Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, September 25 2007 10:18
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There are indeed a lot of little contradictions like these in the Bible, and they do rather undermine the theory that it is a preternaturally accurate and coherent document. If one views the New Testament as an ordinary historic document, however, they actually strengthen its claims to be an accurate record of the important things. A perfectly harmonious document would be either a miracle, or a carefully composed fiction. The Bible is not that kind of miracle, but neither is it that kind of fiction. Parallel passages in the Bible typically do differ, and not just in ways that seem attributable to clerical errors; but they agree on the basic outline of events. This suggests that the parallel passages do come from independent sources, which were faithfully preserved in parallel, and which agree on the important points. That is generally the best one can get, even today, from eyewitness testimony. I was once assisting officer at the military summary trial of a reservist charged with offering violence to a superior. Between some hesitation by the accused over whether he wanted to elect for court martial, and the slow pace of administration in a part-time organization, the trial finally took place a year after the events had occurred. There were four or five eyewitnesses present at the trial. Everyone agreed that the accused and the officer had been drinking in the same group, that an argument had developed, and that the accused had thrown a glass object. Nobody claimed that the officer had been injured. But each of the witnesses claimed under oath to have a clear and detailed recollection of exactly what had happened, and none of the stories matched. One guy said the accused had pitched a beer bottle over the officer's head, the bottle had smashed in a corner of the room, and he himself had later swept up the pieces. Another said that the accused had hurled a beer glass onto the table, and pieces of it had hit him, the witness, in the arm. And so on. Despite the confusion, it was clear from all the accounts that no deliberate attack had been made. So the accused was found not guilty of the serious charge. It was also clear, though, that he had flung some glassware around while conversing with a superior officer, and that made him clearly guilty of a lesser charge. Military justice being severe, that was enough to get him demoted to private and hauled off to jail that very night. But only for two weeks; for offering violence he could have gone away for a year or more. There were quite a number of bad things about this episode and the way it was handled, but in my opinion the CO's assessment of the eyewitness testimony was good. Minor discrepancies are inevitable given how human memories work, but they need not invalidate the essential story. [ Tuesday, September 25, 2007 10:30: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, September 25 2007 06:16
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The idea that heavy armor went out of fashion in Europe because of longbows and crossbows was always my understanding as well. But on a list I just found while searching for paper armor, I found reference to a recent scholarly tome that apparently concludes the opposite: longbows went out of fashion because they could no longer penetrate improved armor. I had always supposed that bows ruled until firearms replaced them. But it should be easy to check. When did longbows fade from the scene? When did crossbows? And when did plate armor? If it's true that armor outlasted bows, then presumably firearms alone killed armor. Also, although infection was a horrible problem until modern times, I don't think anyone wore chainmail in battle primarily to stave off gangrene. In addition to giving you nasty infections, penetrating wounds are much more likely than blunt ones to kill you directly. Sure, being bashed really hard is really bad. But being hit equally hard with a sharp edge or point has got to be worse, unless you're wearing armor. [ Tuesday, September 25, 2007 06:24: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, September 24 2007 06:10
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It may be worth explaining the challenge singularities pose to our current theories. Strictly speaking what we have now are two separate theories: general relativity describes gravity, and renormalizable relativistic quantum field theory describes everything else (in fact, one specific such theory, the so-called 'Standard Model'). These two theories seem to be incompatible. Trying to fit them together is a lot like the kind of argument one often sees on a forum like this one, in which each participant has a lot to say about their own pet perspectives but simply ignores those of the others. Quantum field theory keeps wanting to talk about quantum states, which are vectors in an abstract space of staggeringly large dimension. General relativity knows nothing about that space or the vectors that live in it; as far as it is concerned, everything exists in good ol' four-dimensional spacetime. GR is keen to talk about the possibly complicated geometry of spacetime, and how tricky it can be to define the 'flow' of time, or the concept of energy. QFT totally ignores these issues. Attempts to express either GR in the language of QFT, or QFT in the language of GR, have been total failures despite decades of effort from very brilliant people. The resulting theories have all either been absurdly inconsistent, or else so abstract and vague as to yield no implications for any observable phenomena. So from a philosophical point of view contemporary physics is simply bankrupt. Pragmatically speaking, though, we are doing all right. We assume that our two incompatible current theories are like blind men's views from different sides of the elephant which is the ultimate theory. Each view is very good, within a limited range. Using one or the other we can answer any question which does not require a view of the elephant as a whole. Unfortunately the early universe and the cores of black holes are just such places. Gravity and quantum mechanics would seem to be important simultaneously in these cases, so we really have no idea what is going on. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, September 24 2007 05:14
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quote:This is confusing because it's not clear what Newton's Second Law has to do with this question. And first you say that nothing infinite can ever have a beginning, but then you seem to say that it can if it is created by another infinite thing. quote:The first is indeed a puzzle, but the spacetime geometry of event horizons is very well understood. Space and time are not folded into nothing at a horizon. You may be thinking of the metric singularity at the 'center' of a black hole, well inside the event horizon. It is similar in some ways to the Big Bang singularity, and it is not understood either. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, September 24 2007 01:28
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Actually, are we sure paper was so cheap? It's cheap today, but medieval Chinese folks burned it as a sacrifice. Making paper in large quantities is heavy industry today, and it uses chemicals that make whole towns smell bad. I do believe that there was probably some sort of paper armor, but I doubt it was much like an inch thick book, and a quick google search makes me suspicious. There are a number of 'gee-whiz' references, but very little detail. I think it might turn out to be a complete myth; most likely there is some truth to the story but in fact the available evidence is very vague; possibly the truth is known but not as surprising as it sounds (maybe some sort of papier mache kind of stuff was used as padding in cloth garments, or something like that). The idea that paper armor would defeat early firearms sounds interesting. I can imagine there might be some truth in it, if the firearms in question were throwing blunt projectiles that could break hard armor but not cut paper. But it might also be nonsense: I have fired a musketball through a pretty thick chunk of wood. My rule of thumb these days is to be skeptical of any supposed historical fact. A lot really is known about the past, but a lot of what passes for historical fact is mere speculation based on very feeble evidence. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, September 23 2007 23:43
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It is not clear whether the universe is spatially finite or infinite. Either way, it currently appears that it probably had a beginning. In principle, though, an eternal finite universe and an infinite universe with a beginning are both possible. A passage from the Bible has infallible authority on one question only in this discussion: the question of how that passage reads. The other fine reason to quote scripture is that you like the way the Bible puts something. If you like how Homer Simpson put something, you can quote him too. Anyone can google the NT canon and learn the status of our knowledge about how it was formed. The picture seems pretty clear, since we have quite a few relevant documents. In general the official decision represented a very solid consensus, but there were a few borderline cases. As has been mentioned, the epistle to the Hebrews was one such. The book of Revelation was also very controversial. There was even some argument about the gospel of John. The epistle of Jude suffered suspicion because it quotes an apocryphal OT book (Enoch). There were also a few books that some people wanted to include in the canon, but didn't make it. The fact that we now doubt the traditional authorship theories for many NT books is not really a big deal. The important question back in the day was not who contributed the exact words, but rather who was the source for the content of the book. Whose teaching did the book convey? So a book whose authority traced back to Peter would be attributed to Peter; nobody really cared whether or not Peter himself wrote or dictated the final text. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Khyryk's Catacombs in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, September 21 2007 22:57
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Tek's Spectral Dirk is a classic Geneforge item, since you took it from Tek (a spectral jerk) in G1. My fond theory that it is that same item you find in each successive game was unfortunately challenged when I collected two of them once, I think in G3. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, September 21 2007 22:33
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quote:And from the fact that we're all still here. Let's be honest: there seemed no reason to re-examine 'this generation' in this way, until it became apparent that the world wasn't ending fast enough. And a re-examination based on relating Greek and Hebrew words from opposite ends of the Bible is hardly the most immediate contextualization. This is one of those tight corners. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Do you name your creations? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, September 21 2007 22:04
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quote:Global wyrming. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, September 21 2007 09:17
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quote:But they weren't playing against each other. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, September 21 2007 05:42
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But it seems this could go either way. Why recruit, supply, move, and control so many soldiers, if you can win with a few guys in armor? If the net advantage lay with naked hordes in Asia, and with squadrons of knights in Europe, then the question remains, Why the difference? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, September 21 2007 04:50
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You can make armor out of paper, and in fact I read somewhere that Chinese armies used this a lot, in some period or other. It could certainly be better than nothing. In fact, either those paperclad Chinese armies were just stupid, or paper armor was overall the best option they had in their circumstances. Stupidity on one side or the other is possible in principle, but it should be an explanation of last resort. So, sure: non-metallic armors might well have been better for the needs of various non-European cultures. The question is, Why, when they weren't good enough in Europe? [ Friday, September 21, 2007 04:51: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, September 20 2007 12:42
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Funny, I was happy to read the first two of Pullman's books, but somehow lost interest at that point. I think it was the building towards this climactic battle with, apparently, God. Pullman's title for his trilogy is a quotation from Milton, in which the 'dark materials' are God's. And Pullman's novels make a number of emphatic references to real and imagined theistic religions. But the God of theism is the author of reality, not a power that one could possibly defeat. So by the end of book 2 I felt that Pullman's 'Authority' was a bait-and-switch. I thought he had been talking about God all along, but clearly he was really only talking about some merely superhuman tyrant. The actual theology of HDM seems to be entirely unexamined atheism. Atheism per se is fine, of course, but unexamined anything is a letdown. I was disappointed with how what looked like a novel theological theme dissolved into banality. It was like learning that the Matrix was physical reality after all, and that bit about everything being virtual had been a joke. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Raise your hand if you LOVE Linear RPG's! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, September 20 2007 07:06
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One way I can see to put more RP into CRPG is by having many endings, most of which could be good or bad endings depending on the character's values. This forces the player to think about adopting a particular viewpoint, in order to know which ending they want, or even just to decide how they feel about the endings they get. 'You liberate the galaxy' versus 'you conquer the galaxy' doesn't leave much room for manoeuvre. Which is just to say that if you want RP in CRPG, you can't try to just tack it on. You need to weave it into the medium, and the medium is about powering up your character and achieving goals. If you make the possible goals and powers multi-valued, as opposed to just having many ways of trashing monsters, then you make role-playing part of winning. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, September 20 2007 05:44
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quote:Am I right in my impression that you're a Jehovah's Witness, Stillness? If so maybe you can update me on the current teaching about 'the generation that saw 1914'. As I understand it, over the twentieth century the JW movement consistently emphasized the Great War as a major end time event. If I'm remembering rightly some books I was given in the mid '80s, the idea was that the end of the world had to happen before the last people born in 1918 had all died. I suppose that with medical advances that could still have us lasting until 2050 or so, but a few extremely old folks who were babes in arms at the armistice seems like an awfully finicky realization of 'I tell you the truth, this generation shall not pass away until all is accomplished.' So is this still, or was it really ever, the official JW line? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, September 20 2007 05:09
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I googled for armor metallurgy, and found some informative sites that seemed to have plenty of respectable looking references. The impression I got is that the answer to my question may not yet be available, since there seem to be some important open questions about how medieval European armor got made. In particular it seems to be unclear just how it got made in the large quantities it did. Some of the technical methods used by a few major armorers have been reconstructed, but some are only conjectured. And it apparently remains a puzzle how the known armor makers could have produced the known quantities of armor. This means we don't really understand how hard it really was for those medieval Europeans to make their armor. If it turns out that the Europeans had some technical or economic trick for churning the stuff out, then maybe my answer is that other cultures lacked the trick. But since we don't seem to know how the Europeans did it, and since it will probably be even harder to know the counterfactual of how hard it would have been for other cultures to do it, then I'm afraid that a good supply side answer, of how Europeans could make metal armor more easily than others, is probably beyond current historical knowledge. The demand side answer, explaining why Europeans wanted heavy metal armor more than other people, may yet be part of the whole answer. So far I at least haven't been convinced by the ideas suggested along these lines. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, September 20 2007 02:16
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I believe this is roughly true, though adult stature has more to do with childhood protein intake than eating your vegetables. The question is whether those shrimpy little European medievals may still have been bigger than their Asian contemporaries. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, September 20 2007 01:04
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This is the kind of thing I might really buy. Sword blades and arrowheads are quite differently shaped from either armor plates or chainmail rings, after all. If the metals available in western Europe were uniquely effective in making these structures, that would be a good reason why nobody else went for heavy metal armor. Armor is metallurgically tricky stuff, I think. Your armor has to be hard enough that it doesn't get cut like butter, but also tough enough that it doesn't break like glass. Blades are thick enough that you can arrange to leave the back soft (or in a two-edged sword the inside), and temper the edge very hard, so that the blade as a whole will cut well, but also bend instead of snapping. Japanese swords were expertly made in this way. But I think that achieving similar effects in armor might require the armor to be far too thick and heavy. So maybe heavy metal armor does require special metal. [ Thursday, September 20, 2007 01:07: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 19 2007 14:11
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A seasoned army is not nearly as susceptible to disease as a conscript horde, but it's still a problem, and density is unavoidable. It's not a matter of guys standing shoulder to shoulder; it's that everyone is in contact with a lot of other people on a regular basis. If this isn't true, you don't have an army. Sometimes you can't get a decisive battlefield victory, and you have to try for something else or give up. Sometimes the willingness of one side to try for something else is what prevents the battlefield victory from being so decisive after all. That doesn't mean that the quick win wouldn't have been a good thing if it had been possible, or that anybody who knows what they are doing isn't trying for it. The idea that anyone would forego heavy armor just because they preferred to fight indecisively still seems crazy to me. And the idea that heavy armor was built with surrender in mind is also hard to believe. No doubt it was built with survival in mind, but if it helped fighters survive, then that seems to be a benefit unconnected to surrender customs. And there were certainly European battles in which many knights perished despite surrender customs and heavy armor. I do buy that full plate armor was the end of a long development history, so that it might just be that the western Europeans got started on that tech tree first, and therefore got furthest up it before firearms cut it down for everyone. But this still leaves the question of why Europeans started pursuing heavier armor before anyone else. And it's not as though China was using plate mail when field plate ruled the west; there seems to have been a big gap in armor weight between Europe and the rest of the world. It seems in fact as though the Europeans were the only people really trying to climb the heavy armor tech tree. So we have the original question, still. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 19 2007 12:54
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No, armies suffered from disease far more than civilian populations, because armies were dense population centers, while civilian populations were overwhelmingly rural and diffuse. Diseases spread quickly in dense populations, and sanitation is much tougher to handle. And nobody could afford to let their army sicken away over a long campaign just because their enemies might also be sickening. Diseases may eventually get everybody, but they come in unpredictable waves, and no general could count on his enemy's attrition rate matching his. Winning decisive battles is by far the best way to win wars, if you can possibly swing it. So the question is why westerners alone tried to swing it by means of such heavy armor. The possibility that Mongols and Ottomans won battles with moderately armored troops only makes it harder to understand why Europeans went all the way to very heavy armor, and these other powers did not. If armor was good for the Mongols, why didn't they get more of it? If light armor was good enough, why didn't the Europeans stop there? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| How Did You Find Spiderweb? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 19 2007 12:33
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I swung a pendulum over the internet, and just followed the line of its swing until I got here. It worked for Professor Calculus, and it worked for me. If I had happened to go in the opposite direction, where would I be? What is the internet antipodes of Spiderweb? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 19 2007 12:29
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Many sects claim to deduce their doctrines rigorously from scripture as their sole source. Many such doctrines do seem to follow pretty directly, and any outsider will concede so, whatever their views on scriptural authority. Somehow there are always a few of these rigorously deduced doctrines, though, that strike all outsiders as far-fetched. The scriptural sheet is just never quite big enough for the doctrinal bed: there's always a tight corner somewhere. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 19 2007 12:08
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Hmm, an interesting idea. I don't really buy that decisive battle is a uniquely western goal. Nobody wants a long war. For one thing, all armies before quite recent times suffered terribly from disease, so that there was a high casualty rate whether the army fought or not. And, anyway, plenty of lightly armored forces have been able to win decisive battles. The Mongols, for instance, or the Ottomans. And Agincourt was a battle where heavy cavalry charges were decisive only in losing. But there is a long western tradition of trying to achieve decisive battles specifically with heavy cavalry charges. I understand that this was Alexander the Great's favorite tactic, though how well this really worked without stirrups is unclear to me. And the Byzantines were into heavy cavalry, though I don't think they had stirrups either. The western Romans, on the other hand, were never much into heavy cavalry. So tradition could go both ways, and I'm still left wondering. Armies that do a lot of fighting don't maintain unproductive traditions for centuries on end, so there must have been some good reasons for all those European knights. What were they, and why didn't other cultures follow them? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Public Opinion Survey in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 19 2007 09:00
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Samurai had awfully good swords, and I guess their bows were okay. But their armor was much lighter than European late medieval stuff, and I do not buy that it offered comparable protection just because Japan Is Superior. I don't think Japanese swords or arrows would penetrate European armor well. They weren't designed to defeat armor so heavy, since they didn't have to face it. Lots of cultures had mounted warriors. Why did Europe develop armor for its knights that was so much heavier than anyone else's? Was there some socio-economic reason that European knights could afford it more than their counterparts? Did Europe have lots more iron to use? Were huge horses unique to Europe? Was Europe alone in having essential technologies like stirrups and chain mail? Or did Europe lack something that let other cultures do something better than heavy knights? European armies have been fascinated by the supposed 'shock action' of heavy armored charges from before Agincourt to after Kursk. But light cavalry for pursuit, raiding, reconnaissance (and 'screening' to keep out enemy reconnaissance) has always been the duller but far more valuable role. Maybe other cultures were able to keep their cavalry from grandstanding so much. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, September 18 2007 10:40
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American Gods was interesting, though indeed probably not as good as the other. I also just finished The Tyranny of the Night, the first in a new series by Glenn Cook (of the Black Company and other things). These two books have some elements in common, weirdly. This new series by Cook seems interesting. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |