Lawnmower Boy

"Look at the encounter table. All of the other 0 experience point small animal encounters come in a variable range. 1-12 rats, 2-5 squirrels, etc. Except flying squirrels. You get five flying squirrels every time. With a THACO of 20, they hit AC 10 exactly 50% of the time. Swoop! The flying squirrels come through your party, doing exactly 2.5hp of damage to the magic user. Who has, on average, 2.5hp. Coinciidence? I don't think so. "So as you roll up your next character, take comfort in the fact that Gary wanted it to happen this way."

It's typical of a secret Communist like yourself to say something like that. We all know you just want to slip flouride into our water. Now excuse me, because I've got to go break the sound barrier! (I'm having this exotic new food for lunch. It's called a "burrito.")

But what do you actually mean by this?

This show is dead to me! I'm just waiting to see if it's because there's too much Superman, or too little. Or possibly Lois Lane. It could be dead to me because they cast Lois the wrong way. Or if they don't cast her at all. Gotta admit, we sure are spoiled for choices in superhero TV these days.

Denise Richards, like, totally heard this, and, like, you are so dead ZOMG fer sure.

Cabotage (point-to-point) is one thing, while long-distance voyages between ports of call is another. It depends on the trading strategy. I would say that not understanding the tradeoffs is going to be a function of the local geography. The coasts of the Caribbean, Greece, Sumatra and Norway are very different, each from the other, and this will determine choices like whether to put in for the night or not. For your pcs, just jigger up some wind charts and define the geography of the coasts. This one's rocky and treacherous, like southern Morocco or the south coast of the Black Sea. You can only put in at a few sheltered anchorages. This one is marsh right down to the sea: you have to find a river inlet and follow it up to where there's a bank you can moor on. This one is mountains thrusting straight up from the sea. There'll be a delta valley at the head, and maybe a few small ones on the way, occuppied by steadings. Etc. For a wind and tide table, you can look one up on the Internet, or just pull it out of your rear end. "There's a twenty percent chance each day of a prevailing Nor-Easter/Sou'Wester that will take you to your next stop. There's a 1% chance each day of being becalmed." (Although that's a "probability" like a random encounter is a probability.)

What can be called "ninja," is not the true ninja. You cannot step on the same ninja twice. It may be too early to say this, but the ninja is dead, and only could ever be known phenomenally, as a subjective experience. What a ninja might be, as a Japanese martial artist in him or herself, it is possible to know only through the synthetic a priori. Indeed, if we knew some other culture that called what we call "ninjas," "gavagais," would it even be possible to make sense of the statement, "This is a gavagai?"

By RAW, you may get 0 End, but you have to pay for every single dice of your planet-destroying energy.

Objects travelling at FTL velocities have negative mass, are travelling back in time, and have always been doing so (no acceleration through the speed of light)! They would also radiate gravity waves, which would cause them to lose energy, which would cause them to accelerate to infinite velocities, which would cause them to disappear. So Wikipedia's math on the kinetic energy of tachyon impacts with planets and such should be very interesting. Now, as to the bowling ball of iron travelling at near-light speed (and remember that you can get its kinetic energy up to infinity --but not beyond-- by accelerating it to exactly c), at a certain point it is just going to punch right through your planet and continue on its merry way, having shed very little more kinetic energy than your regular meteor impact. Given that you've found some way to persuade your subluminal mass to obligingly deccelerate to rest velocity in the planet's frame of reference (dum-dum rounds?), this will be a very bad day indeed for residents of the poor plant. That being said, however, this is not something-for-nothing. You get out the energy you put in. It is not likely to be cheap or carefree to accelerate a bowling ball to 0.99c. In any fair universe, it will be pretty obvious that you are doing so from a very long way away, giving the planet ample time to dodge out of the way. Now, with an FTL drive, the question is whether you can achieve luminal velocities without going to all the trouble of obeying the law of conservation of energy. If so, you have perpetual motion and unlimited energy, not to mention that the universe is your oyster, etc, etc. As an SF writer, you are free to imagine this universe. I think it would probably be more economical of versimiltude to requrie starfarers to give this energy back to the universe --and not by blowing up planets, as someone went to an awful lot of trouble to make it, and what thanks do they get? Now get your relativistic missile off the planet, and sit up like a gentleman. Also, would it kill you to call your grandmother once a week?

That's crazy talk. I don't even. . . Though I do live a block from a liquor store.. .

Two! Days! Off! In! A! Row! What bliss is this!

You can't usually put in for the night when you're in the middle of an open water crossing. It's kind of the point of an open water crossing. We've had a lively debate in marine archaeology about when and where open water crossings happen, but I think the consensus is that the whole "You have invented Astronomy!1!!") thing is a bit overedone. People have been doing them since the first boats. It should also be noted that coastwise navigation is actually something to be avoided like the plague on many coasts. (At least, for sufficient draft.) In shelving waters, if you can see land, it's too late! That point-to-point coastwise navigation works in the Mediterranean is something to be understood about the Mediterranean.

Well, you don't put in for the night on an open-water run! Which can be very, very long, by the way. English fleets used to show up off the Levant in the early summer on a regular basis from the First Crusade on. (Actually, probably a century or so earlier.) As far as we can tell, the standard route was : assembly at Dartmouth or nearby (hanging around); a straight run to Santiago de Compostella (hanging around); turn left at Lisbon and straight through to Sicily (hanging around); Levant. The hanging-around episodes in the midst of long voyages all involve waiting for the right wind, although when we have accounts of them they're all about politics. (People get bored, and bored people besiege cities and take sides in civil wars. It's just human nature.) By late medieval times, English voyagers were clearly ending up in Candia (honey citron), Kalamata (olives), and Monemvasia (Malmsey) so often that the names are synonymous with their signature exports. By this time, the standard voyage was from London, and the place of hanging-around was the Downs. We know the Downs above all from the trials of the Pilgrims there: you took ship in London, went downriver to the Downs, and then waited for a wind that would take you around Spithead, from which it was usually fresh all the way to Gibraltar. And so this very long voyage from England all the way to Greece was usually most trouble a day's voyage from London. It's all about the wind, is, I think, a fair summary of this particular kind of voyage. It's almost meaningless to talk about how long "the voyage" is, unless you include the time spent hanging around waiting for the right wind. Because if you haven't got a fresh wind, and an expectation of it continuing, why are you even bothering? Just wait on land! Now, on the other hand, the "standard" voyage to St Kilda was four days, and made under oars. This is a very small distance, and a very long time, and it is not as though you can't improvise sails on boats this small. (Picture that image of the lifeboat with the improvised sail made by hanging clothes off an oar.) The reason people did things this way is that by far the most laborious parts of the whole voyage were those spent doodling around land. The entire last day of the voyage to St Kilda was scheduled on the basis that you arrived off the island's anchorage at nightfall, waited until morning, and spent as much of the day as you needed negotiating your way to land --probably mostly determined by the tides. In other words, it is not just the distance across open water that matters here. It's also the last hundred yards to land. This is pretty common for Atlantic voyaging. There has to be close attention to destinations and also waypoints. You sail, period, long distances, and row, period, short ones. (Although by "row" I think we need to allow improvised masts and sails, as noted.) I could pile on circumstance and location without end, here. Norwegians built deep-hulled ships because their waters are deep. Cinque Port captains go pirate easily, and this reflects corruption on land, because the only way to land at the Cinque Ports is to come up on the beach, and have some locals winch your characteristically short, fat-hulled boat up the steep dunes. And yet for a coastwise galley-trip in the Mediterranean, suddenly the rules are reversed; sails are used even for short voyages, and voyages are broken by what appears to be easy and regular beachings. The reason things are so different is that Mediterranean beaches are quite different from Atlantic, and much more common. While, on the other hand, tides are quite gentle and neither aid nor obstruct beaching. You probably can't just set out into the blue in a Mediterranean context, but if you know the land and seascape, you can plan a point-to-point-to-point voyage from one beach to the next. This is why the typical Mediterranean cabotage vessel is long, narrow, and shallow-hulled. It's meant to be hauled up shallow beaches. And then, from Bangkok to Canton, it's nothing but sails, ever, and even if you're going to war to restore the Bach Viet, your war elephants go from Da Nang to the Pearl by junk. Again, whereas if you're going to war against the Khmer or Surabaya, it is by war canoe. The long voyages rely on the monsoon winds, and your profit depends on your being the first ship of the season to catch them. Whereas the short voyages are going to landing stages on the flooded forest margin. It's that interface between land and sea that is decisive here. Different geographies demand different technologies, and different schedules. This is why, I think, most writers, and especially writers from the good old age of sail, scour ancient texts for voyage lengths. Locals know their waters, and, if pressed and talkative, will explain why the boats look like they do, and why voyages take the time they do. But, even here, you have to beware the "smartest man in the room." I think I'm on solid ground here, writing mainly from the maritime history of the Crusades and histories of the European workboat, and the very dangerously shallow basis of some tentative work on South China Sea piracy in the golden age.

That's too bad. I was kind of taken by the image of a free port orbiting a galactic black hole (nice neighbourhood you've got here!), dealing with the occasional visitor popping in from a billion light years away.

You can all see that Jeff isn't coordinating with my campaign, right?

I just want it on record that I'll give you all two ponies if you make me President.

If we're going with sperm whale powers, he could have a massive, intrusive, bludgeoning effect due to massive fat deposits in his head. (It's not implausible. I already have this superpower, and I'm a (non-sperm whale) mammal.

I know. I can't believe he dropped Hello Kitty, either.

Yeah. I stopped reading right there.

I have to start pretending to be a hot naked chick now? ... Because I am, you know.

Tri-Fist, The Pestilence of Men? See, with three typing hands, I can troll even faster. By the way, you're all ugly, and your Moms dress you funny.

This estimate might be a bit pessimistic. The York Factory Express was the annual Hudson's Bay connection between modern Churchill, Manitoba and Fort Vancouver, Washingtion. The Express was expected to travel the 4200 mile route in two-and-a-half-months, and, at a maximum, had a break-up-to-freeze window. Here's the Wikipedia article.

This, I admit, is true. That being said (for the 2005 default, anyway), Argentina was also not a democracy for much of the period in which this external debt was incurred. In fact, Peron is probably the one guy you can point to and be all Jerry Pournelle. "See, this is how democracies always fail in the end!"

Well, isn't someone shipping forbidden Paladin-love? (Lien has a boyfriend!)

I'm sorry to return to this, because it looks like I'm taking issue with Sinanju, whereas in fact you will notice that I have clipped his hopeful codicil. What I want to say is that I've read these guys, too. Or to put it another way, We know these Papenheimers. I'm returning to it, above all, because there's also a substantive issue. It has been very convincingly argued that this age of secular stagnation we live in (also known as: the reason you haven't had a real raise in thirty years) is due to a shortage of public debt. As incomprehensible as it may seem to people raised on a steady diet of deficit scolding, the amount of public debt around the world has been shrinking for years. The only reason America is an exception is that you've cut your tax rates so far. (Leaving the argument about whether that was a good idea or not aside.) So this pose of world-weary, cynical wisdom grounded in historical knowledge is dangerous to the public weal, even before you tancy that you see seven flavours of awfulness in it from the pens of Jerry Pournelle, Heinlein and H. Beam Piper. Because it's a terrible argument. It's wrong everywhere! It's actually not even just wrong. It's like anti-truth! It's like someone taking you aside and telling you, "Hey, kid, you're young and I'm wise and old, and I know science. Trust me, the Moon is made of green cheese." Almost literally so. i) Two hundred years? There are precious few regimes that last two centuries. Dynasties fall; civil wars happen; invasions succeed. Mostlly, it is monarchies and tyrannies that fall this way. But! But! But! But! I'm sputtering here because singling out democracies is such a terrible move to make in this argument. ii) Because, well, for one thing, there aren't that many historical democracies. The Death Tribble notes that Britain's democracy has lasted more than two hundred years, but that's not really true. Britain was an oligarchy with representative institutions until some point during the long road of parliamentary reforms made in the course of the Nineteenth Century. I don't know where in the progress of freedom you want to place the magic moment of breakthrough to the sunny uplands of true democracy, but it wasn't in 1816! iii) Given this, the whole pose of objective-data-driven-social-science is just completely wrong. What historical democracies are we singling out? There aren't that many of them, and the examples we single out: Rome, Athens, Venice --they all lasted a lot longer than two centuries. For the most part, they didn't even fall to internal tensions! In fact, if we're looking for examples, we need alleged Greek democracies of the sixth century BC, about which we know absolutely noting, and what we know is almost certainly wrong; the Roman republic (two centuries, not so much); and, I don't know, I guess Florence? Machiavelli was all upset about that, so I guess it counts. But if you're going to make some kind of point about democracies being particularly unstable, I've got a longer list right here of Chinese dynasties (alone) that fell. Though most of them made it three centuries, so good for them, I guess? Actually, I bet you could make a longer list of states-of-the-island-of-Java-that-fell-in-less-than-two-centuries than you can make of democracies that. . . iv) This is just another numbered point, but I'm separating it off because of the whole rich and deeper cray-cray factor. Not only have there not been many democracies in the world in history, there are a lot more now. Right now, and for the last two centuries, the pattern has been for dictatorships and anarchies to fall and be replaced by democracies. And the number of democracies which have fallen in that time is . . . . Hungary, maybe? Thailand's had some rough patches, too. But, overall, the clear, the very clear trend, has been the opposite of this historical insight presented above. Oh, maybe we're due at the magic two centuries mark, but until then, where's the freaking evidence? So that's democracies failing. Now, the bit about the crowd realising that they can vote themselves money out of the treasury. Public debt is a feature of the modern age, ever since the Habsburgs of Spain (accuracy note: note a democracy!) started borrowing to fund their wars in the Sixteenth Century. The Habsburgs of Spain also pioneered national debt repudiation, which is clearly not a good thing, but in no way the end of the world, as we can see on account of the world not ending. The Habsburgs having set a precedent, everyone started borrowing large amounts of money to fund their wars. And stuff: Like, for example, corruption. Right down to today, the entire list of countries which have repudiated their public debts since the French Revolution consist of: the Weimar Republic (by stealth); and, assorted dictatorships and anarchies. Not a single democracy has repudiated its debt since 1815, to the best of my knowledge. Why? Because, in the mid-seventeenth century, two regimes which fought the Spanish a lot realised that they had to put their national-debt-raising on a solid footing and establish proper taxation to pay for it. And you know what countries those were? Two republics! (Dutch, English.) Then, in the Eighteenth Century, in a particularly bad episode of public debt repudiation, the French monarchy's handling of it led to a revolution which established a republic , which, in turn, put French finances on the right path. One of the more interesting things about this was that they did so by getting rid of the rich and connected rentier class which took a large share of the public debt as private payment. It turns out that monarchies last until aristocrats realise that they can privilege themselves a fortune out of the public treasury. . . Meanwhile, in the second decade of the 21st century, we see public debt shrinking everywhere. It is projected that the American debt will stop shrinking and start growing at some point in the future, but this is because the projections assume that Americans will never raise taxes, ever again. For example, you will not raise your social security taxes by, for example, eliminating the tax preference for private retirement plans that have so dramatically failed their investors. I --never mind. Of course, that tax break has served at least one purpose: it has put a lot of money in the hands of the American financial industry, and, since some of it comes back in the form of lobbying money, into the hands of its politicians. Something about public largesse?