Cancer

Re: The cranky thread Gah, I am clearly having a Bad Day, mostly (but not completely) just failed DEX tests. Any systematic negative modifier just kills me, with my raw DEX 6. At least I got my bookmarks mostly reconstructed, and a copy thrown out onto the backed-up-nightly group data disk.

Re: How can you feed this many people? I'm near the end of a very interesting book, The Little Ice Age. Lots of stray data that would be relevant for this thread. Two pounds of bread a day seems to have been the standard for peasant Europe, France in particular. In a big fantasy city, the greatest concern would be crowd control. If food fails, you get bread riots. The larger the discrepancy between rich and poor (i.e. the closer the poor are to literal starvation) the greater the threat of said riots, both in terms of severity and scale. When the revolutionaries cried out "Peace, land, and bread", they meant that last very literally. That leads me to suspect that the bread depots in a big fantasy city would be the most important (and most thankless) government post. The heart of those depots could be just a minor mage with one spell: mass duplication of a single inanimate object. Once a week, each depot gets a fresh new 2-pound loaf of bread. The mage's task is to mass-duplicate this loaf, and the other depot staff sees to it that every person with a valid bread chit who claims it gets their one loaf. That way you could support a very large, and very squalid, urban population with minimal resources and one spell. The limitation is just on how many depots you have, which is probably limited by how fast you can get the peasants and and out the storefront.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? One of my nominees for greatest rock albums of all time, Deep Purple's Machine Head.

Re: The cranky thread Man, I hate it when my browser crashes hard and wipes out my bookmarks. Time to re-create the collection, and then throw a back-up copy somewhere. I'm a moron for not doing that latter before, the last time this happened.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER I recall (when I was in a state university math department) hoping that none of our conservative legislators looked at the on-line course schedule and saw the department's offering with the abbreviated course title "COMPLEX ANAL".

Re: The Last Word Event horizon.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Over at Neopets one of the items you can equip your pet with is "Battle Dung" ... Man, that just sets my scatological sense of humor going full time. May have to start in on that one.

Re: What Would Your Character Do #33 Mr. Terrific's powers come when he takes one of his power pills, and the effects of each pill lasts two minutes (tops). The rest of the time he is a skilled normal. Therefore his situation is, at worst, the same as, say, someone who's gone violent while on PCP or some other illegal drug. I suspect there is a wealth of ecclesiastical scholarship that argues that the soul does not take flight from the body when the body is controlled by a drug, so in the formal sense, the charge is refuted.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER ... and with those exhibitions of anal aggression, we revert to the true fundamental nature of the NGD boards.

Re: The Last Word Or is that aleph-null?

Re: So yeah, about those Star Hero lasers....

Re: Juke Box Heroes This concept could take you down the same kind of path as in the movie Rollerball (and I only saw the first one ... man, any movie that opens with Tocatta and Fugue in d minor ... well, that's what I would want as my theme music)....

Re: So yeah, about those Star Hero lasers.... If the laser is of visible wavelengths, then at night, scattering of laser photons in the air makes the beam visible to the dark-adapted eye long before the beam is powerful enough to do any damage (except to the eye if you take the beam in the retina). In fact, you can successfully "range" the Moon (measure the distance by time-of-flight techniques) with visible lasers that aren't powerful enough to be seen by such scattered light with the unaided eye. If the laser isn't in the visible window, then if you see it, you'll be looking at the fluorescence of the plasma channel it carves through the air. And that would consume a lot of the radiated power.

Re: The Last Word Don't eat that shotgun, I need it for my debugging.

Re: How Dense Is A Nebula? Yes, I know where to look. Oh, wait ... you want the details in a convenient format? Hmm. That's harder. Lemme do a bit of googling and see what I can find. It's quite possible that this isn't going to be something that has been satisfactorily translated out of Tech-ese, though. That you limit it to 30 parsecs helps, sort of. That's a pretty piddly small part of the Galaxy. Yeah, to first order, that volume is mostly hot phase: we're mostly in the "Local Bubble". Turns out that phrase "Local Bubble" is one where Google feeds you lots of good stuff. Other links are here and here ... those have graphics, the second one may be more technical than you want. A simpler site (with less info) is here.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER OK, ok. Birks with socks only look good if you don't give a **** what other people think you look like. Like I said, I hang around with academics too much.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Ever tried Birkenstocks? Maybe I hang around too much in academic circles, but you can get away with those, even with socks.

Re: How Dense Is A Nebula? How complex do you want to get? When you introduce the interstellar medium ("ISM") to students, one of the phrases you introduce is the "three phase ISM". Because of how gas cools by radiation at various temperatures, there are only limited temperature regimes which are stable (that is, will persist for times longer than the collapse time of the cloud ... though it has to be noted that those collapse times are rather long on a human timescale!). These are characterized as "hot" (millions Kelvin), "warm" (thousands Kelvin), and "cold" (tens Kelvin). Very roughly, these states can be considered to be in pressure equilibrium ... which means that the product of (particle density) * (temperature) is approximately the same in all of them. This isn't exactly the same as saying the density of atoms varies in the same way, because the ionization fraction changes drastically among the three phases: the hot state is about 100% ionized, and the cold state is <1% ionized. (A decent helpful page is here.) It also doesn't tell you about dust, which is strongly more concentrated in the cold phase. The relative proportions of the three phases is something we wish we knew. I think it is fair to say that BY VOLUME IN THE GALAXY -- that is, sort of how likely you are to encounter a phase if you travelling in a starship -- the "cold" state is the least common and the "hot" state is the most. The numbers I recall dimly (I did stars, not ISM) are sort of hot:warm:cold 60:30:10. Those numbers are "ancient" ... that is, from my circa-1980 pre-Hubble Space Telescope grad school days ... and could be hideously antiquated now.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER About to go dark for the rest of the week, off on vacation. BTW, if you've never visited an old US Coastal Artillery fort, they are Way Cool. I wish the guns (or even just correct-scale mock-ups) were still emplaced, but they're still fun even with just the concrete.

Re: Why no heavy cavalry? The heavy armored lancer, what we think of when we think of the mounted knight, has two technological prerequisites: invention of the stirrup, and development of breeds of horses large enough to carry tack, armored rider, and its own armor while still being fast enough so the impact shock makes it worth it. If you want to have other riding animals for the same purpose, then the "warhorse" breed of that animal also has to be stupid and aggressive enough that it will charge into a thicket of spears. If the draft animals are too small to carry that burden, or too intelligent to perform headlong charges into near-certain death, or too slow for a charge to be worth it, then you won't get heavy lancers. The Roman era didn't have horses large enough to have heavy lancers, though war elephants did exist; elephants are not lance-type animals, though. They tend to go berserk when combat starts, and although that is gratifyingly destructive, it isn't the steerable charge that horse cavalry gets you. Horse cavalry in that era were slashing-sword types and horse archers.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan

Re: The cranky thread Step on the Hairy Tick!

Re: The Last Word 2.95 million lines is too much debugging output.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Hoo-Dee-Hoo. The thing is running. I don't know yet how wrongly it's running, but it's running, and it's not stuck in a loop because the numbers aren't all the same, and all my diagnostic outputs are slowing it down a bunch so it's time to yank some of those out. Not to mention the 92-megs-and-growing log file. I might make Monday's (self-imposed) deadline yet.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Seeing this one item alone on the page, without context, I wondered if this was about some new venereal infection, one of the women pictured in the cat-suit thread, or something like that. Maybe all at once.