Bay 12 Games Forum

It's... a hell of a lot better than high school is, generally. It's got its downsides (especially before the folks that don't want to be there manage to find their excuse to drop out), but my personal experiences have been largely net positive.

It... kinda' depends on the situation. I ended up dropping latin half way through the semester in high school (for half credit -- it was online, and so far I just haven't had much luck with studying languages online. Much better response when I'm in a classroom with a teacher.), and my last half year of high school was... odd. In that I switched over to the local adult school and basically taught myself the last half year of classes I needed to get a high school diploma (best period of high school I ever experienced). Extenuating circumstance there being a somewhat influential parent in the system, but everything was done above board and through the system.

The general point is that there may be options. You won't know unless you ask around and see what's possible, if anything.

E: Though I'm not exactly surprised latin's dropping. The language itself is kinda', y'know. Dead. And other languages aren't. And they could be spending money teaching languages people actually use even remotely regularly for communication. Instead of one that's primarily useful for puzzling out some scientific/medical terms, a little bit of vocab, and... not much else.

Quote from: SalmonGod on January 10, 2013, 09:03:11 pm

Quote from: Frumple on January 10, 2013, 08:55:32 pm

Yup. Now we just have to hope for epic sea monsters (and tentacle-wielding robotic fisherman's wives. Can't forget those.).

Waterworlds can be wonderful.

Well, I like a good fantasy story more than most, but... that's all that lil'pseudo-science (not even that, really ) spiel was, y'know? Pretty much entirely unverifiable and unsupportable, pure speculation with basically no foundation in anything even resembling fact. Without some sort of support (which is pretty much impossible to produce unless a fellow's got some sort of time machine or some degree of historical records [of a sort which we lack]), the only reason I'd have to consider it as a meaningful (sorta') explanation would be if I were trying to support some other position with (baseless) just-so stories, which... I'm not, really.

S'an interesting enough example of spinning a yarn, but that sort of thing being presented as serious is one of the reasons the anthropology field gets laughed so much. Which kinda' makes me sad when I see it, as I'd love for the study to find itself a niche that isn't covered by psychology or sociology (and for it to get off philosophy's lawn ).

I've noticed that when things break, they all tend to break in a relatively close period of time. It's weird.

Iirc, they actually, like... don't. You're just primed to notice by the first instance and then remember the rest coming around the same time better or... something. Too late for me to remember the specifics, but there's some kind of memory shenanigans going on with that line of thought. Rule of threes, etc., so forth, so on. Statistically nonexistent but emphasized by neurology. Something like that. There's been studies, heh.

Best I can explain is that by designing them for a certain job profile, you're deciding their lives for them.

GG's point, near as I can tell, is that that's, well. Not possible, or at least not efficiently doable. It's really hard to improve something for a specific position doing one thing and not have that skillset/capability expansion not make that thing also better at many other things. And there still doesn't seem to be anything intrinsic to providing a genetic predisposition toward certain skillsets that's stopping the modified from doing something less than optimal. Being really good at something doesn't somehow change the firmament of reality and make it so that's the only thing you're capable of.

Basically, it's really hard to improve something and in the process make it less capable. You'd have to be specifically removing beneficial adaptations and... there's no reason to do that. It's less efficient, notably so. You get more use out of a smart critter with legs, with less infrastructure investment, than you do from ones without. There's no financial (or any other, really -- any control issues can be handled on the social side much more effectively.) incentive to breed a less effective critter, y'know?

Though I guess that's tangential to the slave thing. I'm not really sure about that one, either. It takes more than just "better at deskwork" to turn something into a slave, I'd say, but perhaps TMS can clarify the point.

Going by the sand stream thingy, it looks like it'll be pretty difficult to flood the world, at least with water physics as they currently are.

Here's hoping for water worlds!