zompist bboard

Offer the officer the gum, then run, planning to use your knowledge of Malay picked up from this board to discover not only a way home, but where the strange red scar running down your left pinky came from.

You must either climb up a tree one hundred feet, where you will be picked up by helicopter, or down a hundred foot rock wall, where you can find an elevator to a helipad Which one do you choose?

add a question, hon.

Jetboy wrote:You must either climb up a tree one hundred feet, where you will be picked up by helicopter, or down a hundred foot rock wall, where you can find an elevator to a helipad Which one do you choose?

Tree, because a) climbing up is easier than down, and b) climbing trees is easier than rock walls. And c) I haven't climbed a properly big tree since last summer, so I want to make sure I still can.

If you could obliterate all memory and record of one single invention (mechanical, cultural, political, social, etc.) from human history, what would it be?

The Snuggie.

One nation, for one reason or another, must be entirely eliminated. Which one would you choose to eliminate and why?

Aeetlrcreejl wrote:The Snuggie.

One nation, for one reason or another, must be entirely eliminated. Which one would you choose to eliminate and why?

Not going to answer this, just ask for a clarification: are you talking vanishing the entire nation, or incorporating it into another?

It doesn't exist anymore. There's sea where it once was. Its culture, too, goes, along with any effects on other nations it once had.

Aeetlrcreejl wrote:It doesn't exist anymore. There's sea where it once was. Its culture, too, goes, along with any effects on other nations it once had.

If the land it's on becomes sea, then one that creates interesting sea routes if eliminated: Canada or the US perhaps (though either would eliminate me), Panama (How would it change history if there was no need for a canal because there was already an open sea route?), Egypt (no need for the Suez canal), or Russia (The Mongols become renowned and feared seafarers).

Yes. Let's say Russia. There is now a sea route from Belarus to Japan.

You are given the opportunity to rearrange the surface of the Earth to match the geography of any time within the past 700 million years. Human civilization will have developed with that continental arrangement instead of the current one. Flora and fauna will generally match that of the present day. What era do you choose?

170 million years ago. Even though I myself dont like hot weather, the concept of a giant rainforest that makes even the Amazon look small has always intrigued me. The climate would probably not be as hot as it was 170mya because the radiation field was supposedly weak then and it is stronger now. On the other hand, the sun is also stronger, so who knows. Maybe the rainforest would be too hot for humans and we'd be stuck with the uncrossable divide between the North and the South.

Also, I find the http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... ity_crisis interesting. Imagine a Death Valley 10000 times bigger than our present one, with a temperature of 160F at the bottom.
next:

You have discovered a vaccine that provides immunity to HIV, and can even cure people who already have HIV, and this vaccine cannot itself be defeated since it is also a virus. However it also kills humans' ability to get any significant calories from meat, so everyone who has it must become a vegetarian. (They can still eat meat for pleasure, but wont get any nutrition and will end up being hungry for the rest of the day as though they had only eaten 2 pounds of grass or something.) Because it is a virus, there is no way to get rid of it once you have it, and it will be passed on to children, so even though people can get the vaccine voluntarily to begin with, it becomes involuntary very quickly and soon the whole world will be vegetarian and meat farms will just have to close down and let their animals die.

If you release the vaccine, there's no going back, so do you do it? or do you lie and say the study was a failure?

I would release the vaccine. It would be for the greater good of the people who have and are suffering from the HIV virus.


You are given the choice of reviving one extinct species with the latest cloning technology, which do you choose?

Probably pteronodons. Pteronodons are effing cool and I think maybe they were big enough to ride.
You are allowed to choose one leader of a nation-state, past or present, to rule the world. Who do you pick?

Its not likely an actual pteranodon would be able to pick you up and carry you around, nor could you ride on its back, unless youre a baby or toddler .Pterosaurs in general though did include an even bigger animal known as Quetzalcoatlus that might be able to do it.

I'd choose Gorak (he was leader of a prehistoric farming village)

You are given the ability to post in a thread where you ask people open-ended hypotheticals. Do you choose to ask lazy questions that allow only very short, boring, and thoughtless answers?

You are given the ability to post in a thread where you ask people open-ended hypotheticals. Do you choose to ask lazy questions that allow only very short, boring, and thoughtless answers?

Sometimes.

You are a biochemist with a specialty in the chemistry of the brain. One day, through a series of unfortunate events, you ingest the latest compound you were working on. For the next 48 hours, you experience an insatiable desire for women. After the drug's effects stop, you think: "If I disclose my findings, the 'homosexuality-can-be-cured groups will go crazy for it. If I hide my findings from my company, leave, and then license this drug, I could become very rich. However, I could cause suffering in LGBT individuals if they are forced to take this drug every two days." What do you do? Do you bring the drug to market, or do you destroy your discovery?

I do a Salk and release it and all protocols into the public domain, damn the consequences. Man must be overcome.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'?

I go 'Hunh. Ok.' Then proceed to ask it a series of very specific questions about the nature of reality, as it sees it.

You are a midlevel wageslave in a corporation which wields massive influence worldwide. You stumble on a file on the network that exposes a company plot which will result in the murder of an entire village in Africa, set to begin in two days time. As a consequence of you being able to see this file, you have the (stolen, unintended, whatever) power to abort this mission. You know you couldn't get the authorities to act in time to stop it. Do you issue the order to abort, which you will be prosecuted for {nevermind the specific charge for this purpose} and experience extreme hardship as a result? Or do you go on with your life as it was before, with no consequences to you?

Yes, I would, because it's the utilitarian thing to do.

Edit: wait that's stupid.
You have the power to pair everybody with their soul mates, but everybody has to go back to being a hunter-gatherer. Do you do it? For some people, the happiness will outweigh the benefits of technology, but not for others.

No, twenty year life spans would suck.

You either have to give up either making phonologies, and have to take them more or less as is from natural languages, adding or removing at most one or two phonemes, or you have to give up making orthographies, simply taking those of natural languages more or less whole-cloth to cover your inventories, patching any gaps with another natlang. Which do you choose?

Jetboy wrote:No, twenty year life spans would suck.

Your reasoning is wrong.

First, for most of history, hunter-gatherers, who didn't have crowded cities, had low population density, and weren't tied to just one crop (as opposed to most peasants, who were tied to maize or rice or wheat), actually had a higher lifespan than agriculturists.

Also, a 30-year life expectency (far more reasonable than 20) is misleading, because most pre-industrial societies, agricultural OR otherwise, had high child mortality rates that brought the figure down. Generally speaking, if you lived to age 10, you'd probably live into your late 50s on average, especially as a hunter-gatherer. So, the people for whom the soul mate thing applies aren't going to die at 25 in high numbers by any means. They'll enjoy a good long life.

Now, excepting a response from Jetboy, back to your regularly scheduled sessions of having your heads in the clouds.

You, on the other hand, are presupposing that such a thing as a "soul-mate" actually exists, and that there is exactly one for everyone.

dhokarena56 wrote:Yes, I would, because it's the utilitarian thing to do.

...what?

You either have to give up either making phonologies, and have to take them more or less as is from natural languages, adding or removing at most one or two phonemes, or you have to give up making orthographies, simply taking those of natural languages more or less whole-cloth to cover your inventories, patching any gaps with another natlang. Which do you choose?

Orthography. I would use the Adyghe one universally.

faiuwle wrote:You, on the other hand, are presupposing that such a thing as a "soul-mate" actually exists, and that there is exactly one for everyone.

Plus, the likes of me would be (rightfully?) shunned for being gay since keeping the population going at a steady rate is quite important in these communities...

@Dhok: Well, dying as an infant would also suck. However, I meant something more along the lines of "We're incredibly lucky we have all the great stuff we do today, and going back to a time when people died sooner, had somewhat more trouble getting food, didn't have knowledge of linguistics, etc., would not be fun." Giving all the awesomeness of modernity up for one thing which would probably be rather secondary in a hunter-gatherer society seems rather silly.

finlay wrote:

faiuwle wrote:You, on the other hand, are presupposing that such a thing as a "soul-mate" actually exists, and that there is exactly one for everyone.

Plus, the likes of me would be (rightfully?) shunned for being gay since keeping the population going at a steady rate is quite important in these communities...

Uh no homosexuality in early hunter-gathering was widely established because they helped out without making their own kids.

Dammit, i was just trying to find a way to call dhokarena an idiot.

exclusively homosexual individuals have continued to support the quality of life of human societies through the aesthetic and spiritual contributions made possible by the special mental abilities resulting from the greater functional balance in their brain structures.

Fair enough, hunter gatherers, bla bla bla, but wtf is this horseshit?