Tom

Comment Threads

• Greg. Tingey commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  Yes. Britain & especially England, 1639 - 51. Charles I lost because he was, apparently, totally untrustworthy. Which was why, in the end, Cromwell had him executed, rather than simply kept as a figurehead or imprisoned....
• August commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  Sorry for the late reply. Just getting to this yesterday and it took two days to read through. then clothing is decoupled from routine status displays, and a lifetime later some people start doing dress-up as a subculture thing because it gives them an outlet for non-conformity Yes and no... clothing is still coupled very, very closely with routine status displays, even here in North America; what's happened is that conventions governing clothing have slipped from the realm of explicit knowledge into the realm of tacit knowledge, where things get a bit more slippery and a bit more subtle, but...
• PrivateIron commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  A human personality is composed of cratons and terranes. How do you know which you've sighted? And as a practical matter, will one tell you much about the others?...
• August commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  The way my brain works, it's an author using stupid numbers that annoys me. I'm fine with a huge horde, but tell me it's an army of 50,000 and I start worrying about logistics and tons of food required per day That's actually what got Lee Modesitt writing in the first place, you know. He'd been reading a David Eddings book and, being an economist by trade, began grinding his teeth when he realized that the army of knights as described would require roughly the land area of Africa under cultivation to support them Ignoring logistics/economics of this kind of...
• Nix commented on Fantasy shibboleths
  I'm sorry to say that this sort of thing (ill with X / did Y / X went away) is not enough to indicate that Y cures X, or even that Y doesn't make X worse sometimes, nor even that Y doesn't make X worse every time you try it! All you know is that it got better, which might well have happened on its own ("regression to the mean"). You'd need a larger trial and a bunch of controls to get any idea whether bread has any effect at all, positive or negative....