The Old Hack

Is she strong enough to wave Tedd?

Indeed. As I already stated, as a comment on society it isn't all bad.

You could say that. You could also call him a horny old goat who would screw anything female and didn't view consent or lack thereof as a major factor. As a particularly nice touch, whenever Hera claimed her vengeance, it would invariably be against the victim or the child. This was not a legend written to make the Gods look good. But as a comment on society, it's not all that bad.

Gods are many things to many peoples. The Greeks used the divine legends as vessels for exploring the human condition. Their Gods share all the human flaws, often amplified. It is no coincidence that the tale of Kronos is about a father consuming his children out of fear for losing his place in the future and Zeus eventually committing parricide to seize that place by force and free his siblings from Kronos' belly. Personally I sometimes suspect that some of the legends of later date were added by writers who wanted to discredit the old ways by showing the Gods in a repellent light. For example, Loki suddenly turning from unpredictable-but-generally-benign trickster figure into the Satan that betrays Balder (Jesus) into Hel and so sets off Ragnarok. JerZeus is just one of many, many dubious figures who hijacked a name out of legend merely because it sounded cool. Hollywood and Japanese anime do it all the time with varying degrees of success and respect. I will refrain from going off on a rant about that to save the good people of this forum the aggravation and time.

Watching Lucifer, season 3. I am having way too much fun with a TV series starring the Devil.

Give them a break. They are just tired of being milked for all they are worth.

At least they still got that part right. Say what you like, those things aren't likely to get stepped on.

Big talk from the Pharaoh who had the world's biggest four-sided dice as a centerpiece of his kingdom.

Typically that is my experience, too.

I think I must be half asleep. I initially read that as 'live crickets' and wondered what made them that interesting to watch. My first impulse was that maybe you wanted something a little louder than that Star Wars showing.

*dryly* That is what 'Got one on both my phone and my iPad' means.

Leather slipcases. I swear by them. Got one on both my phone and my iPad. Dropped both of them more than once, not even a scratch on the screen.

That's true. But that was how Don Edwards phrased it: Both seem to work. I can't fully explain this with the simple rules of semantics I know but I suspect it is partly intent and partly phrasing. I do note that Don Edwards understood my original statement as 'how to do it' when I intended it to mean 'how it works.' But this is getting waaaay off topic so maybe we should give it a rest. Magitech can live for another day and when we can fully explain it, it can quietly conflate into ordinary tech being none the poorer for it.

You have a point. At first I thought it was the other way around but then I tried to swap them and couldn't make it work. Maybe I am too tired for my brain to work properly because Don Edwards' version also seems to work. Hm.

Either way works. The point is, once we have analyzed the magic to the point where we understand how it works, it isn't magic anymore.

I can see that they really went berserk in their eagerness to differentiate from earlier editions there!

*sigh* Beats me. I'm still rooting for you, though.

Goldarn high-explosive computers. I guess when they get advanced enough it doesn't take much to set them off. *eyes computer nervously, backs slowly away* Well yes, also possible, but in that case they didn't really need the nuke anymore. *scratches head*

Indeed! Similarly, there can be research done into a good (or at least possible) idea which is not likely to bear fruitful results. Consider the large number of attempts at heavier-than-air flight which involved airframes that flapped their wings, some of them muscle powered. Heavier-than-air flight is indeed possible but you kind of need to have the math back up your theory before you can put it into practice. (Since none of these 'airframes' could ever possibly fly, maybe 'groundframes' would be a better word for them?) The alchemists in Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork actually did get results. Usually these mainly consisted of turning gold into less gold. Hrm. I think we just entered a philosophical paradox here. Magic is an unexplainable force. If we use it to understand the world, we would have to concede that we have no explanation for how we arrived at the understanding. However, if we manage to break down magic to an explainable and quantifiable force that follows knowable rules, it would no longer be magic. How did Agatha Heterodyne put it? 'Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!'

Err, no he doesn't, but it was Roland Emmerich who did this particular turkey, not Bay.

Nope. I was talking about that scene earlier in the movie where the direct nuclear strike against the UFO shield failed. As for the nuke deployed inside the mothership, it could not possibly have exploded with enough force to take it out the way it did. The mothership was stated to have a mass equivalent to that of one eighth of the moon. The biggest nuke ever designed by man would barely have made a dent in that monster. No, I see two and only two possibilities. One, the nuke managed to take out the antimatter reactor or whatever that served to propel the mothership, and the secondary explosion destroyed it. Or two, when the nuke went off, it also took out the mothership's entire store of Coca-Cola, and faced with a future without Coca-Cola the captain took the only option that made sense and instantly hit the self-destruct button. Nope, though they are good examples of the same trope, I have to say.

But as you point out above, almost any kind of research may lead to unexpected results that can prove startlingly fruitful. Sadly, idiots have a near infinite capacity for ignoring either sense or inconvenient facts. Well, sadly in the general case. I have nothing in particular against Nazis wasting their efforts in utterly fruitless labours.

This seems to be the 'helpful' reaction of many an overly trigger happy fictional high command. The Council in 'Avengers Assemble' that ordered a nuclear strike on New York City. In 'The Swarm', the US government's quite reasonable reaction when hearing of a swarm of killer bees on the loose is to order a full nuclear strike on Texas. In 'Monsters vs. Aliens', President Colbert almost orders a nuclear strike on San Francisco to stop a marauding alien robot. Perhaps the nuclear strike against the alien UFO in 'Independence Day' was a bit better reasoned. Too bad it didn't work.

Countless examples of this. In the years just after 2000, Nokia completely controlled the telephone market. In their wisdom, the management slashed the 'expensive and unnecessary' R&D department at Nokia. They already had the world's best mobile phone, why bother researching any more? Not too long after, several other companies overtook them. Now Nokia dominance is a memory. During WW2, several examples. The Japanese had the supremely designed and developed Zero fighter plane and it ruled the skies all but unchallenged. Since this was clearly the pinnacle of fighter development, the Japanese high command saw no reason to waste further resources on expensive research. A couple of years later, American fighter planes began to outperform the Zero. By then the Japanese no longer had an R&D program for fighters and the Americans had a two year head start plus the irreplaceable forward momentum that Japanese high command so carelessly discarded. Or the Luftwaffe AND the RAF. The jet plane was considered a dubious project. In England it barely took off, figuratively and literally. In Germany they had one genius designer working on it who also had the backing of the Führer, but ironically he died in a plane crash and the program stalled for two years. If he had survived, we might have seen the first Me 262s in early 1942 rather than late 1943. A funny counterexample. The OTHER very influential man in the Luftwaffe's R&D was a complete and utter idiot. He ordered the design of a plane that was supposed to have the carrying capacity of a Flying Fortress and the dive bombing capabilities of a Stuka. He directed immense resources towards this end. That these two requirements were all but mutually exclusive entirely escaped him. That the design staff of the Luftwaffe almost managed to do it anyway is a testament to their ingenuity. They actually had the designs for something that might almost have worked as desired in early 1945. Had the war lasted six months longer, the first models might have flown in combat. This goes to show that while research is well and good, it is helpful to have some sort of idea of how practical your goal is.

Even so, that one saddle requires a LOT of skill, specialised tools and materials to make, especially if it is supposed to be comfortable for both horse and courier. You can try to ride bareback for days on end if you disbelieve me. Personally I suspect that after a couple of days I'd wish I were a eunuch and round about the end of the journey I'd be a eunuch. And the skill, the tools and the various materials that go into a good saddle all require infrastructure. So there we are again. It is often an economy of scales thing. If you know that something is likely to be embraced by a mass market, you are more willing to throw the large amounts of time and money into the research needed to create it and make it financially feasible to produce. Mind you, a lot also depends on the magic system involved. Is magic limited to a few exceptional individuals? Or is it available to everyone if they can get the training? Does it require a power source, and is the power source renewable or limited? All can be factors. Steven Brust's Dragaera has magic available to everyone but really skilled mages are somewhat rare. A certain number of mages do research to improve what is known about magic. Many everyday necessities are easily accomplished by any schoolchild and power itself is for all intents and purposes unlimited, drawn through the Imperial Orb which in turn taps into the Great Sea of Chaos. All this makes magic common and useful, and in many cases the Dragaerans have found magic possible to combine with and assist in the development of technology. Technology, incidentally, gained a surge of popularity during the Interregnum, a three centuries long interval of time where there was no Emperor and magic did not work. Larry Niven had magic be powerful, incredibly useful and available to anyone intelligent enough to master the incantations behind it. It was also a non-renewable resource. Once it was spent, it was gone. You could create a floating castle in the sky if you wanted but eventually it would drain the region it floated above of magic and then it would fall. Finally enterprising mages created doomsday weapons that essentially worked through burning out all the magic in an area. Eventually magic was gone from all civilised lands and only a few isolated spots retained any. Jack Vance invented what Gary Gygax later on stole for Dungeons and Dragons. It is self-explanatory. Only a few could use it, it required incredible strength of will, and every spell could only be used once until re-memorised. This does not seem like a system where magic would supplant technology. (Gary Gygax made a good try at it, though. The physics of his game world were beyond surreal. Gold had so low a density that it could float on water, it took you a full minute to achieve terminal speed when falling and once you did achieve terminal velocity you fell at a rate of about five meters (six yards) a second. And there was much, much more that was odd about it. I am not sure that technology as we know it would even work under physical laws that strange.) And so forth. I should in passing mention the Technomancers of Mage: the Ascension. In Mage, part of what makes magic possible is general belief. The Technomancers essentially won the Ascension War by making humanity believe in the laws of science they had painstakingly crafted. 'Technological' advances become possible by convincing people that they are new inventions. In short, that world posits that technology is magic, we just don't know it is. (Even though the Technomancers are cast as villains, I kind of like them. In order for their magic to work, the population must be well educated and be able to partake freely in the marvels the Technomancers create. All the other magical Traditions are by far more elitist. Sure, they are 'more sensitive of the needs of Gaia.' They would also have all the rest of us live in muddy hovels and be ignorant so we can more easily believe in their magical marvels. No thanks.