Lawnmower Boy

Re: Probably a dumb science question...

Re: PS238 & Book Of The Destroyer [quote=ghost-angel It's like a 2-for-1 drive in special! Keep your hands to yourself, g-a. I'm not that kind of boy.

Re: "Touchless" Psychological Strikes So, maybe I'm missing something. In fact, I know I'm missing something, since I don't have speakers hookep up. But doesn't this video end with Mr. super-skills getting pretty thoroughly whupped?

Re: Eurostar is friggin' fast! Fast and deadly? Eurostar needs to drop her off at the shelter and hire someone new. Like Taipan.

Re: Why houses near the spaceport are so cheap Isn't there a rocket engine concept where the fireballs of death would consist of incandescent hexaflouridic acid (or, I guess, hexaflouridic ions...)? "I say, first we blow them up, then we disintegrate them!"

Re: Fishy, Fishy, Fishy, Fish! It's good to see someone using Guilmartin after Parker's driveby "review." I would add the various volumes in the Conway's History of the Ship as pretty much the scholarly state of the art in this branch of history of technology, although those interested in pursuing the matter might want to look at the flagship journal, Mariner's Mirror.

Re: Brainstorming: Enforcers of the Scarlet Moon (spoilers below) My idea was actually of someone as ignorant as a real world person would be of the real ancient history in back of the Crowns of Krim. She's a Satanist, not a Bermuda Triangle nut. If you asked her, she would explain that, having ruled out known histy, this stuff must go back to "Atlantis, or Lemuria, or something like that. Yeah, I know. You think I'm one of those crazy cultists. But it's the only explanation!" So if she can just get someone to do some really deep digs, she'll find the remnants of this lost "Atlantean Age" and get her hands on a Crown. That there might be other, more dangerous things still, down there, she will not accept or admit. Also, she might be the NPC who sents the players back to the Turakian Age, just to have a look around. Your idea, though, is both cool and scary.

Re: Brainstorming: Enforcers of the Scarlet Moon (spoilers below) We have all the books and a free PDF download, we know things that Michaela Sorenson can never imagine. What are those crowns? They don't look medieval, or Roman. No ancient text mentions "Krim." The demons she summons know only that he is a "demon god of ages agone." What does that even mean? Gradually, Michaela has found herself drawn to ideas so insane that she can't even bring them up around her colleagues. There was another age before this, perhaps many. The evidence is there, buried deep. On the one hand, she keeps reading the oldest incunabula she can find. On the other hand, wherever scientists dig deep, she's there. She had a hand in Jason Dixon's experiments. That didn't end well. Currently her hopes rest on a subtle corrupting spell she cast on seismologist Lincoln Connors, aka Sargon. She is also interested in Geo, and is looking for the spells to propitiate Terrayne. Someday, she will dig, and she will find a crown of her own. Spirits whisper warnings to her, of "the Elder Worm" and "Kal Turak," of lost Lemuria. But spirits lie, and she and South Mallon will be reunited.

Re: Fishy, Fishy, Fishy, Fish! Cancer, you may wish to invest in the great naval historian N. A. M. Rodger's two volume history of the British Navies through the ages, which I like not least for its excellent technical chapters sprinkled through the volumes. Rodger is a master of the recent literature, and his views vary dramatically from your sourcesm, which I suspect are not exactly current, as the theoretical context here is Victorian. "The single square sail was a powerful rig, and off the wind must have driven a fine hull very fast, but it had serious limitations. Ships had been able to beat to windward for many centuries by 1204, and all seagoing ships seem to have been fitted with the spar known in English as a 'loof' to boom out the weather tack. This was supplemented from at least the twelfth century by the bowline, and eventually the combination of the bowline... and tack....replaced the cumbersome loof altogether. Nevertheless, the performance of a large, especially a taunt square sail to windward, will always be limited by the difficult of controlling ... .the 'leading edge' in aerodynamic terms.... and medieval sails seem from illustrations to have been cut with a very full bunt... Moreover, the fine, shallow hull of the oarred warship was leewardly, and the deeper hull of the cog was no better, to judge from the replica of the Bremen cog which has been tried at sea. A well-designed quarter rudder can act as a centre-board, but the replacement of quarter by stern rudder on English galleys in the thirteenth century will have removed this benefit. "In any circumstances, and in any design of ship, moreoever, a single masted rig is unhandy. For the purposes of manoeuvrer, a ship may be compared to a weather-vane, pivoting about her centre of resistance. With a square sail set on a single mast, necessariliy on or very near the centre of resistance, the only force available to tun the ship is the weak effect of the rudder.[23] Oared vessels probably used some oars to push the ship round when tacking, but merchantmen must have been unhandy, especially in confined waters.[24] This explains the very long delays while ships waited for a fair wind; the range of points of sailing available to them for sailing on the open sea was probably not greatly inferior to that of square-rigged vessels of the seventeenth and even eighteenth century, and there are clear references to ships sailing close-hauled. However, the ability to work ships in confined waters must have been limited, condemning them to lie imprisoned in harbour for want of a leading wind out, on many occasions when there was a fine wind in the offing for their intended passage." (Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 64.) Italics mine. In summary, single-masted vessels can sail close to the wind, and did. (Which only makes sense --I mean, modern sailboats do, don't they?) The problem was that they were so bloody hard to turn because that humungous sail didn't give the rudder much torque. Oarred vessels didn't have that problem, but cogs and hulks needed a square wind to get out on the open sea. The existence of a replica gives us high confidence in these results. PS: I need a typing stand.

Re: Eastern Canadian History/Geography Resources? So....okay. Nothing I like better than hearing myself talk.... Of course, no reason why anyone should read it just because I like hearing myself talk. If, however, you want a new take on the history of the North Atlantic, a new explanation for Vikings and pirates and Henry the Navigator and a story that makes room for mysterious "Norumbega" and Vinland settlers in a modern historical discourse, then by all means, strain the eyes and, bearing in mind that this is a thought experiment, by all means critique it. Geography The first big point is that the Atlantic wind system runs clockwise around its basin. Basically, draw a circle, starting in the Canary Islands running to Domininca, Virginia, Newfoundland and the northwestern tip of Spain. Inside the circle, winds are fitful rather than nonexistent. Above it, storms disrupt the picture. The second point is the English Channel. I know it looks like a west-east route running from the Atlantic to the North Sea, but take another look at it in a polar projection, and you'll see that it is not straightforward. Winds tend to blow into the English coastline and the Pas de Calais. As a result, it is very hard to sail up and down the Channel, and much easier to do so from the French side than the English side. England's big Atlantic ports lie in the West County of Devon and Cornwall and coastal Wales, but both these areas are very isolated from centres of population and wealth. They have important maritime traditions, but they can't really be outlet ports for the wealth of England. To the extent that the island has one, it is Bristol. (Liverpool only developed in the 1800s.) Nevertheless, it was usually more economical for shipments to go down the Thames from London, anchor in the Downs, and wait for a contrary, favourable wind than to send them overland to Portsmouth, never mind the West Country. Coming back up the Channel, the luxury trade in Mediterranean goods bound for northern Europe actually used to land at Portsmouth and portage across the south of England to the Thames Valley. Interestingly, the summit of the trail from the south is Stonehenge, from the northern European side, Avesbury. Eventually, people began running sailing galleys, but the ultimate solution was more complicated. See, looking at the North Sea, you might get the impression of a water like the one a modern ferry traveller gets. You get on a boat, you sail out of the harbour, you sail into a harbour. But in historic times, the southern coast of the North Sea was ...indefinite. Mud flats, sand banks, impenetrable walls of dunes, and shallow estuaries where large rivers trickled out to sea. The local maritime population built stabilised mounds ("thorpes") and lived in the midst of this neither-land-nor-sea region on stilts and small boats. This was the world the Romans found, and for the most part they lacked the power and resources to change it. Then came a quickening and intensification of economic activity in the wake of a major maritime transgression, which is why Roman London and Roman Norwich were hastily abandoned around 380AD, we figure. Communities began to cut access ways through this amphibious maze, creating new markets and transportation routes by which overseas products could be landed and distributed. For our purposes, the most important consequence of this was to make seafood a marketable commodity throughout western Europe in the years just around 800--900AD. However, the sudden appearance of Flanders into history in 1000AD marks the first aggressive attempt to drain the lands of the interior of Belgium by piercing the sand-dune walls, incidentally creating ports through which ships coming up the Channel could land, and water mills for the production of textiles. It took many years for this to develop in full, but by 1450 or so, a major trade existed in Spanish wool and soapmaking materials and the mill/canal/port cities of Belgium. Finally, the polar projection map should show just how distorted the Mercator Projection is. Notice how the northern seas are cramped together in a vice between Greenland and the Scandinavian peninsula? Now look over to where Archangelsk is today and let your eyes be guided up the Dvina, over the Berezina and down the Volga until you suddenly are in Central Asia. It's not the most promising of long distance trade routes, but in historic times even tea came this way, although the trade in Arctic furs was much more important. Incidentally, we have sources indicating that this route was in use in Alfred the Great's time. Sociology Now I want to talk about deviance. There's a big recent book about the Mediterranean that borrows an old, Roman label for it; the "Corrrupting Sea." What the Romans were getting at is that once out of sight of land, surrounded by the water, evil, immoral things start to happen. Of course, our minds are immediatly drawn to pirates and sea raiders. But the real problem is corruption. Ship's captains sell cargo that doesn't belong to them, and sometimes even their crew. They land cargo where it oughtn't go, and avoid taxes and excises. People sell things to those ships, and don't report the proceeds. As always when skullduggery happens, it is other people who are at fault. The pirates are aliens from afar; they stole and plundered, rather than bought and sold. The surplus crew that the captain sold actually ran away, or died at sea (or even in a plundering expedition on shore.) When unwanted young men are put on a boat and sent away by a community, it is because the "pirates" impressed them. And the profits disappear. The pirates must come from distant, foreign lands, because no-one knows who funded them, or sells their plunder for them. The reality, of course, is that the very officials, up to and including the Kings and Queens of England, but, perhaps more importantly to this story, the Admirals of the coast of the West Country and Pembroke County, Wales, funded pirates and cleared their goods. This was frustrating for, say, a King of Spain, but as long as no-one could prove it, and you were playing the same game on occasion, there was a limit about how much of a fuss you could make about it. The second point goes to that thing about selling crew. This may seem harsh and alien, but that's because in our modern society of ready money, we just don't get how old-timey society worked. There were, of course, people who always had grain in the storehouse and animals in the pen. But, then, there were those who didn't. And, what's more, wealth is often a stage of life. The most secure middle-aged farming couple might once have been children, pressed into a labour gang, wandering the country looking for work. When food ran short, someone had to give you food. You proved that you were worth the favour by following your master and supporting him, whether with votes or with arms. And there were people who just dropped out; both broken people (lunatics and alcoholics), and scrawny teenagers suffering from the same curse as every teenager in the labour market before and since. Without experience, you can't get a job; without a job, you can't get experience. The law said that if a wealthy man wanted to enslave these people, he was a public benefactor. Such law as existed on the subject encouraged him to do so, and after the middle of Elizabeth I's reign imposed taxes to support those that the counties couldn't place. The whole burden of labour law took slavery as normative. Apprentices were slaves to their masters, children were slaves to their parents. Even upper class families obtained "premium apprenticeships," and knights were normatively the slaves of the King. Now, masters had reciprocal obligatons. Looking after the physical livelihood, career development and virginity (in the case of females) of the slave was the absolute minimum. Beyond that, church authorities tended to poke their nose in. If slaves were Christians, they got regular Holy Communion. Muslim slaves got five daily prayer breaks and regular fasts. Obviously a Christian slaveowner didn't have to attend to Muslim religious needs, or a Muslim to Christian; rather, they were supposed to convert their slaves. And if they did convert them, the law provided that the freedmen were dependent on their former master in the local religious community, in effect allowing the master to swap economic for political power. (In those regions with democratic institutions, and there were more of them than you might think), freed slaves voted the way their former master told them, and this was enforced through the public control and surveillance of the parish. Given all this, it makes sense that religious law in both spheres looked down so harshly on the sale of slaves to unbelievers. And, of course, why Muslim pirates were always so successful in taking Christian slaves, and Christian pirates in taking Muslim slaves. Pirates --the universal scapegoat. History So you've got an intensification of fishing and fish sales around the North Sea basin. Towns like London and Rouen are emerging as market centres where product (more luxury goods than fish, but still) can be taxed. Conversely, you have piracy emerging to evade these controls and restrictions. And you have a trickle of trade goods from the far North. There are synergies here. Up the North Way there are many fishing grounds, and slaves to spare. Why not "plant" adjacent shores with Baltic farmers, who are good at making northern lands prosper? An anarchic energy flows, south to north, creating new, instant societies that hardly know where they are on this round Earth, except that it is northerly, winters are long, that buttered salt cod is a good snack eaten raw, and that the intestines can be kept in good order with flaxseed-and-grass-seed porridge, while flax stocks make good fishing nets, sails, and underclothes beneath the wool and fur. Amongst the big men who command with charisma and violence, one Erik the Red has settled on what probably even he understood was an island, Iceland. There had been a real estate boom on the island, but it was over by 985AD, and the latecomers were, as usual, stuck with properties whose value was not inflating near as much as they expect. But in an age when your credit limit was measured by your spear's reach, one did not say, "oh, I'm not making enough in rent, I think I'll put my numbered company into bankrupty." You put your retainers in boats, and flee to the ends of the Earth. There were those who did this for whom it didn't work out. We hear no more of them, but Erik crossed the Denmark Strait and fetched up on the wild coast of Greenland. You'd think he had a guide or something, because it was hardly easy to work your way around Cape Farewell and up the fjords to the farming country of southwestern Greenland. (Which, contrary to those who think that our historical data is good enough to talk about climate change in the tenth century, was good farmland, is good farmland, and has always been good farmland in the interim. The problem is the cool, maritime climate limits the crops that can be grown. Erik didn't care, because the limited group included food grasses, sheep and flax, but these aren't good cash crops, and the fact that there's only room for a few hundred steadings made this a bit of a Duckberg. No worse than the average Faeroe Island, to be sure, but hey, not much happens on the average Faeroe Island, either.) We would not hear any more about Erik than we do about the men who founded those Faeroe Islands communities were it not for the fact that in the summer, when the men went out in small boats and ranged towards the Pole in search of furs, ivory and whale oil, and towards the sea in search of cod and seals (not that they really needed seals, with their fat-rich diets), they could also see a far shore across the Davis Straits. They also met local hunters, much like reindeer hunters at home, and in fat years when there was more crop to harvest than hands to do it, traded for their surplus young folk, typically scrawny teenagers ("Skraelings.") If the Greenlanders disposed of their own in the same way in lean years, the local Church was not told, or at least didn't exactly write memos to the Pope about it. Erik's son, Leif the Lucky, set out for those far shores, looking for what he could find. He was quite proud of what he did find, which was trees for making charcoal, and, much further away, a land where grapes grew wild. The Greenlanders may have exploited this "Vinland" a bit, but in truth, it was a longer sail to Vinland than it was to Norway, where wine could also be found, and other things, too. The way the winds blew, it was even a shorter sail to Portugal, although Erik had no way of knowing that. The forests of Labrador were likely much more profitable, and much more extensively used, but we don't know that for sure. There are long centuries to account for. Even the catastrophists think that the Greenland Norse lasted until well after 1410, and the catastrophists are talking through their hats. Something else happened about then; in 1405, specifically. Portugal was in a pickle. The crown didn't want to settle for a small country on the edge of a large peninsula. That wasn't what kings did. They had a claim to the whole Visigothic kingdom of Hispania, and the magnates of the Kingdom had pan-Hispanic horizons, because they owned land throughout the peninsula. In the fight for prestige in the smaller communities of the peninsula, though, the neighbouring community of Castile held a huge ace, in that only it had a Crusading frontier with a Muslim power. Prestige and even wealth flowed from crusading, and Castile treated its residual Muslim neighbours almost like a private hunting reservation. The Portuguese Duke of Albuquerque was welcome to crusade in company with the King of Castile. They could make war, and talk; talk about daggers in the night and the benefits that would accrue to the house of Albuquerque in a Spain ruled by Castile. That was why the Portuguese had taken advantage of a power vacuum in Morocco to seize Ceuta. But this flyblown dump was no crusading frontier, and the court was thinking of abandoning it. Up spoke a bold young chevalier, a Prince of the ruling House named Henry. He would ship supplies into Ceuta and keep it going. It was a foolish pledge. Henry needed ships, and money to keep the ships, and that meant cargoes, not crusading. Casting around for an adventure, he found the Canaries. It did not go well. A few cargoes of slaves, a few loads of sap of dragonswood for dyes. And for that his captains risked all, even being driven into the great rock of Madeira, an unapproachable spire of trees and woods rising out of the Atlantic, constantly beaten by the wild seas. It was fortunate for one of those captains that there is a smaller and lower island near Madeira. To low to catch the rain clouds, it was thoroughly unprepossessing. But, anchored in close, the captain saw dragonswood. Who knows if it even grew there a few years before? The point is that there was a rich load of sap just waiting to be tapped. A hurried consult with the Prince about expenses, and the next ship bound for the Canaries deliberately veered near the island and dropped off some boats with a working party and supplies. No-one had ever been near Madeira when the wind blew away from the island (well, no-one who made good on the ephemeral opportunity that was about to arise.) It isn't that this was infrequent; it was that ships don't beat up-wind to get near a known navigational hazard. So imagine the surprise of the working party when the wind shifted, and the dangerous breakers vanished. Madeira turned from a terror to a lost sylvan paradise of waterfalls, sandy beaches, and beckoning benches half lost in the blue sky in the blink of an eye. It probably didn't take much persuading for some men to load one of the boats and row across the water, to pull up on the soft beaches where no man had ever trod, and walk in to those forests. Those beautiful forests, full of marketable timber, and water power to saw it. If Prince Henry was a foolish youth, many youths are foolish. His folly, though, led to one of those great windfalls an entrepeneur enjoys when he gets in on the ground floor of a boom that changes the world. Cheap timber was profitable in its own right, and the farmland cleared of it even more so, but within a few years the problems of getting the timber to market in Lisbon had been solved by building ships specifically to carry a load. Whether the boat was knocked down for sale as timber at dockside, or turned over to the Prince for "crusading" purposes down the coast of Africa towards India, the Holy Land and Islam --or so geographers thought-- is no matter. There was profit enough in fishing, in a new real estate play in the Azores, and, in the hands of a truly brilliant navigator, in the discovery of the great cycle of the winds, and the blue waters of the Caribbean. As the fisherfolk of Iberia soon discovered, the trip to the Caribbean brought one home via the cycle of the winds that led right through cod banks whose extent no-one except possibly a few Greenlanders ever suspected. While explorers dawdled along the American coast getting places named after them and bringing back Indians to show off at court, annomymous fishermen reached Saint John's, perhaps as early as 1485, but probably only after 1500, and from there reached the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence by the 1530s. That, though, was keeping to the coast long after you could leave it. The treasure fleets of Spain typically turned east away from land at the Cape of Virginia. The great empire of the New World was a bit of a bust (I personally suspect that the wealth and population of its great Neolithic empires was exaggerated like a penny stock's potential), but no-one could doubt that there was the labour to exploit bullion mines. And the Crown has a claim to perhaps 10% of raw bullion under the law of seigniorage. It needs to be pointed out here that Spanish merchants loved their king and would never think to cheat him, apart from loads smuggled aboard the ships themselves. I point this out because there were numerous pirates tangling with the treasure fleets, and the cynical mind construes certain scenarios.. scenarios of "poor sailors" dropping behind the flotta and quietly anchoring on a Virginia bank, of silver being unloaded, of regrettable losses to piracy, and a merchant of Seville saying, "I'm ruined, ruined by my losses. I can't possibly pay my taxes this year. It's the crown's fault for not catching Il Drake. Oh. Excuse me, a gentleman from Falmouth has dopped off this nice brown paper package, all wrapped up with string. It's probably that copy of NIght Watch I bought on Ebay. Pardon me while I go into the other room and count.... I mean, verify its condition." Virginia, of course, was where the English kept trying to plant settlements in the 1580s, and eventually succeeded in 1607, right after peace with Spain. This was hardly the first time we hear of western planting. It was a regular activity of West country "pirates" and adventurers, and many details are lost. We know about Jacques Cartier's very ambitious project, and Humphrey Gilbert, and the settlements in Florida, but here is a rule of history. If there are mysteries and ambiguities and activities, then we can take it for granted that two means more. Planters are supposed to facilitate fishing. They're there overwinter, so that they can get on the fishing grounds first. They build facilities for drying cod and drawing out train oil. They grow flax and weave nets and sails. They grow provisions for the return home, although that is a very capital intensive business, because preserving large quantities of food is not cheap. They build boats for the inshore fishery, and even ships, so that men who arrive on the coast in irreparable wrecks can return home if they've the money. This works; it worked hundreds, thousands of times in the northern North Sea, and as far west as the coast of Greenland. We wouldn't have a Norway without planting. But little did the planters know the final secret of the winds, that west-facing coasts are habitable at a far higher latitude than east-facing. The frontier of farming settlement in Europe and even Greenland is north of 60. On the American east coast, it is hardly north of 40. That didn't make planting impossible, but it did mean that one had to give up on Newfoundland and push south, as far south as the Maritimes. And, given that, one might make the best possible choice. Of all the exogenous costs of a large codfishery, the most onerous is the salt tax. New sources of salt were valuable, in general, and the one geographic windfall that the sailors from Europe had not found to this point was a salt-rich shore close to the great cod banks. Not, that is, until someone had a serious look at the coast of Massachusetts. As to when that happened... well, Walter Raleigh sent the notorious pirate Simon Fernandez to coast Massachusetts in 1580, as the first step in his project to colonise Virginia. So, by that time. The expense of landing folk on the coast was hardly great. Raleigh sought to send out gentlefolk when he could, but that was because he needed investors. Martin Frobisher's attempt to colonise Baffin Island (so, uhm, good luck with that, Martin) sailed loaded with men marched down to the docks from the poorhouses of London. Frobisher promptly landed them back ashore --or most of them, anyway, but there's no question that if a "planter" wanted to make a try on Massachusetts, it would be the cost of moving the people, and not the lack of them, that would be the issue. Naturally, they wouldn't be topnotch people, but that was the business. You went down to the London taverns, you met a gangmaster. He had a few teenagers on hand, too big now to intimidate and altogether no longer worth keeping around. You paid him off, you transported these boys, you sold them. If to Christians, they were "indentured labourers." If not to Christians, you said nothing, or blamed pirates. And the whole coast of America was filled with slaveowning societies that could provide the infrastructural support to a small planting community. Obviously a West Country pirate/planter couldn't set up a Christian community with a parish and a priest reporting back to his bishop. Or, well, he could. See, there was one bishop (or, more often, bishops' regent) on the western shore of the Atlantic with a large diocese, filled with people with the skills to make plantings work. And Greenland has this problem; compared to Massachusetts, it sucks. I won't go into further details here for why I think that the Norumbega of the Greenland Vikings really does lie under modern Boston. Suffice it to say that when the history of New England officially begins in 1623, it is when a company goes to considerable length, even providing a clergyman, in order to induce a community of expert textile workers to set up hard by the salt fields, drying racks and shipyards of Massachusetts. As far as we know the limited history of this era, all of those sprang up more-or-less on their own, 8 years later. The "Pilgrims" of 1623 farmed. Not that we've any detail of how and what they farmed --they didn't even bring much livestock over. And, of course, they landed in the midst of farmed fields, promptly acquired two separate Indian interpreters who had been to London (two previous expeditions brought out their own Indian interpreters, arranging for prominent local Indian men to spend a year or two in England prior to the settlement). Mystery hangs over the next 7 years. You can reconstruct a bit of a narrative from a few sources --a sensationalist memoir by Miles Standish, Pastor Bradford's diary, two or three promotional letters. Then, a fleet of 17 ships landed 1000 settlers. Over the next decade came 13,000 more. (The numbers of emigrants have been much exaggerated, but it seems that a maximum of 80,000 reached New England between 1623 and 1700.) And with that --bang-- New England was born. People are at great pains to emphasise that the colony was tentative, marginal, clinging to the shore, etc. Certainly the people were poor in material terms. No forks have been found in an archaeological context prior to 1700, for example. But on the other hand, they launched whole fleets of ships and by 1700 were capable of making a major amphibious expedition against Quebec. It is my experience that, if you flick a match at a patch of ground and an explosive flame rises, it's because there's gasoline there already. What I'm proposing is the existence of a pre-settlement phase in which a mixed-Indian and English community emerged in the Massachusetts Bay--Virginia area, probably incorporating a few Greenlanders. There was a slavetrading port of call, dubbed Norumbega, probably where Boston now stands, but perhaps at Springfield or even Albany. (Or these were similar entrepots, frequented by other groups. It was not an English-speaking community. It wasn't even a literate one. The trade creole of the area stabilised into a distinct language, "Algonquin," and established itself along the coast. Since there were Indians back in Wales and the West Country as well as English in New England, there were open channels of communication. As contact intensified, the Plymouth company made the next step of intensification in 1623 --putting a "factory" ashore. To get well-established tradesmen to enlist, the members of the Company faced the ticklish problem of finding a Godly and righteous pastor who at the same time would wink an eye at a slave trade in Christians. Fortunately, by this time the chaotic religious world of the North Sea had sponsored religious separatists who believed that only the Elect were true Christians. A likely community of such was found, already exiled in Leyden, and turned to its purpose. So successful was it that by 1630, a widespread ethnogenesis was underway. There were "Yengisee--" Algonquin for English-- everywhere, and a labour market hungry enough for "indentured servants" that there was no longer any need to stand in the way of the establishment of new parishes in New England. This opened up opportunities galore for new college graduates back in England, and the colony soon had an intelligentsia to shape its public image at home --mainly in the direction of getting new settlers.

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished? Jared Diamond is the most influential historian of our generation, cuz he knows so much more than other historians. And he was trained as a botanist. Which raises the point that sometimes "knowing" isn't the same as knowing, if you get my drift. People have refuted Diamond on a case by case basis: Karin Seaver's demolition job on the Greenland thing is memorable; Heather McKillop, The Ancient Maya is too cautious to entirely reject "collapse theories," but the discrepancy between what we know and the big picture stories is striking. Easter Island is particularly exotic. The big history of the island that's out at the moment is a second edition fo the work from which Diamond drew. The critiques that I'm aware of are generally journal articles, and I can't put my finger on the authors. I strongly recommend Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Archaic State for Mesa Verde specifically and "collapse" generally, just because it is a theoretical work of the first importance for everyone who wants to be an informed citizen of the modern state. Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape, which I have touted endlessly on this board, is a sort-of amplification and restatement. In deference to the critics, though, Archaelogical Review thought enough of a run-on review of Yoffee to publish it as an article recently. Can't remember the author's name, but he had a fiery-hot mad-on about Yoffee. If it was brought up, Martin Byers, Cahokia: A World Renewal Cult Heterarchy In other news, my recommendations for generalist-level reading should be taken advisedly, since there's a reason that I'm reading myself into an area. That said, Alison Weir, Elizabeth the Queen makes a good claim that we need a more personal look at this pivotal ruler. I also found it a good prep for reading Susan Ronald, The Pirate Queen. (The latter is a little dry for a researcher trying to refashion herself as a popular reader, and a little less daring than my favourite of the genre so far, Benjamin Woolley, The Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America.) Woolley is a little less ready to think outside the box (read: is less of a crank) than I am, so I was a little disappointed about the strength of the conclusions he was ready to draw. Summary: Against Diamond Karin Seaver, Frozen Echoes: The Norse in Greenland and Beyond (subtitle is basically my reconstruction; don't type the whole thing into a library catalogue and expect to f ind the book!) Heather McKillop, The Ancient Maya --a good book for serious readers Norman Yoffee, Myths of the Ancient State ---one of the "big" books of the era, unfortunately neglected for its apparently narrow focus Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape --ought to be far more widely read Byers --So many downright silly things have been said about Cahokia that it is a pity that the first serious book about it should be such heavy wading. What I've been reading that is worthy mentioning: Alison Weir, Susan Ronald, Benjamin Woolley, and probably, once I struggle through the Doughty story one more time, Stephen Coote, Drake.

Re: US Government's reaction to superhumans Well, obviously, whatever the short term response, there's a clear need for a coherent policy response. Specifically, a secret conspiracy to exterminate all the superhumans in concentration camps, run and implemented by super-combat robots with large and powerful, if perhaps glitchy, AIs. I mean, it's only logical. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Eastern Canadian History/Geography Resources? Just to clarify here, "Norumbega" appears in 16th Century contexts as a city of gold and pearls somewhere along the Northeastern coast. It begins to appear as a possible destination of explorers and sailors who show up in "Newfoundland" during the summer cod fishery ...at some point. (Unfortunately, we do not know when European fishing fleets began to visit the island of Newfoundland. Saint Johns' harbour appears in a map tentatively dated to 1515, although it could be as early as 1485. We also do not know when they began visiting the mainland. An archaeologically recovered Basque whaling base may be as old enough to belong to that "around 1515" category of dates, or may not be. Similarly, it is often said that Jacques Cartier met European fishing boats in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence when he ascended it to Quebec in 1535. The evidence is unfortunately indirect, but it seems reasonably clear that he had an experienced pilot aboard.) We do know that in the aftermath of his 1568 disaster at Vera Cruz, John Hawkins dropped 100 men off on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, we assume not too far from Tampico; and that three of those men, led by David Ingram, were back in London before the next winter, having taken ship near Cape Breton. It is as sure as anything can be that Ingram travelled the distance between the Gulf Coast and Nova Scotia, overland, in those few months, because they had a great deal of help from the Indians, who presumably were doing favours in hopes of getting someone's gratitude. The interesting part (for old time adventurers) is that Ingram claimed to have visited "Norumbega" along the way, and dropped off another 23 men who "married into the country." Ingram's description of Norumbega was fantastic, but then it was transcribed with the intention of promoting trade expeditions to it, and investors' pockets had to be opened up. This converges with the key point that, if Norumbega existed, and if it were as wealthy as folk say, then it couldn't possibly have been built by Indians (they said back in the Nineteenth Century), and must have been a surviving Viking community. The vision this opens up is of early English adventurers actually settling amongst a pre-existing Viking population in New England, so that "Norumbega" lies somewhere under modern Boston. And why haven't we heard about this? Attention goes to all those exciting pirates (Peter Easton, Henry Mainwaring, and of course the big names like Drake) who sailed the northern seas in those days. No doubt they were keeping secrets for their nefarious, piratical reasons, and even exterminated the remaining Greenland Vikings just 'cuz. Thus, Martin Frobisher got to Baffin Island so readily because he knew exactly where he was going. "Just sail to the place where we cruelly used those Norwegian Catholics, and take a left-hand turn." This is the traditional crazy-talk theorising. I also have my own ideas (well, mostly Karin Seaver's ideas) about what actually happened. Go ahead, ask me. I'll kill some electrons.

Re: Eastern Canadian History/Geography Resources? Wikipedia +Google + Google Maps+links as appropriate. I'm sorry that I don't know the ultimate "Norumbega," Peter Easton or David Ingram site, but even the briefest search will tell you everything the Web actually knows about these subjects, which isn't very much.

Re: Fishy, Fishy, Fishy, Fish! Or maybe something like this... Again, I don't do this much, so do your own math! Forty Fathom Anchor Clinging, +55 Str plus Stretching, 40" (Always Direct [-1/4], Cannot Do Damage [-1/2], Limited Body Part [-1/4], Linked, although this seems cheesy, so -1/4); Bulky OIF (-1), Independent (-1), Extra Time (1 Turn) (-1 1/4), Continuous (+1), Reduced Endurance (0 End, +1/2), Gestures, both hands (-1); Real Cost 27 points. This anchor will set and hold instantly on even the most ironbound ground at a depth of up to 40 fathoms, making inshore work far safer. You might even be able to kedge out of danger.

Re: Book Recommendation Maybe. Or maybe we're now taking a more conservative view of what the data actually tells us. The Roman case isn't mysterious. We know why the modern Romance languages are so similar to each other in vocabulary and grammar, have texts that allow us to trace those similarities back a long way, and a fairly full grasp of the history of the area back to the period before the spread of the Romance languages. Compare that with the somewhat similar case of the Indo-European languages. Hindi and Irish have similarities in vocabulary and grammar to each other, and to a number of other languages, such as Tocharian, the proposed (on very weak grounds) language of the Urumchi mummies, and to Pulleyblank's proposed Pre-Early Chinese. How did those similarities arise? We say the languages are "related," and the metaphor leads us to propose an "ancestor language," just as we take Latin to be the ancestor of Romance languages, including Quebecois French and Brazilian Portuguese. Was there an Indo-European Empire that spread from Xinjiang to Ireland? Well, there is a modern Indo-European okumene that spreads that far, but it is clearly not the origins of the similarities, as we have Irish texts going back to 800AD or so, and while Hindi is much later, we propose a "relationship" (look --our metaphor has begun to run amok!) with the Old Persian of the Behistun inscriptions of c. 500BC. More relations point us to Hittite, written down about 1200BC, although Akkadian texts reference Hittite names going back to 1750BC or so. (The most conservative conclusion from the facts, I'll now point out parenthetically, is something like that the Hitite Empire spread Indo-European. But that's not the conclusion.) Now we have put the "historical" event that we sought to explain firmly back into prehistory. The linguistic evidence has become our only useful evidence. From this, can we deduce migrating "Indo-Europeans" imposing their language from Ireland to Xinjiang? No: we can put it forward as a hypothesis. But we must also consider it along other theses of language change. A grab-bag of opposing theories of language change hold that no "relatedness" is required. This is clear in some cases. English adopts vocabulary from Chinese, Chinese from English. In other cases, it is much more complex. Proponents of "relatedness" as a useful and easily discoverable mechanism for language similarities hold that some linguistic phenomena, such as grammar, are not borrowed. This is clearly not the case. To get anywhere, we have to construct liklihoods of borrowing. Grammar is less likely to be borrowed than vocabulary, this phonetic change more likely than the next; and so on. At this point, we get to sketchy data, problematic statistics, the problems of comparing written to unwritten languages, and so on. Now, it happens that Indo-European linguistic relatedness is one of, if not the earliest of these constructs. We knew far less about the way that languages interact when the theory was put forward then we do now. And, what's worse, the crucial stages in which this relatedness was constructed in whatever way it was constructed, occurred in an undocumented period of which we know nothing about the history. What it looks like, here, is that we are building the history to support the thesis of language relatedness, not using the clear facts of relatedness to construct history. This is a nuanced case for Indo-European, where language similarities are clear. The real, preliminary target (IMHO, we'll demolish the "Aryans," too, before we're done) are the many theories of prehistory put forward on the model of the Indo-European relatedness theory. "The Munda spread rice and the Austroasiatic family tree; Natufah culture is related to the spread of Norstritic..." and so on. Oops --gotta go to work.

Re: Book Recommendation Okay, now I've got two entries on "Indo-European fallacy," though fortunately on the second page of the search. Hold me: I'm scared.

Re: Book Recommendation

Re: Fishy, Fishy, Fishy, Fish! Even without magic devices, the fish won't run some years. Good thing you've got boats, and can try other fishing grounds. Murmansk, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland.... There's a reason Vikings got around so much, and plenty of adventure hooks. A Buddhist monk travels up the Volga and down the Dvina to board at Murmansk, seeking passage to Shamballah, which, obviously, is northwest along the coast from the Greenland settlements. I hope you pack Wendigo repellent, and even more that you tumble to the fact that this innocent young monk is actually the rightful Ming emperor, and that not everything sent after him is merely mortal. Oh, and... Cloak of Comfort Life Support, Safe Environment, Cold (2 points), +3 Dex (only versus clothes-related penalties for Dex-related rolls, -1 1/2), +5 Strength (only for casual strength, only versus clothes-related encumbrance, -2), Usable simultaneously (+1/2), OAF (-1/2); real cost 8. (Bearing in mind that I haven't done many of these. It seems rather expensive for what it aims to do....)

Re: No Horses For You The first part hits the (cheap, iron) nail on the head. The second part is an area where it is complicated. I'm skeptical about the ductility claim because bronze guns have been dissected, and they are rarely homogenously bronze all the way through. The mix of tin and copper, never mind other alloys, varies greatly depending on the location in the gun. They may have been optimised for ductility where it mattered by casting practice, but that isn't clear. The main reason that bronze guns persisted (and I've had to argue this a great deal with an expert) is that large pieces of cast iron were, for a long time, crap. I started to give the reasons below (as I understand them) why that is the case, but old time ironfounders can't discuss the chemistry without getting into the methods, and the discussion quickly becomes tedious and arcane. There's issues of slag and carbon monoxide inclusions ("sponginess"), of carburisation and of neutralising the ore. Again, I think I'm on secure grounds in calling the question complicated.

Re: No Horses For You Things can get a little complicated with composition and treatment details. I remember a description (Journal of Metallurgical History, for those who want to geek out at length) of a shot-peened bronze helmet deposited as a votive offering sometime in the 400s BC. Clearly this laborious hardening treatment gave it a much higher surface hardness than a typical bronze piece. Was it it harder than a typical Early Iron Age wrought iron piece? I do not know. But then, wrought iron's advantages lie in its toughness, not hardness. Certainly Drew, Early Riders, builds his case for the contemporary development of horseriding with iron-making on the advantages of iron bits. Here we are probably talking about cemented pieces, though. In short, better to go long: many questions about how iron works are hard to answer briefly. Take a look at your local technical library's copy of Making, Shaping and Treatment of Iron and Steel, the definitive textbook by the Iron and Steel Institute of America. If you need to go the Wiki route, I'm sure that the "Iron and Steel" article in the 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedica Britannica is available through Wikisource.

Re: Gods and Saints I have some, uhmm, friends who want to talk with you. They have a problem with the Arian heresy, ....and a comfy chair. But don't be expecting them.

Re: Ships of the Dark Ages and Medieval Period IMHO [Humble --I slay me!], people tend to go at this the wrong way. You want to worry about the bit where people get on and off ships, then about the ships. We moderns tend to hear the word "port" and freeze up, whereas in old times, people couldn't leave it to civil engineering. The Mediterranean, for example, has few sheltered harbours, so you can't just drop anchor and lighter off your cargo, or tie up to a pier. It does have scads of well-scoured beaches with gentle inclines. A long, shallow, but relatively wide ship can just beach itself and be about its bulk-breaking way in so many places that it just doesn't make sense to use anything else, for the most part. It's difficult to beach yourself under sail, so oars make a great deal of sense. Presto, galley. Atlantic beaches exist, but tend to have a much steeper gradiant, and tides that will refloat your boat whether or not you're ready. If you're going to operate from a beach, you want a vessel that's short enough to haul up above the tideline, and since you're using brute, pulley-assisted force, you don't worry about the lines of the vessel so much. To get cargo volume, you end up with a short and tubby boat. The Atlantic also has plenty of tidal rivers. Tide's are like nature's railways. They carry huge loads up the river and down, no human effort required. All you need is guys with poles at bow and stern to fend off trouble. "Vikings" would go up to Hamburg, Emden, Antwerp, York and London and Rouen this way. It also has plenty of estuarine waters, and vast stretches of sand-dune fronted coast broken by small rivers and canals giving access to inland ports. Docking at a Frisian thorpe or getting to Ghent or Norwich(?) requires exquisite manoevrability and a shallow draft. You'd be far better off carrying a few lighters of our own, which can be used as lifeboats. Notice that you can also throw a cable to those lighters and let them tow you. This way, you can build a high-sided vessel that can't be conveniently rowed, and still get the advantages of oarred transport. Finally, carried lighters can be used in the cheapest and most efficient kind of fishing, the inshore fishery. You can sail into a Saint John's Harbour, drop off boats and fishermen, and let them do the work. (Then at the end of the season you can sell them to the Indians and tell any pesky clericals at home that they died of some horrible disease. given what labour gang refugees faced when they got home, they'll probably be grateful for a chance at a new life as a "Skraeling.") More, although not that much more information can be found in the medieval volumes of Conway's History of the Ship, and especially the technical chapters of the first volume of N. A. M. Rodger's history of the navies of Great Britain, Sovereign of the Seas. And in the Admiralty voumes on wartime ship construction coverinng amphibious vessels, since the designers of LSTs and the like confronted the modern version of the "galley" problem and came up with some remarkably similar solutions. The idea of an east-to-west trans-Atlantic slave trade in European "vagrants" is my own recent speculation.

Re: No Horses For You By the way, the Wikipedia article above was not distorting quotes from the acknowledged expert, Ann Hyland (The Medieval Warhorse, 1250--1600 [{an address in the U.K deliberately chosen because the publishing group hates librarians}*: Sutton Publishing, 1998). She doesn't pull in zooarchaeology, but people might be interested in knowing that Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer and others made scale drawings of medieval warhorses. There's also a neat picture (p. 38) of the Lithuanian draft horse (15.5 hands, but a little more robust than the modern saddle horse) that the Royal Armouries have bought to show off their collection of late medieval panoply. It fits to a "T," indicating, as suspected for a long time, that the references from late medieval times referring to efforts to buy larger horses were targetting animals the size of the modern hunter/Olympics equestrian horse. The knight's charger was smaller, albeit more solidlly built, than the modern saddle horse. *Phoenix Mills, Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom. You type that into your dissertation bibliography a few dozen times....

Re: Book Recommendation So-called Urumchi Man was found just outside Urmchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Before the construction of the qanat towns of the Tarim Basin, Urumchi lay on the main route from east to west via the Zhungarian Gates, so given the presence of undisputed signs of Middle Eastern --NOT European-- influences in China such as sheep, barley and chariots, it is hardly surprising to find an ancient Caucasoid there. And given that the Uighur and Kalmyck populations of the area still include Caucasoid individuals today, it seems doubly unamazing. Given all this, Chinese archaeology's "wake me when you find something interesting" attitude is the third unamazing thing here. There's an element of chauvinism, of course. But there's also an element of longstanding distaste for the excesses of the cryptohistory fanboys. A few red-headed mummies are a very limited and selective element of the available database, and much of the ancillary evidence adduced by the fanboys comes from historical linguistics, a true red-head of the historical sciences, in this case a red-headed stepchild.