Profile for Or else o'erleap.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Or else o'erleap. |
| Member number | 335 |
| Title | Law Bringer |
| Postcount | 14579 |
| Homepage | http://www.polarisboard.net |
| Registered | Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Game Cost? in The Exile Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Thursday, June 1 2006 12:55
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But no, there's no standard way to get the trilogy CD discount without the CD. Go figure. Still, if you ask Jeff, he'd probably be willing to give you three registration codes and not ship. —Alorael, who just realized that it's now cheaper to get the Avernum CD than to get two individual Avernums. Go figure. And the Avernum Trilogy plus Nethergate costs only twice as much as Nethergate. Go figure even more. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 19:38
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Where do you think macroevolution comes from? Mutate enough and you get a new species. Mutate even more and you get a new species that doesn't even resemble the original species. Microevolution does not necessarily involve mutation at all, because simple changes in allele frequency can happen much faster. A lightning strike cannot turn garbage into a CD because most garbage doesn't contain the elements required to make a CD. Turning one element into another is either alchemy or radioactive decay. The latter doesn't apply and the former doesn't work. While I'll concede that a CD is simpler than any organism, a CD with coherent instructions on it is more complex, largely because it can't evolve. All in all, "complexity" is so vague and these comparisons so apples to oranges that I think we've lost all semblance of meaning. Technically, life doesn't have to have a source for sustenance. All evolution requires is replication. It's just that it's hard to replicate without ingesting material for replication and energy with which to do it. —Alorael, who doesn't specialize in life manufacturing. His understanding is that it's quite doable with a small caveat: nobody has tools fine enough to do the construction work. That's still not useful, though, because we can also assemble CDs and it's pretty clear that there is an irreducible complexity problem there. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Belisarius Is The World's Biggest Noob in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 19:24
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I think WM was the other case of sarcasm gone awry. I could be wrong. —Alorael, who will have you know that =) is a common suffix for a very popular markup language. Or maybe it's html. They're easy to confuse. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 17:20
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For Urey-Miller, read here or here *i didn't say you don't study science, he said you haven't studies the specific science behind evolution. You clearly haven't. The vast majority of mutations aren't beneficial. Actually, most have no real effect. Once in a while, though, a mutation is beneficial, or the result of many neutral mutations is beneficial. That's evolutionary "progress" (even though progress is the wrong word, really). There are a number of hypotheses for how life began. None of them are accepted yet. All of them have some merit and some problems. None of them involve sparks suddenly starting life. —Alorael, who thinks there is a misconception about implausibility. The spontaneous beginning of life isn't likely. On the other hand, it's likely enough that given millions of years and a proper environment it can and apparently did happen. Some kind of lightning-strike alchemy forming a CD with information on it is literally impossible. (A CD and its contents are probably more complex than early life, too.) [ Wednesday, May 31, 2006 17:23: Message edited by: Manual Remailer ] Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Some interesting questions in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 14:39
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I would be played by digitally generated images. And I'd be silent, so no one woud get voice credits. —Alorael, who missed this question entirely on his first time through. Oops. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| In this topic, I celebrate my inability to shut up. in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 14:36
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Good job, Aran! Keep yourself in that number 1.5 posting spot! —Alorael, who would not want to neglect Aran's other services to Spiderweb. Without Aran there would be much less ease of stalking. Without Aran there would be no spam races. Without Aran there would be dire consequences from Something Awful. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 14:29
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According to Wikipedia, Col. Whittlesey was an American commander, and he lost more than half of his men in the Argonne Forest. No mention is made of Psalm 91. In fact, Google turns up no references to Whittlesey and Psalm 91 with even marginal credibility. —Alorael, who is surprised nobody bothered with the all-important Wikipedia basic fact check yet. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| 5160 in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 13:45
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 —Alorael, who wheelbarrows and ornithopters. Frequently. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| the exile I music in The Exile Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 13:41
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I'm not overwhelmed by the quality, but you can get free and legal downloads of the Little Fugue here. —Alorael, who will now resume looking for music by Litolff and Boeildieu. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| What is Scribbane? in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 13:32
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Five months for a worthless revival? Just say no! —Alorael, who does. And his word is final. Quite literally. Word. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Why is this? in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Wednesday, May 31 2006 13:26
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Warning: Mockery below. Please do not read if you have blood pressure problems and no sense of humor. Who has started the most immediately locked topics? Probably spammers. But of tolerated Spiderweb members, TM. —Alorael, who uses tolerated somewhat loosely. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that TM is tolerant. While this seems rather incorrect at first glance, there are important biological ramifications. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 30 2006 16:55
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If it were science versus God, I wouldn't be able to believe in God and still take scientific answers over religious ones most of the time. The fact of the matter is that right now the debate breaks down along lines of science, which opposes creationism, and creationism, which is based on Judeo-Christian religion. As I said, there's plenty of evidence for evolution. We can see that it's possible, and the fossil record makes a pretty good case for it being true. I know it's useless, but I'd still love to see your evidence for creationism. Especially young Earth creationism. I'm not even sure where six-legged cows came into this. They die because no cow has six legs without being one terribly damaged embryo. If cows accumulated mutations that led to an extra pair of legs they'd have six legs, but I can't imagine what advantage that would be. Nobody claims that all mutations are good. The claim is that enough mutations are non-harmful for them to build up very slowly into useful genes with new functions. —Alorael, who wishes bacteria would stop mutating (and passing its mutations along laterally) so medicine didn't need to keep up with an evolutionary treadmill to remain effective. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Some interesting questions in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 30 2006 13:18
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I think I think in written text, but how do I know that how I think I think is how I think? —Alorael, who further realizes that his textual thinking is a large barrier to pronouncing many words right. Sure, nu-clee-er and not nu-cue-ler, but where's the emphasis? He's currently reworking his mental dictionary so that words have the nécessary áccents marked in. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| A Thousand Words in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 30 2006 13:12
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(Image as link for browser sanity) Lock Mod was here! —Alorael, who has more of those lined up. Many, many more. [ Tuesday, May 30, 2006 13:13: Message edited by: The Adventures of Taqman and ELISA ] Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Spell scam? in Avernum 4 | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 30 2006 13:03
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Some of the cheap spells are worth it, but the later ones invariably aren't. Buying the first level of a spell can be worth your money, though, depending on how long you'd have to go without the spell otherwise and how useful the spell is. —Alorael, who wouldn't survive without lots and lots of Minor Healings and a few Bolts of Fire. The more bonus the merrier! Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Tuesday, May 30 2006 12:59
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In this context, it is literally impossible to prove a negative. If God exists and does nothing detectable, then he is functionally nonexistent (until we die, anyway). Now, despite Thuryl's point, I give religion two definitions. One is a codified system of spiritual beliefs, especially when such a system is shared. That's the hat. The other definition is any spiritual beliefs, because everyone has some beliefs that function as a religion equivalent even if they aren't religious. That's the pidgeon. Alec uses wisdom and experience interchangeably to mean empirically verified truth and gnosis to mean accepted but unverified truth. It's more complicated than that, though, because I have no empirical evidence of relativity. I can't understand Einstein's work, and I can't even understand any of the work after and around him. I just accept the word of the physicists who say that it is both mathematically true and experimentally valid. How is this different from those who attest to the Bible's truth? Peer review and quality control, really. On this level, belief in science and belief in religion are quantitatively the same but qualitatively different. This holds true until we try to use information to get desired results, in which case science is useful and religion really isn't. That said, if we accept that there is no vast conspiracy of scientists and that their empirical understanding as conveyed to us is meaningful, we've got our logos and gnosis. [Edit: I've gotten over looking bad as a non-atheist. All the evidence is really on the side of agnosticism. It's quite okay to believe in God, but it's rather pointless to try to argue that God trumps science because science has won every time. If God really didn't want science to be the truth, he'd be intervening.] —Alorael, who won't trot out all his evolution arguments again. His first point is that your ignorance of evidence does not prove an absence of evidence. Microevolution has been extensively, even excessively, documented. It happens. Mutation happens and has been seen too. Macroevolution from mutation has also been documented in labs. Speciation happens and we've seen it. All that's left is "irreducible complexity," which is another fancy way of claiming that ignorance of evidence is evidence of non-occurrence. When other scientists propose mechanisms for evolution of complexity, they're shouted down. [ Tuesday, May 30, 2006 13:01: Message edited by: The Adventures of Taqman and ELISA ] Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| My God can beat up your God! in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, May 29 2006 19:34
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That would depend on the denomination of Judaism. That said, all the Jews I know of use the many terms for God, but generally only in a religious, reverent context. —Alorael, who is operating under the assumption that Judaist is an odd term for a Jew. [ Monday, May 29, 2006 19:36: Message edited by: Timothy Edible ] Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Spell scam? in Avernum 4 | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, May 29 2006 19:33
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Make sure you're always buying your spells for the right character. Teaching your fighter how to hurl death rays around isn't very useful and can be quite expensive. —Alorael, who can tell you exactly what the effects of each spell level you gain is. Check the manual for each spell. It will say something about the effect of Bonus in the formula. Bonus is the sum of Magery, Spellcraft, levels in the spell cast, and either Mage or Priest Spells. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Custom Names - images inside in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, May 29 2006 12:18
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It's better for everyone if you don't ask. Needle/ferrets may be involved. —Alorael, who has generally found that the worst part is trying to get the lemmings to stop squirming while you get all the clamps tightened. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Walkthroughs in The Exile Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, May 29 2006 12:16
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That's only if you have all five brooches. With only four you can get in to kill Hawthorne but you have to die for the cause. —Alorael, who figured martyrdom is as good an end as any for the intrepid Avernites. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| My God can beat up your God! in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, May 29 2006 08:55
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I was reminded of specific atheism by earlier events yesterday. Slarty, you've really lost me. I think Kel covered the God side already, but besides the obvious linguistic difference of "dieu" and "dios" being evolutions of the same word into two different languages, what's the difference? You say the meaning isn't the same, but I can't see how. A god is a god is a god. This may not be true for the "god" word in a very different culture with very different basic understanding of religion and gods, but English, Latin, French, and Spanish all share a sufficiently homogenous religious culture. —Alorael, who has scientifically proven the existence of God by redefining God. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Official Comic Book Thread in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, May 29 2006 08:43
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 —Alorael, who does not approve of posting games. Failed ones are even more fair game. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| My God can beat up your God! in General | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Sunday, May 28 2006 22:29
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quote:Not the same. Judaism emphatically denies that One and Only God is Enlil. The Mesopotamians aren't around to debate the point, but I think they'd deny that Jews worship Enlil too. They may be the same by descent, but they're not the same theologically. Jews, Christians, and Muslims by and large agree that they're all worshipping the same divine entity. Exactly how to worship that entity, what it has said and done, and who speaks for it is under debate, but there's no debate over the entity itself. Also, saying "dieu" and "dios" and "deus" and so on aren't the same is linguistically absurd. They really are the same word from the same root. "God" is a distinct word, but it covers the same concept. God with a capital G could be distinct from Dios with a capital D, but that still seems like a bizarre distinction. Catholics in Rome and Catholics in Belize have no theological disagreement about who they're praying too regardless of language. (Whether it should all be in Latin or not is another issue.) —Alorael, who is entertained by atheists who specifically reject the red or green apple gods. If you are not believing, must you pick a specific entity in which not to believe over all other potential entities? Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| is this game worth playing in The Exile Trilogy | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Sunday, May 28 2006 13:51
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Meaningless topic revival! —Alorael, who is lock before the in. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
| Avernum V ideas in Avernum 4 | |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Sunday, May 28 2006 13:49
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All things are possible, but there's really not even strong circumstantial evidence for Shadow47 = Ed. —Alorael, who can't wrap his mind around not quite unique. Unique is a property that can be either true or false. There are no degrees of uniqueness. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
