womble

If someone knows the Complete Works 'cold', they'll probably be able to communicate their thoughts relatively cogently. Lit classes don't just require memorisation. My maths education involved learning about compound interest, as well as Pythagoras. We did Pythagoras first, because that's pretty effin' simple. It only involves powers of 2 and addition. If someone couldn't handle that, they couldn't handle compound interest equations. There is definitely room for both in the system. The problem with maths is that kids are taught, or learn very fast, that "maths is hard". So you end up with people asking whether measurements are offered in cm or mm when simple common sense tells you that a waist high thing is not 90mm high... Functional innumeracy is unfortunately prevalent; combine that with the Societal demands for material posessions Right the heck now!!!!! and you've got a personal credit crisis. Schools shouldn't have to teach saving-to-buy... The problem as I see it with language teaching is that it's gotten too relaxed, and actual use of language has been deprioritised over appreciation of it and freedom of means of expression. You really need to know the rules before you start breaking them.

Aunty says the Syrians are claiming the civs were off base. They are also asserting that the Syrians are claiming that not all the TLAMs made it to the target area. It is conceivable that there were civilian casualties from cruise missiles that fell out of the sky short of the boundary fence for whatever reason. Syria does have a pretty good air defense network, IIRC, courtesy of Mr Putin, and Tomahawks can be shot down.

I think there's so much bound up in tissues other than blood that you'd want to use some kind of magical means to extract the iron. Myoglobin, for example, won't account for a trivial proportion of the iron in a body; less than the iron in haemoglobin, probably, but of a similar magnitude... And it's really hard even to get all the blood out by mundane methods.

That enunciates the problem I think. It's what it looks like to an outsider, and if someone who comes from the background can corroborate, it seems to add emphasis.

Yes it was. Urban, diverse communities tended to vote for remaining within Europe, while whiter rural districts voted to leave. Some of that will have been because the rural districts see accession-state citizens taking the menial, largely unskilled agricultural labour jobs, and pushing out the native youngsters. There are more jobs, and better, needing more skills and better English, in the cities, so the impact of willing labour in towns isn't so noticeable, except in the quality of plastering and reliability of plumbers. [The above may include some tongue-in-cheek stereotyping - Ed]

There's probably some principle of moving goalposts here, though: "Working 27 hours a day so you can pay for healthcare is unhealthy, so we're going to push your premiums up so you need to eat cheap process-recovered food padded out with carcinogens to keep your food bills down enough to be able to afford the cost of health insurance. But eating that crap is even more unhealthy, so we're going to increase your premium so you have to scrimp on the heating/aircon, which increases your chance of sickness, so we're going to up your contribution again..."

I'm sorry I don't have any answers, but I wanted to add another globalisation-sanctioning inequality that would need to be addressed to bring a "level playing field": environmental legislation. While China (et al) can continue to burn cheap coal in inefficient power stations, their goods will remain cheaper even if their labour costs equalise. Unfortunately, it looks like the general Governmental Will is to equalise this field by eroding the environmental protections already in place in the "first world".

Michael, you might have set that off yourself if you were noodling about teh Intarwebz researching/boggling at the activities of those folk.

In the interest of verisimilitude, in case you get a gun buff in your group... The percussion cap serves the same purpose and largely superceded the flintlock. Both are methods of initiating deflagration in a propellant charge. The propellant charge was black powder for the operational era of the flintlock, and early "percussion lock" guns also used black powder. Later percussion cap guns may have used more advanced propellants, but by the time those came about, the percussion cap had been incorporated into the composite brass cartridge. You can have a musket (smooth bore, one shot long barrelled, fired with both hands from the shoulder) with either 'lock'. Early percussion locks pretty much just swapped out the flintlock's frizzen pan for a cap nipple, and the flint-holding hammer for a simple striking one, but the convenience of the percussion cap led to practicable six-guns and breech loaders and other advances in loading methods.

The idea of bullets being unsuitable for doing magic damage was one of the ways Shadowrun kept muscle-powered weapons relevant: your high Force elemental will take a lot more bursts of autofire to kill than it will Weapon-Focus-Katana hits. It worked to some extent. Restricting the availability of firearms depends on whether the components of firearms (metal strong enough, mostly; the rest of the bits needed to create operational "real" black powder weapons are pretty widespread, apart from sulphur maybe) are rare. If decent steel swords are relatively common, the materials for barrels aren't far off, and take less finesse to cobble together into a working "hand-gonne".

It's not just dampness. The fine priming powder that goes in the pan is very easily dislodged by movement and would generally not be applied until just before the intended firing of the weapon. It's also a complicated process that, in the heat of battle, is likely to be improperly executed. Hence the emphasis on the first volley of muskets (which will have been loaded carefully before the battle begins, leaving only the priming to be done in the face of the enemy); after the first volley, an increasing proportion of shots will lack essential elements (like a ball, or half the propellant charge, or proper tamping of the powder). Possibly not so important for the few-on-few tactical engagements common to RPGs, but certainly a "reloading" skill that needs to be rolled for an effective shot wouldn't be misplaced for muzzle-loading black powder weapons, and penalties to the activation roll for jostled/mishandled weapons.

Hopefully someone will come up with something a bit better than those. Given that every book involving them is in some way about how they are inherently flawed. Personally I find the "technology won't make humans redundant in large numbers" assertion to be complacent. Sure, buggy-whip makers went under with the advent of the automobile, and had a (very, very niche) revival with the advent of socially-permissible BDSM, but the technology of automation is already having a large effect on the kind and quality of job available and those effects are only going to be magnified as technology becomes more capable. The other "worker" that became very much less employable at the advent of the car was the horse. What's coming has the potential to do the same to people-as-workers.

But his followers are adamant that amendments cannot themselves be amended (even if that's demonstrably false). How would they cope with the cognitive dissonance necessarily imposed by such altered states of thought?!

Does the God have any actual control over their river? Should they have powers to reflect that? If the God were the actual river, the ability to control its flow might be considered analagous to the power of humanoid characters to move about.

Didn't you post this exact same thing a couple of pages up-thread?