metadigital

As does posting comments helps us readers to write better -- because most inveterate readers are frustrated writers ... :D

"Form of: an ex-Soviet bloc city" "Shape of: an Hapsburg ancestral cultural sactuary"

Way Off-Topic 2: The Search for the Missing Members ... "

It's funny that Liverpool won't be able to defend their title next year, though. " Why is there so much enmity between two cities so close together ... maybe England needs a Hungarian solution, where the two sprawling metropolises can unite as Buda and Pest once did, over the Danube ...

Yes, but it's the first installment of the Prequels to the Prequels Trilogy - so it's Episode -2, -1 and then 0. ^_^ <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Evidently you are more magnaminous in your assessment of GL's mathematical ability than I am ...

If you are having trouble with all combat, it indicates a strategic flaw. Think about how you are preparing for battle; you certainly shouldn't be dual-weilding with only the one feat -- that's why you are missing so often. Master Flurry has no penalties, and Master Speed I use constantly: if I could I would have it on "replay" so I didn't have to keep pressing the power button. How have you levelled up Kreia? She can be a good m

I'll tell you after I play it ... might fire it up now. PS Baley I'm surprised you didn't explore and find the Bikini mod ...

Okay, I am back and I've braved chapter 2. A couple of minor points: "tabled", as in "She tabled the issue for further consultation" means "put away" in the US and "bring out" in the UK. Secondly, I generally dislike having characters with overly similar names; your twins are irritating to disambiguate, much the same as Saron and Sarumon were for me in LotR. Now, I like this chapter a lot more than the first. Karn seems to be a better character, I would say he has been worked on more, because he has more depth and that comes across. One small point, you don't seem to include any negative characteristics in your descriptions; even Karn's habitual tardiness is left to inferrence and another character's comments. I find adding things like having a hang-over or a hang-nail add some depth. I like the post-apocalyptic setting, the contrivance of dates and the use of Aztec nomenclature -- only do please remember to explain the gods / artifacts all the time, because I for one tend to skim those words as they appear similar and I can't pronounce them anyway! I was a little puzzled that Karn has taught himself a lot of science where it is obvious that there isn't any Great Library to help ... that might lead to credibilty problems later, depending on if he builds a laser blaster from a couple of coconuts (unless you're doing a Gilligan's Island spoof or a homage to Holy Grail). :D you might just want to expand on that a bit, or provide some sort of artifact to explain it, rather than giving him the knowledge. I must admit I have little idea what you will write next, except I imagine Karn and the shapechanger dude are going to meet. (Oh, I liked Galileo in the first chapter, too, I think all spaceships should have a hologram of a great scientist.)

Here's a nominee who survived: Exploding Outhouse 2004 Darwin Award Nominee Confirmed True by Darwin (13 July 2004, West Virginia) An unidentified man in Blacksville, while relaxing in a portable outhouse, decided that it would be even more relaxing to light up a cigarette, inadvertently demonstrating another reason to give up the life-shortening habit. According to a spokeswoman for the ambulance, the methane in the porta-potty

Well, that was a bit of a downer ... so I'll add something fun: here is a Half-Life 2 role playing mod.

:D ) Cancer is an umbrella term for lots of diseases. Any mutation that causes the cell to duplicate without dying is a form of cancer, e.g. Leukemia ("any of various acute or chronic neoplastic diseases of the bone marrow in which unrestrained proliferation of white blood cells occurs, usually accompanied by anemia, impaired blood clotting, and enlargement of the lymph nodes, liver, and spleen"). I think the best answer is we haven't enough knowledge about shark physionomy yet. After all, it is only in the last couple of years we have worked out their extra senses. (And they are boneless, so good to eat.) Also there is debate about genetic manipulation of the germ cells (i.e. sperm and ovum), should society allow the design of all future decendants, or just the current people?

That was a thought experiment of the future of the Earth if people just vanished, not a bona fide prediction. But yes, encephelopods (the clue is in the name) are very intelligent, and have complex social interactions in their groups,so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that they will develop further over the next few millions of years.

Hmm, interesting pov. Global Dimming is the process whereby particulate pollution adheres to the ice crystals in cloud formations. It is a direct result of the buring of distilate fossil fuels. It is possibly the cause of the famine in Ethiopia twenty years ago that we all donated money to in Live Aid. What happens is the particulate matter adheres to the water crystals. this gives the crystals more surface area to precipitate onto. The net affect of this is that more of the sun's radiation is absorbed by the cloud-pollution mix, causing a diffusion of heating that can change global weather patterns, like moving the monsoons over North Africa north and avoiding the crops of the poor farmers there. Evidence of the Global Dimming phenomena was first uncovered by a couple of Australian scientists who noticed that some fifty-year-old calculations for heating a given quantity of water with solar radiation were not consistent. What they discovered led them to analyze the clouds and build a weather model. The scary thing is that Global Dimming actually minimises the effects of Global Warming. You may be right, there may be a natural upswing in global temperature due to some geological timeframe; but the fact that 25% of the world's population is using 85% of the resorces, and China and India are only just beginning to industrialise using fossil fuels, coupled with the fact that greenhouse gases are on a cycle of decades, means that we should not be complacent. Oh, and there aren't any scientists that don't believe in global warming as a result of fossil fuel use. Only the US government actually persists in this fiction, like the tobacco companies usd to insist that there was no proven link between smoking and lung cancer (even though their own researchers quashed attempts to market a "safer cigarette" in the 60s as it would naturally lead people to conclude there was such a thing as "unsafe cigarettes") -- sustainable development is only a more costly method of production because the true costs are not factored in. If I build a hose with bricks and particle board and render like a modern builder in a developed country does, this is a totally different cost model to creating the bricks from mud and baking them in a kiln and waiting for them to set and chopping soem trees down and waiting for the wood to set and smithing some nails from freshly smeltered iron ore. It also doesn't behoove the developed countries to act irresponsibly on global environmental issues, because the developing world is about to multiply the problem (or hopefully the solutions).

Well, without reading the entire thread you have linked, I would say that all the organisms that exist now (apart from sponges and some bacteria) are mutations with added value. All life practically died at the beginning of the Proterozoic eon, 2.5 billion years ago (it might have been higher than 90%, say 98%, I don't remember the exact figure, I read about it fifteen years ago). So everything we have today comes from those few single cell organisms. If I have time I'll read the thread and comment further.

I do, however, like a bit of "customizable past". In Arcanum, for instance, you can choose various pasts such as "raised by wolves" or "joined the circus", etc. I like the idea of having a list in dialogue like this: "I'm from Tatooine and my dad is a moisture farmer" "I'm from Onderon and my (late) dad was a senator" etc, etc and for this to have some bearing on how the story progresses...that would be cool. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, and stuff like that ain't hard to implement either. It's just as easy to write dialogue for that kindda stuff as it is to write dialogue for male/female or charachter name. I wonder why it isn't done more often? Everybody loves character customization, so lets have more sutomization! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I agree. I think the main reason why this sort of customisation is not done is because the whole process is skimped on; no real effort is invested in the main point of the game. I quite often take upwards of an hour deciding on the exact attributes of a PC in NwN, for example, and there are only a few options to choose from (class, skills, physical appearance, etc )

That's a tough call. Could we be our own demise? And from a religious perspective, would God allow us to do such things? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, humans are already unique in all creation ( :D ) in that they change their environment. Oh, okay beavers build damns , but humans build cities and deforest whole continents and pump enough of certain types of gas into the atmosphere to cause global warming and enough particulate matter into the air to cause global dimming; just as the Aztecs should serve as a poignant lesson in the consequences of terra-de-forming (their capital city was 100 square kilometers in area), and evidence of life's innate ability to adapt (try and find it now without satellite infravision under the canopy of some of the densest jungles in the world!).

I'm still struggling to understand your question -- Does methicilin-restitance provide other benfits? Other than survival, you mean? I have no idea. I don't know what the individual parts of the resistence are -- whether it involves a faster mitosis rate or a sturdier neucleic barrier -- or whether it just laughs in the face of this puny fungal decendant. The point is, to survive it needed to adapt this way. And life always adapts. Roaches, crabs, scorpions, trilobites etc -- all the armoured anthropods -- will survive long past us mammals, they've been here on Earth for about 0.5 billion years (amongst the first creatures out of the sea), so us ephemeral homo sapiens sapiens, who have only been around less than a million years, and had any sort of society for 30 thousand years, can't even imagine the 60 million years back to when the dinosaurs died out. There have been several massive kills of most exiting life on Earth. One was a couple of billion years ago (at the beginning of the Paleoproterozoic era, which is the beginning of the Proterozoic eon, the geological period starting 2.5 billion years ago; before the Cambrian explosion approximately 0.54 billion years ago,

Sure, that sounded a bit harsh (especially for the Way Off-Topic forum! :D ). It is incredible that there are still fundametalists that insist in a literal interpretation of the Bible. What is ironic is that fundamentalist bigotry, pogroms, and religious intolerance was the very thing the forefathers fled from in Europe. There are a lot of scientists on the fringes of our knowledge (e.g. the particle physicists) that are very religious, too. I am quite sure you will not find any factual reason why a god can or cannot exist. It is merely a question of faith. Some people look into the void and insist that there must be something more. Others don't see it. Whether the first group are the proberbial blind man seeing a black cat in a dark room, or the if the cat isn't really there, as the second group insists, is all down to faith. What is reprehensible is the militant insistance on evagelizing to convert human capital to a particular theology as a political endeavour, whether this is overt or accidental.

Well, one in six people have some sort of mental illness, including depression which has the most sufferers, who also tend to be more intelligent and/or talented: Van Gogh, Churchill, every single comic, ever (and it also affects 50% of women at some point in their life). One in ten have been abused as a child in some way (physically or sexually). We live in a sad society, where rich people get richer at the expense of poorer people. What did Eddie Murphy say? If poo was worth something then poor people would be born without arseholes. (I've cleaned that up a bit.)

I guess the way to resolve the issues is to work on precedent; the first film has more authority than the sixth, and all of them are more authoritative than anything else. The big issues come when GL either revises the films or contradicts himself in a later film (both of which he does with irritating regularity; he is a perfect advert for the Dark Side expediency of Chaotic alignment ...) It wouldn't surprise me if GL made a new SW movie about some existing part of the EU and completely ignored the EU and made up new histories and characters.

If I understand your question, I think you are asking if it is possible for the successful variant of a bateria to have less genetic mutation information. I would say yes, it is possible. Whether this is the case, I don't know categorically. As most of the variants of Golden Staff would be killed by the antibaterial agents used in a hospital, for example, then the limited ones that survive would not have the bredth of genetic diversity that the larger initial group would, anymore than if the Nazis had killed off all the other races except Arian blue-eyed, blonde haired people would not have the genetic diversity that included that only people from Africa have in their genetic makeup.

You should stop trying to derail the thread about evolution into a thread about the validity of religion. Most religious people do not have a problem with evolution: in fact you would be hard pressed to find many people outside the Bible Belt in the US who do. To argue against evolution is to insist that the entire world, all the scientific evidence from all spheres of science: be it interstellar gaseous chromotography or gene therapy, or plate tectonics, or radioacitve decay, or lingusitics, or whatever else we study all support evolution. The concept of a god is only discounted on purely logic terms: if god is not necessary, then why have one? If you say "God created the universe, and god has always been here" why can't I say the same about the universe, without the need for a god? That's what Occham's Razor, which is the principle of simplying cmplex statements by removing anything not necessary. Especially if we can providfe evidence of the forward process of time on the constituent elements of the universe and it provides a consistent and independently verifiable story. If you want to believe in any metaphysical adjunct to the real world, that is your choice; at no point is the validity of science ever in question by said belief.

MRSA is a perfect example of the "Survival of the Fittest" concept propounded by Charles Darwin in his scientific paper "On the Origin of Species". MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is just plain old garden-variety Staphylococcus -- "Golden Staff" -- that has bred resitance to the most powerful poisons used to kill it. Consequently, doctors cannot use penicillin or any other drug, as even their "doomsday weapon", namely methicillin, doesn't work on it. The MRSA strain has grown from the small percentage of organisms that had a natural resistance to the poisons; as all other forms of Golden Staff died, they were able to grow without competition and so became a dominant strain (in the local area: be it a petri dish or a bed pan).

What colour?

The same, innit? A mandal wore a mandal armour. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I've just never, EVER heard of them referred to as a "mandal" before. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The living language that is English; here we witness first hand the major motivator for speech modification: laziness. I thought "Mandy" was the accepted abbreviation for Mandalore and his Mandalorians, when referred to singly, and "Mandies" would presumably by plural.