WIllythemailboy

Reply to Technological/Manufacturing Capitals and Bonus Tiles in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Nah, I'd go with the Artificial Slave Center on a 700% tile for an instant 200% manufacturing bonus empire wide.

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I'm simply saying that yes - to disprove a theory, one does not, and never has had to, provide a better explanation, or any explanation for that matter.[/quote] True, at least in isolation. To disprove a theory, you must be able to prove that it gives a wrong answer in a known situation. If you can provide substantial evidence that the theory takes known starting conditions, predicts an outome based on these conditions, and the predictions are flat out wrong compared to the kno

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]It's bearing on evolution is zip, it's just wrong information.[/quote] I've found a few papers that bring into question whether neanderthals were completely displaced or just interbred until the races homogenized. It's not yet settled (or more accurately was thought settled and became unsettled) whether they were indeed an entirely separate species or a different subspecies within the same species, much like wolves and dogs are still close enough to be interfertil

Reply to Technological/Manufacturing Capitals and Bonus Tiles in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

The exception is the political capitol. Due to how the bonuses it gives are calculated, it can use the bonus from either a morale or influence bonus tile. The difference is in how the different planetary outputs are calculated. Manufacturing and research are produced as concrete point values, and the capitol structures increase that output by a percentage. Since the two structures perform slightly different functions, the game recognizes one as getting the bonus and the

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

Mumble, you seem like someone who would really enjoy reading God's Debris . It's fiction, he admits it's fiction, but it's a damn good read anyway.

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]First, a glass of water does not stay at 0C until all the ice melts. If it did, the ice would never melt under the surface, major duh here since it melts faster. Aren't you an engineer? Yes I am and yes it does. Sure there will be very minor incremental temperature differences throughout the liquid but basically the water stays at a *relatively* constant temperature and the energy of added heat to the system is taken up by the energy (80 cal/g) of the

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

First, what you are basically arguing is the "irreducible complexity" idea, generally championed by Michael Behe. It's based on the expectation that evolution can only add things, and that evolution has a direction. Fortunately, neither of those statements is true. Evolutionary changes can remove structures, or alter the shape or function of an existing one rather than just adding new ones. And evolution itself does not have a direction - most people seem to think that evolution must always s

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]There most certainly was a MWP as well as a LIA but both of these are in fact *regional* variations of *weather* as opposed to significant changes in mean global temperature or in other words, climate. The MWP has in fact been displayed in graphs in many replies in this thread and typically has been used as some sort of disproof of the "hockey stick" and by extension AGW. If you haven't noticed this then you must have missed way more than a few posts. Again this

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Homo Neanderthalensis is alive and well in the balkans, strangely confused for homo sapiens. It probably has something to do with the actual differences between the two species being little more than the difference between white boy me and someone from Africa or Asia.[/quote] Do you have any sort of evidence for this? And is this using the classical* definition of a species, or one of the many alternerative versions that mainly related to microbiology? *The classical de

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Amino acids forming into DNA is proven ..... ya might want to do some reading on this before spouting off like that[/quote] It seems nitpicky, but PROTEINS are formed from amino acids. DNA is chains of nucleotides. All in all, amino acids are a lot simpler, but there are more of them.

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]smoothing a 12km radius[/quote] I really hope you lost a couple zeroes there, 12 km would be an implausibly tight monitoring net. I can bet there isn't an official weather station within 12 km of my parents' house, or the high school I went to (over 12km from the house). The only reason there is one within 12km of where I'm sitting is the airport.

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="GW Swicord" reply="87" id="2483450"] As for real-world proof, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus. You'll note the standard variety of staph is still around, even after the resistant forms evolved. You're forgetting that Wikipedia isn't part of the Web Woo-Point-O vanguard. It's part of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Just like all those nurses doing paperwork and the epidemeologists who parse mountains of that paperwor

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Wait Willy is a creationist too?[/quote] How about no ? In no way can my post be construed as supporting a creationist veiwpoint. In fact, I was using it to argue AGAINST one of the prevailing arguments for ID.

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

A better question is how far is your commute? I drive a 91 Buick, and an extreme greenie professor here drives a Prius. I'm less than 3 miles from the university and he's about 40. Care to guess which one of us uses less gas?

Reply to Deniers and skeptics. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote] Four steps: A: Life Exists B: Each surviving generation produces another generation of which the vast majority inherit traits that are fundamentally identical to the parent generation. C: Each member of a Generation so produced has a chance of having an inherent (One which could itself be inherited) change that renders it different from it's parent Generation. D: There is a chance, however small, that the change so induced is better suited to an

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I have seen this in several graphs with no clear definition of the term.[/quote] What you linked to is not the anomaly you think it is. In the context of a temperature graph like Jonnan posted, "anomaly" is defined to be the difference between the individual data point and the mean of those data points over the time scale of the graph. It's a common way of making a small increase on a large base more apparent. The same graph wouldn't have nearly the same impact if

Reply to Some newb questions in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

It's the weapons/defense breakdown. Beam weapons/missiles/mass drivers, then shields/point defense/armor.

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

Then take BP as an example. It's one of the biggest oil companies in the world, and AFAIK the only one to explicitly endorse the AGW view. Yes, they still get huge profits from oil (and indeed are considered one of the worst companies in the world for both environmental impact and human rights violations), but they now produce 20% of the world's solar panels and own a sizable fraction of the wind farms too. They've positioned themselves to profit either way, so c&t won't hurt them nearly

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I somehow doubt that Al Gore is in position to make *billions* as claimed. However I have no particular love of Al Gore, as far as I'm concerned he's basically a cheerleader. He's certainly not a scientist himself, at best he's a publicist and in reality he probably does the cause as much harm as good.[/quote] While he is no longer in office and does not have to disclose his financial details, he's estimated to be worth a couple hundred million dollars - all earned after he got

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Give me a fucking break. THREE fucking senior Japanese scientists "strongly questioned." You can't fucking be serious. THREE . So what organization on my list do these THREE fucking senior Japanese scientists actually represent?[/quote] Dr Maruyama said yesterday there was widespread scepticism among his colleagues about the IPCC's fourth and latest assessment report that most of the observed global tem

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus While Michaels doesn't have a spotless record, and now works for the Cato Institute (and thus sits two seats down from Bernie Madoff at Satan's dinner parties), he *was* a research climatologist for nearly three decades. Note he supports AGW in theory, is skeptical of the "consensus" values in terms of severity, and got railroaded out of his fac

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]In other words the rest of the world really couldn't care less about all the angst that we in the US are going through over this so called "hoax".[/quote] I agree that they may not particularly care *why* a fairly large portion of Americans doubt global warming, but I certainly think they care whether that doubt results in another Kyoto situation . Although that map needs a bit of work - ad

Reply to influence help in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]On the higher AI levels I assume this isn't as easy? I've taken 11 planets so far without firing a shot. Almost seems like I'm cheating. [/quote] The rules for flipping don't change with difficulty level, at least as far as I've ever noticed. What will change is how the AI reacts to you building influence bases near their planets - relations will rapidly decline and occasionally they will declare war on you over it.

Reply to influence help in Twilight of the Arnor GalCiv2 Forums

You need to get the Korx planets above 4. Getting your planets below 0.25 is just a way of estimating how close you are to getting the Korx planets to 4 if you don't yet have the espionage levels to tell you exactly what the Korx planets are at. Another tip, don't try to split the difference when building an influence base. Build it touching one of the target planets, as the effect of the base drops much faster with distance than it does from planets. Once one flips the other will fol

Reply to Global warming hoax!?! - UPDATED - in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

Apparently the Russians are crying foul now, too. It's not one of the leading scientific organizations putting this out, but an economic statistics orgainization - presumably someone who knows a bit about statistics. But I'm sure that won't matter to anyone who refuses to doubt the official line of the CRU. <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020126/climategate-goes-serial-now-the-russians-confirm-that-uk-climate-scientists-manipulated-data-to-exaggerate-glob