly big deal, so long as the distinction is made between pretend and real. Kids can and do learn the difference.
I'm also of the opinion that kids need to be exposed to firearms safety courses VERY early in life (even though I'm not particularly pro-gun) I think being exposed to firearms early removes some of the mystery and curiosity that encourages kids to go hunting for any guns that might be in the house, I think it teaches familiarity such that accidents are reduced if a gun DOES (heaven forbid) land in a child's unsupervised hands, and I KNOW it teaches enormous respect for what a gun is capable of doing to another human being.
DG
Featuring such hit songs as
Be very, very afraid.
DG
Medieval Madness is pure genius. I love that game.
Ditto Adams Family.
I'm also a big fan of... I can't remember the name; it has a 50's movie theme. Open snack bar. buy ticket, get kiss... etc.
DG
I think you'd be suprised at just how mobile a tank or LAV really is. It's not something you see a lot on TV.
The only things from a terrain perspective that I ever really worried about were swamps (tanks don't go where the bullrushes grow), large boulders hiding in bushes, and basements. Small trees were no obstacle, large trees we avoided, as tanks have an aversion to anything that provides a movement/sight restriction.
Things like mountains and rockfields you can't really enter, but that terrain isn't a gimme for a legged vehicle either. It would have to have enough intelligence to place each foot in an individually selected spot - can you run flat-out across a mountain?
And your legged vehicle is way worse in soft ground than a wheeled or tracked vehicle - and EVERYTHING is soft ground when masses of armour traverse it.
You're limited to 2 freeway lane widths (1.5 is more like it) wide, or you can't fit on roads, bridges, or tunnels. You can't get much taller than about 13 feet high, or you can't fit under overpasses, or into airlifts. You can't mass much more than about 80 tons or you chew up roadways, sink into soft terrain, etc.
Never ever ever underestimate the power of logistics to win battles. "America's 3 most powerful generals are General Foods, General Motors, and General Electric"
DG
Disclaimer: I'm a retired real-life Armoured officer - and incidently, a former hard-core Battletech (board game!) player.
Sadly, there's a few reasons why we're unlikely to ever see 'mechs striding the landscape:
1) Vulnerability. Modern anti-armour weapons, especially guns, are insanely powerful. The 120mm gun in the M1A2, when equipped with the latest APFSDS ammo, has a muzzle velocity of over 1800 m/s, and a penatrative capacity of 960mm of Rolled Homogeneous armour - yes, nearly a full metre of solid steel. 1 cubic metre of steel weighs roughly 17,000 lbs
Tanks get away from this by using armour that has greater protection capacity at thinner thicknesses, and heavily armouring only the portions of the tank likely to see fire - the turret, and the front of the tank. Tank commanders are heavily trained to use terrain and situational awareness to keep the armour pointed at the enemy. The punishments for getting caught "tracks up to the world" or "broadsides" were severe (although not as severe as what the enemy could dish out)
Ideally, the only part of the tank visible to the enemy at any given point in time is the gun muzzle and the front of the turret.
Effectively, the armour on the turret is worth about 800-900mm of RHA, and the glacis is between 500-600mm. The sides, top, and rear are much, much less - and the way that you generate those high effective thicknesses is through the use of super-dense materials like depleted uranium - lighter than the equivelent resistive thickness of steel, but still not exactly light.
Your Atlas, even if the front arcs are more heavily armoured than the rear, stands so much taller than a tank that concealment and the use of terrain will be much tougher, if not impossible. That means that the forward arcs will have to be *at least* as well armoured as the turret of an M1, and it has a MUCH larger surface area to cover. That's going to weigh a LOT more than 100 tons.
2) Mobility: Given the massive weight of the chassis (dictated by the armour it needs to carry) and the high ground pressure (dictated by the bipedal form factor) this thing is going to tear up terrain like nobodies' business. Tanks, with low ground pressure and (typically) rubber-padded tracks, still rip the shit out of roadways and open country. Your Atlas is going to be far, far worse. It will be difficult to move any number of them from place to place without transforming the roadway into an untraversable morass, and bridges will be right out of the question.
Even assuming ideal conditions, mobility is still going to suffer. In a world dominated by line-of-sight projectile weapons, the proper place for a biped is on his stomach - or squatting. Soldiers walk and run, yes - but only for short distances. A quick burst of speed to the next position of cover, and then dive on your face.
I doubt your Atlas will dive more than once.
There are other reasons... but the basic problem is one of scale. Bipeds do not scale well past a certain size.
DG
Cool. Thanks for answering.
So let me ask you this - if we assume the possibility that such a field could exist, how long would it have to stay operative in order to have enough matter accumulate to form a black hole?
I asssume there's some sort of volume effect here... the "virtual particle" generation rate per cubic centimetre of space. Is there an actual estimate for that?
Where might one find out the specifications for black holes? (minimum mass required to produce one, the rate of evaporation, the amount of matter infall required to offset said evaporation, etc)?
DG
Slightly offtopic, but (I hope) interesting, and something you may actually know about:
I've got a piece of technology I've worked out for a story I'm working on.
As I understand it, one theory behind the vacuum is that it is filled with "virtual particles" that pop into existance with their anti-particle somehow nearby. They collide, cancel each other out (with no release of energy? How does THAT work?) and vanish.
Is that right?
So this fictional technology (it's a warhead, actually) creates a field that supresses the generation of one of the two types of virtual particles. That generates a sudden, theoretically infinate (but practically limited ) "burst" of particles within the field limits.
Supress "normal" virtual particles, and you get a ball of antimatter, which immediately contacts the normal matter of the field generator, and BOOM!
Supress "anti" virtual particles, and you get a super-dense ball of regular matter - dense enough to create a small black hole. Trigger this near a planet or a star, and you get enough matter infall to counteract the rate of it boiling away via Hawking radiation, and chomp!
If we handwave away the mechanism behind which the field works, is the rest of this plausible?
Please discuss. I'd love to hear your take on this.
DG
A coomon misconception about evolution is that the process is in some way "directed" or "progressive".
Any given feature on any given creature is there because it conferred some sort of survival or reproductive advantage on itself or on an ancestor (where it might not confer an advantage today, but probably isn't a disadvantage)
Tracing the origin of any given feature or structure can indeed be a question of guesswork and (hopefully) intellegent speculation. Life has been around long enough now that evolution has had time to produce some very complex creatures and structures.
So yes, the "how", from a historical sense, can be a bit murky. There just isn't enough data out there that describes the history of how any given creature/structure developed in sufficiant detail (although a lot CAN be determined through careful work)
But from a *proceedural* or *process* perspective, the "how" is very well understood. Sexual reproduction and inherited traits make "evolution" not just possible, but inevitable.
DG
Ah, but this has been accounted for.
As you state, part of the problem with convincing people that evolution works is that it takes literal generations to effect change in a species. Given that most of the animals and plants we deal with on a regular basis have lifespans that are signifigant fractions of the human lifespan, changes occur too slowly to be noticed.
But if you study animals whose lifespans are very short (like fruit flies) it becomes possible to observe generations on a much more compressed timescale, and actual physical evolution becomes something you can test and (heh) reproduce in a lab.
And then you get casuality - you can artificially generate conditions that should cause evolutionary change, cycle through a few dozen generations of these short-lived creatures, and observe it happen.
Given that the underlying mechanism behind the process (sex, DNA, inherited traits that may or may not confer a survival/reproductive advantage) is the same from plankton up to you and I, it's easy to show that the process must really be universal.
As far as I am aware, there is no single part of the evolutionary process that has not been independantly confirmed under artificial conditions in the lab. There is considerable debate over the nature and exact path of the historical progression from species to species, but all of the _process_ has been proven out.
That passes your "Science demands that the results need to be reproducible" test.
Well, a number of basic building blocks of life *have* been "assembled from loose material". That, admittedly, is not the same thing as life, and I agree that this is a process yet to be understood. We don't know everything yet.
What we do know is that the raw materials of life were present on the primordial Earth, and that these raw materials had an enormous amount of time (and plenty of external sources of energy) such that random combinations of chemical processes *could* have given birth (heh) to a form of life. Once that happens - like starting a stubborn lawnmower - Vroom! Off it goes on its own.
Now I suppose that, given the lack of evidence (for or against) that position, one could label it an article of faith that that's what happened. That phrase "article of faith" is heavily overloaded with meaning...
Where this differs, and very strongly, from religeous "faith" is that my belief that primitive life effectively spontaniously generated on the primeval Earth is based on my understanding of chemical processes, what the Earth was likely to have been like at the time, and by the fact that random chance hat a lot, and I do mean a LOT of time in which to stumble across the correct process. The million monkeys on typewriters had a couple of billion years in which to generate Shakespere (and even then, they didn't need to generate full-fledged Shakespere, they needed to generate something simple that could start the evolutionary process running)
This, to my mind, is a far more likely process than to conjure up an invisible, supernatural, unverifiable boogeyman who wishes life into existence. Especially when one considers that of all the mechanisms and procesess and occurences that happen in the world all around us, not a single ONE of them has ever been shown to have a supernatural cause.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but "our" side has the monopoly on proven theories, and has rational and reasonable explinations for those remaining items not yet proven.
DG
Priced Solidworks lately?
DG
I happen to be a race car driver. I also happen to be male.
:) Carefully harnessed, it has its uses.
And I agree with you, to a certain extent. All men come out of the womb thinking that they are naturals at driving, fucking, and shooting. Having instructed two of those three (which two is left as an exercise for the student), It Just Ain't So.
Driving a race car in competition in particular is an unnatural act. Nothing you have ever done in your entire life is *remotely* close to the skills you need to develop in order to be able to drive a race car at the limit of adhesion.
Time after time, I've seen the triumph of testosterone over talent. Most who try get their egos bruised so badly that they never return. An extra facet is that ego is often tied to which car you own. so when your mighty Porsche or Corvette is humbled by, say, a Neon... well, there are those who who never recover from that particular shock.
Those that can face facts, admit to themselves that driving is indeed a LEARNED, not inherited skill, and start from square one tend to be the future champions. The sport is full of drivers who are full of sound and fury, but don't actually produce.
But having said that....
You still need to be able to tap into that testosterone fueled agression in order to do REALLY well. My best runs are always done in a state that can only be described as carefully controlled rage. Racing requires aggression - not wild, berserker aggression, but the ability to attack the course and push the limits while still maintaining control.
Interestingly enough, by particular flavour of motorsports actually has a large number of female participants. We have classes specifically for women. Women may choose to run with the men in the "open" classes, but historically few do so.
And it is undeniable that the women are, on average, a good deal slower than the men - often, in the same cars (husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend teams often compete in the same vehicle)
There really isn't, in this day of power brakes and power steering, a good physical reason for that. I expect that the men's Olympic shot put or weightlifting teams will probably always outperform the women - that's just physical size and strength talking. But in what we do, there is no physical reason why the women should be slower, on average, than the men. But they are.
That's not to say that the women are SLOW - there are lots of women who, had they run in the open class for the same car, would finish mid-pack or slightly better. I know some women who are very quick indeed. But they tend to lack that special something that puts them over the top from "good" to "great".
I think it's the testosterone. I think that same drive to master everything, no matter how much it hurts or how much it scares you, it what gives the top men that little extra push over the top women. A good part of what goes into championship-level success is the ability to keep on keepin' on, even when everybody else thinks you're nuts.
So don't be dissin' the testosterone sister.
DG
Put me on the "me too" list.
As a coder, your first priority is to optimise for human legibility. Ideally, you should be able to use any code snippet you write as a tutorial on that particular algorithm for a complete newbie.
This is an investment in the quality of the code after it has been released. The easier it is to read and understand, the easier it will be to fix the bugs that are ALWAYS discovered once code reaches the users.
Incidently, it may not be some faceless nobody who benefits from your forward-thinking - it may be YOU. Prolific, expert coders work on a LOT of different projects, and what is second-nature today may be long forgotten tomorrow. That obscure obfuscated nifty hack may come back to bite you some day.
Most of the production stuff I wrote during my tenure at a Big 3 auto manufacturer was done in perl. There is a language that lets you be as clever and obscure as you wish. Not once did I ever regret choosing to optimise for legibility - and besides, it's cool to have some junior coder come up to you one day and tell you that your code, that he inherited, taught him how to use the language.
And an odd side effect... I can't prove this rigourously, but it seems sometimes that code optimised for legibility seems to compiler-optimise particularly well. Subjectively, not only are your intents clear to some future maintainer or collabirator, but also to the COMPILER itself. After all, what's a program if not a conversation between yourself and the compiler?
DG
I agree with you, both in the claim that this phenomenon is not psudoscience, and that calling it a "sixth sense" is somewhat sensational.
The article spells out the test methodology in detail, and it seems solid.
But I have personal experience with this.
I have had extensive navigation training, first as a pilot, and then later in a military career. The Army in particular had very high standards for needing to know exactly where you were at all times (to within 100m) without the aid of something like a GPS.
So you learn to keep a visualization of your surroundings in your head, and to cross-reference that visualization against whatever tools you have (like a map, compass, or odometer) at regular intervals to keep the internal representation in sync with the real world. After some practice, this becomes second nature - muscle memory stuff.
But there's an odd side-effect, at least there is with me. If I make a wrong turn, miss an exit, or make some sort of navigational mistake, something in my subconscious will pick up on it well before I'm ever consciously aware of it (especially if my conscious is somehow distracted away from navigation) It's hard to put into words... but I will get a profound sense of "wrongness", like an inaudible alarm bell. The more I ignore it, the worse it gets.
I have learned not to ignore it. If that alarm goes off, I'll immediately make navigation the highest-priority mental task - and without fail, I will have just goofed somehow.
Unfortunately, this ability does not convey any other information other than "you are no longer on the planned course". There is a recognition function in there, but no follow-on advisory function. It's still up to conciousness to correct the problem once discovered.
When it happens though... it's really a very odd feeling, and it's quite strong.
DG
I don't know about you, but I've never written a perfect program.
I assume that anything that gets released with source will have that source tweaked by someone to fix some bug somewhere.
I want those bugfixes to make their way back into the "general release" source. A bug fixed by one should be a bug fixed for all.
So for me at least, it's not that I'm afraid of the program being "stolen", but rather that I want to encourage the bugfixes to come back to me, and not be locked up in a box somewhere.
DG
I'm totally with you on the ability of people to recognise patterned behaviour, typically far faster than a game designer might suspect.
:)
But people can also discover "emergant" patterns that aren't necessarily explicitly programmed in.
I remember playing Sargon III Chess on my C-64. I accidentally discovered that the AI couldn't see - I'm no chess geek, so I'm sure there's an official term - "indirect" attacks. Rather than move piece A to sqaure Q ro threaten enemy piece X, I'd move some other piece B onto the line of attack that I wanted to make A->X, blocking the attack. Then piece A would be moved into attack position on Q, and piece B moved out of the way, unblocking the A->X attack.
The AI seemed to be able to predict that a straight move to Q by A would threaten X, and it would be very good at countering those moves. But attacks from a third piece by moving some other piece out of the attack line were invisible to it.
Once discovered, this lead to strategies that involved setting up elabourate attacks that hinged upon "reveals". It'd drive the AI nuts. Sadly, actual humans do not suffer from this blind spot and ol' Sargon did not improve my RL chess playing ability one bit.
Here's another example of a different kind:
One summer, a group of my friends played a TON of the original Battletech board game aginst each other. We'd start after supper and go to the wee hours of the morning, day after day after day.
In so doing, we developed a particularly effective strategy. We'd have a 4-lance company. The first lance was composed of stripped-down lightweights equipped with maximum jump jet capacity and a single weapon - a flamer. The second lance was of superheavy, very low-mobility, weakly-armoured, long-range rocket artillery units. The third was ultra-heavy, low mobility, heavily armoured massive close-in-damage units, and the fourth was the reserve unit of heavy cannon equipped hovercraft.
As is typical for wargames, the faster you move, the harder you are to hit. There was a further negative modifier if the 'mech was jumping. Our lightweights, if they jumped full distance every turn, accumulated so many negative to-hit modifiers that they were unhittable. They would fan out over the game board, spotting the enemy and setting fire to terrain - which in the game rules, happened 100% with the use of the flamer - and which caused vision blocking due to smoke, plus there was a chance for the fire to spread to adjacent hexes.
The lightweights could also spot for the indirect fire lance with minimal penalties. The indirect fire lance would never move; it would just fire salvo after salvo of long range missiles. The hit rate wasn't great and the distribution of LRM fire tends to spread damage easily, but enough would hit as to ablate off some enemy armour - and the psychological effect of taking damage from an unseen source without the ability to retaliate... it was maddening.
Meanwhile, the heavy, close-in units would slowly advance up to intercept positions. Thanks to the madly-hopping lightweights and the smoke, we'd know where the enemy was but the enemy wouldn't know where we were.
The enemy would thus blunder up against the close-in units, which did monster amounts of damage with a high hit probability (the enemy unit was often moven slowly, due to the smoke, and the close-in unit would be stationary). It was not unusual to destroy an enemy unit in a single turn.
If things got sticky for whatever reason, the hovercraft would race in from the flank/rear and could disrupt the most cleverly planned counterattacks.
With all the practice we got, these tactics became drills - they could very easily have been scripted.
We put this to the test at a wargame convention, and we slaughtered everybody, without losing a single 'mech in any battle. Towards the end, the organizers were matching us upwards of 3 to 1; we just could not be beat.
Needless to say, we were not invited back.
DG
Dude, I saw him at the mall. He was over by that place where that local-access TV station was doing a dating game ripoff show.
DG
One of my favourite demos with my old Amiga 2000 back in 1989 or so was to have a C program compiling on the Bridgeboard, a Pascal program compiling in a shell window, and then drag down the Workbench screen about halfway to reveal F/A-18 Interceptor running behind. I'd then play the game (with no slowdown) while the compilers kept churning away.
:)
For its time, it was an amazing bit of hardware.
I always liked AmigaDOS because it combined the best features of UNIX (in the shell, and with AREXX scripting) and MacOS's GUI features.
Nowadays, the GUI on Linux has gotten to the point where it is far superior than anything the Amiga ever had. A modern RedHat/Fedora box really is the spiritual successor to the Amiga.
The only thing I miss (two things actually):
1) Every Amiga application worth its salt has an AREXX port, because it was trivial to implement. That meant you could script EVERYTHING, including moving data back and forth between applications. It was awesome; you could batch-process every single application on the box.
2) The speech synth chip. This was awsome in Netrek, because you could play the team chat window through it and turn it into a radio - get all the team communications without having to take your eyes off the galaxy map.
DG
He who collects the most wives wins!
DG
Both Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are outstanding books (and I would add Xenocide to that list), just for different reasons. They speak to different things.
Sadly, Children of the Mind slips a bit, and the follow-on, return-to-the-well "Shadow" series is just horrible.
My advice is to purchase:
"Ender's Game"
"Speaker for the Dead"
"Xenocide"
"Children of the Mind"
and then stop. Pretend he died shortly thereafter.
DG
You may wish to do some more reading - might I suggest www.snopes.org ? Every facet of the process of evolution (including speciation) has been observed and proven out. There are NO holes.
Holes in the progression from some ancestor species to some decendant species, yes - many. But all the processes of both "macro" and "micro" evolution have been proven and documented.
The "hot dog" analogy was not one of evolution, but rather on the need for "faith" in science. "Faith" is unecessary when the entire process can be observed in action.
The big difference between cruelty in the name of science and cruelty in the name of religon is that religon supposedly has a supernatural guardian who is dictating the words - if a certain passage in the Bible promotes cruelty, that's not a *human* failing (as is cruelty in science) but rather the explicit Will of God. If people do horrible acts in God's name based on God's Word, and especially if they meet with success, then that must mean they are carrying out God's Will, no?
So let me ask you then - those people who burned hundreds of young girls alive for the crime of witchcraft, were they carrying out God's Will or not?
If so, how can a good and just God countenance such cruelty?
If not, why didn't God step in to prevent the perversion of His Word? It's not like the witch-burners were _evil_ - they were just carrying out the orders given to them in the Bible. They thought they were carrying out their pious duty to God.
And what if said crucial passage turns out to be mistranslated? Who then bears the responsibility?
I'm thankful your God doesn't exist. If he did, he'd be a right asshole.
DG
Except that every precept of evolution in operation - including both "micro" and "macro" - has been observed happening. There is no portion of the evolutionary process that has not been tested and proven out.
The only portion "missing" is the direct historical record by which any particular given species (most commonly, homo sapiens) came about. We do not know the exact progression from form to form, species to species, that eventually produced us.
A very large portion of that progression can be deduced, both from observations of the fossil record, and from biochemical forensics. These give clues towards how our species developed - for example, we are biologically nearly identical to certain primates, which means we share a recent, common ancestor. Exactly WHICH ancestor that might be, we may never know - and really, it's not all that important, because the PROCESS is so very well understood.
If you have a hot dog, tracking the component parts of that hot dog back to the original cow that produced its raw materials is a difficult proposition. But given that the process for turning a cow into a hot dog is well documented and easily demonstrated, it takes no faith at all to know that every hot dog has as its ancestor a given cow (or cows)
Similarily, even though the exact progression from single-celled organism to me sitting at this computer is unknown, the fact that such a progression took place requires no faith at all - because I can see and understand the underlying mechanism (which has been observed so thouroughly)
Interestingly enough, one might describe the Bible as an "evolutionary" work, as it is changed through a succession of translators and editors. Its meaning changes all the time. Does God change His mind? If we discover that the word "witch" in "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (the root of all those witch burnings - you remember, when people were burned alive with religous sanction) was actual a mistranslation of, oh, say "poisoner", does that mean that all those people were needlessly horribly tortured and murdered in the name of God, or that God has decided that witches are now OK?
DG
The various flavours of Creationism rely on the infallibility of the Bible - the Bible says that it is true, thus, it is true.
If, however, he has to tweak the Bible in order to fit its words into established reality, via the mechanism of "mistranslation", then the Bible becomes fallible, and EVERY word in it is suspect.
The Bible is either the correctly transcribed, perfect word of God, or it is not. If it has to be "corrected" to match known reality, then that is a strong argument that perhaps the wiser course would be to study that reality and ignore the obviously flawed book.
Incidently, you have a flawed assumption of your own in there. Evolution, simply stated, is a process whereby organisms use sexual reproduction to pass inherited traits to their offspring. If those traits promote some sort of reproductive advantage, they tend to survive and get passed along to the next generation. If those traits provide some sort of reproductive disadvantage, then they tend to be culled before they can be reproduced and passed along.
This is a necessary side-effect of the way DNA and sex works.
But there is no "direction" to evolution. Evolution does not "seek" "higher" forms.Instead, the pressures of evolution tend to select organisms who are better survivors in their particular environment.
If your environment is an underwater hot mineral vent, you are probably better off as a microbe or a worm than as a bird or a monkey. And if those vents suddenly shut off, the selective pressures of your new environment will probably work against you rather than for you.
So your underlying assumption that "evolution moves to a higher state" is false. Evolution seeks no such thing. Evolution seeks to adapt organisms to their environment - HOW that happens is strictly a matter of chance.
DG
I'm a former Armoured soldier, and morover, I own this book. It's outstanding.
One of the major points raised in the book is that historically, there were support networks baked into units that helped deal with the residual mental stresses.
To use the WW2 example, a unit would be in for the duration, which means that the personel in it would remain fairly constant with time. There would be some turnover with casulties and promotions, but for the most part, the men in the unit would have trained together, fought alongside each other, and gone home together.
I don't know about the Americans so much, but Canadian units (historically, not so much any more) were often formed from distinct population centres. The guys you went to war alongside were your friends and neighbors.
The "gone home" part is very important. There was a time delay when units were pulled off the field and sent home, and the trip home was by boat, which is slow. So the men would have an opportunity to be in each other's company and aclimatise to the transition between incipient death/kill or be killed, and normal civillian life.
That probably sounds all Oprah... and it's not like they sat around having group hugs and circle cries. But you know soldiers - they talk to each other. By the end of the war, they were closer than brothers. They'd be able to help each other deal with some of the mental damage (even though I doubt any of them would _express_ it that way)
Presumably, the same sort of thing has happened throughout history. If you marched across Europe in a war of conquest (be it armed with stone axes, bronze spears, steel swords, or muskets) you're gonna be marching home again too. You'll be spending a lot of time in each other's company without the threat of death or needing to kill hanging over you.
Compare, however, to Vietnam, with the 1 year in country tour programme. No longer was the goal to "win the war so we can all go home" - now you just had to stay alive for your year. Unit turnover was constant, so bonding between soldiers was not as common and not as profound. And it was entirely possible to be in the jungle in the morning, and be discharged and back in the US in the evening - no support network.
And what war has the reputation for the greatest number of post-discharge mental problems? Vietnam.
As far as the Rwanda example goes, they're living in their support structure. You and your buddies from the same tribe went out and killed people from the other tribe - together - and then you go back to your village and stay in each other's company. you can work out your residual stresses amongst themselves.
I'm simplifying of course, but you get the idea. The book does a far better job discussing it.
DG
The Canadian version is called the C9.
Ours has optical sights.
And it is by no means "hefty". It's small and light, compared to either the C6 GPMG or the older Browning GPMG.
Heavier than the C7/C8 assault rifles to be sure, but you can actually pick up and run with the thing. Running is not a lot of fun with the C6.
It was by far my favourite weapon. Even though it weighed more, I preferred it to the C7/C8.
DG
There is, however, a side-effect of this whole "finding the story" process that you have (accurately) described.
The tone of the book is very much "Hobbit" like in the first chapters, but as we wend our way towards Rivendell, the tone grows darker and more "adult".
This winds up mirroring a similar journey for the hobbits, who start off as childlike and neive (like the tone) but get much more worldly as they get exposed to the real world.
Bombadil works in the book, because he shows up near the start when the hobbits are still in juvenile fairy-tale mode. If he were a denizen of Ithlien, he would seem jarring and out of place.
And I agree that it made perfect sense to cut him from the movie.
DG