[SPOILER] Dark Savant graduates from blatant n00b to plain n00b

[Dark Savant]

Turn 25 - 3000 BC (Part 2 - C&D)

Elkad and Donovan Zoi have both put all available EP into me ever since making contact, so I have no evidence they have contact with anyone else.

Donovan Zoi should know that I have another contact.

19000 soldiers appeared this turn.

This is also the turn non-Creative players get credit for expanding to second-ring on turn 5.  The twenty non-Creative rivals got 240,000 land area that turn, so no one at all has water in their second ring.  There's still a point difference between 20 and 21 land tiles, which I suppose makes me that much less threatening on the scoreboard.   It also means most non-Creative players gained 4 points this turn.

Other things I can determine from land areaL

• Rusten's holy city expanded his borders to 3rd-ring on turn 23, and he gained the maximum 16 tiles from that, so he doesn't have water even in third-ring.
  
• The four Creative rivals gained 63,000 land area between them this turn, so between them they have a whole one water tile in third-ring.
  

Yeah, no one at all started close to salt water.

Non-land points this turn:

• 2metraninja: +1 point, capital grew to size 4
  
• AdrienIer: +1 point, capital grew to size 3; +6 points, researched Bronze Working (in 15 turns)
  
• Elkad: +1 point, capital grew to size 3
  

naufragar has the lowest score; he's still at size 1, spent a lot of time getting Bronze Working, and is probably chopping out workers and settlers (he's Imperialistic).

[Dark Savant]

Okay, non-Civ rant time!

People tend to believe that science is very much cut-and-dried.  It's presented that way in the classroom and most writing, and it tends to be treated that way even by professionals.

Cutting-edge science is rarely so, however.  Some seemingly straightforward findings that were not:

• Humans have 46 chromosomes in each cell.  Usually; some people have 45 or 47.  I'd rather not have to write things like "humans usually have two arms", though.  
  
  You'd think counting them up would be easy.  It's not really that hard, not even with technology older than most people currently alive.  You take a microscope, and find cells that are dividing and in prophase, when chromosomes are easiest to see because they have condensed.  You stain your slide with something specific for chromosomes; chromosomes are easily stained, because DNA has a strong negative charge that makes it stand out chemically.
  
  You'd be wrong.
  
  For decades, biologists counted them up and agreed that humans have 48 chromosomes.  They even checked for things like whether race made a difference.  Nope, they still somehow magically came up with 48, consistently.
  
  It's not easy to do if you are not used to it, because you're counting little noodles that sometimes get on top of each other, but there really shouldn't have been this consensus that lasted for something like 30 years.   It took all the way until about 1960 for that to get straightened out -- that's after Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA.
  
  (The technology is better these days, but it's still not cheap and some researchers still do it the old-fashioned way.)
  
  
• Thalidomide.  That's the once-hailed miracle drug, then drug of horrors, now approaching miracle drug once again, that gave lots of kids flippers for arms and legs if their mothers used it during their pregnancy.  (It doesn't seem to have strong adverse effects otherwise, which is why it's regaining favor these days -- we know when not to administer it.)
  
  You'd think proving that effect would be straightforward, and that the company who made it would be sued for a fortune.
  
  You'd be wrong.  Well, the company did get sued.
  
  But as it turns out, the scientist who is generally credited with making the discovery that thalidomide is teratogenic kept awful notes.  Awful, awful, there's-no-way-that-would-pass-muster-these-days notes, full of omissions and inconsistencies and nonexistent patients.
  
  And when that surfaced in court (this was in West Germany, I think), that proved to be more than enough to demonstrate reasonable doubt.  It took extra years of research by others to validate the discovery, and courts generally aren't inclined to wait that long; confirmation of that sort can sometimes take a lifetime.
  
  
• You might have heard that limes have a lot of vitamin C, and are thus good for curing scurvy (vitamin C deficiency).  You might also have heard that the British Navy did so.
  
  Well, they did, and it did work.
  
  ... eventually.  It didn't actually work at first, and significant drama ensued because the scientists' claims started out poorly in practice.
  
  That's because the Navy needed to preserve the limes somehow for long ocean voyages.  They did this by turning the limes into juice and then boiling them.  Now, you've probably heard that boiling can destroy vitamins, but vitamin C is not normally that fragile.  What actually destroyed the vitamin C is that the boiling occurred in the copper vessels common at the time; the vitamin-destroying reaction only happens with heat and copper-mediated catalysis.
  
  That's also a reason why we don't usually use copper cooking pots these days (well, that and they're expensive; stainless steel has been widespread for a long time now), but not very many people even know they do that these days.
  
  (... that doesn't even get into limes not actually having that much vitamin C -- the British advocated them primarily because they happened to be grown in regions under their convenient colonial control.  And that isn't even the only British military propaganda myth about vitamins that's widespread ...)
  

If such seemingly non-controversial and simple findings can be so clouded, imagine what happens when things actually get either controversial or complicated.

This has been a Dark Savant Blog / postcount++ Post.

[RefSteel]

Quite an interesting post! But what does "cut and dried" actually mean? Or "clouded" for that matter? I think there is definitely a problem with the way scientific discoveries are described by semi-competent grade-school science teachers/curricula and completely scientifically incompetent news reporters, but ... the kind of anecdotal argument you're making here about vague terms like the above is no better. In particular:

If such seemingly non-controversial and simple findings can be so clouded, imagine what happens when things actually get either controversial or complicated.

Of course it depends on what you mean by controversial (and what you mean by complicated) but I see no reason to expect that apparent controversy or complexity would necessarily be indicators for additional "cloudiness," unless what you mean by that is "likelihood of random people being misinformed on the subject."

Still enjoying the tales of the Dragon's Dominion and the ++postcount/blog posts though!

[Cornflakes]

I quite enjoy the off-topic posts as well, so here's a ++ post from me Now if you really want to increase your post count you could post an opinion on a controversial scientific subject to spark a conversation

[scooter]

On the science stuff - you're not wrong in a vacuum. The problem I have with this line of reasoning is it's used as a cheap excuse to doubt anything. What's lost is any concept of certainty. There are things scientific evidence suggests to be true with a very high degree of certainty and things that are far lower because the research is newer and less mature. And that certainty level often has nothing to do with how "controversial" it is. Controversial really is a terrible way of measuring something like that.

Let's take Alzheimer's research. A new finding on that is not likely to be controversial because there exists no people who think preserving that disease is a good thing. Those new findings might be wrong! But publicly there will be no real controversy. It's a field that's still in its relative infancy, so all advances should be met with some skepticism, but most people are just generally excited at any signs of progress, even though a lot of those signs have been mixed. You can't use an example of a scientific theory that had a low certainty level and ended up being wrong as an excuse to dismiss a completely unrelated theory that has a much higher certainty level. That's just irresponsible, and it shows a lack of understanding of how the scientific method works.

[Dark Savant]

I was unexpectedly busy at work for a couple days, back to Civ.  

Quite an interesting post!  But what does "cut and dried" actually mean?  Or "clouded" for that matter?  I think there is definitely a problem with the way scientific discoveries are described by semi-competent grade-school science teachers/curricula and completely scientifically incompetent news reporters, but ... the kind of anecdotal argument you're making here about vague terms like the above is no better.  In particular:

I mean that even findings that seemingly are both simple, and evoke no sort of controversy for whatever social reason, usually aren't.

It's typically presented that way, partly just for sake of simplicity, but it's generally not the case in practice.  That's true even for well-established technologies like DNA sequencing that few people think to question.

I don't think it helps to teach science that way, because my experience is that it was very jarring to go from media and classroom into an actual lab and discover that it didn't actually work that way.

I quite enjoy the off-topic posts as well, so here's a ++ post from me Now if you really want to increase your post count you could post an opinion on a controversial scientific subject to spark a conversation

Hmm, well, would you like a discussion on why I think it's obvious that pro-lifers should support Roe vs. Wade, and pro-choicers should oppose it?



I think the reverse happens because of a couple of common human failings; nothing nefarious on either side of the debate.  Yes, my answer actually does have something to do with science.

On the science stuff - you're not wrong in a vacuum. The problem I have with this line of reasoning is it's used as a cheap excuse to doubt anything. What's lost is any concept of certainty. There are things scientific evidence suggests to be true with a very high degree of certainty and things that are far lower because the research is newer and less mature. And that certainty level often has nothing to do with how "controversial" it is. Controversial really is a terrible way of measuring something like that.

That's true, but you can use that to doubt the doubters, if you're doing it right.

And that gets into something else which I believe strongly: the very accusation that someone is corrupt or otherwise behaving poorly is itself a far stronger indicator of corruption than most other people believe.

People actually used to take this sort of thing more seriously.

If you know the history of pacifism, for instance, it used to be believed that simply accusing another of some horrible war crime was itself worthy of being called a war crime.  That's because, at least before modern long-distance war technology, getting morale up was critical to waging war, and what works well is "those are horrible people".  This belief was especially popular in the late 1920s and 1930s.  You can guess what happened after that: a lot of people did not believe that the Holocaust was ongoing precisely for that reason, that it was Allied war propaganda along the lines of what happened during World War I.   And now that way of thinking is so dead few people are aware it ever even existed.

I think we need to swing that pendulum back some.

Let's take Alzheimer's research. A new finding on that is not likely to be controversial because there exists no people who think preserving that disease is a good thing.

I wouldn't use that as an example; I can think of a couple things that are (or at least were; I don't follow it nearly as closely as I used to) massively controversial there.  (Is cooking with aluminum vessels a risk factor for Alzheimer's?  Plaques and tangles: cause or effect?)

I used to work in Parkinson's disease research (as in, with the scientist who made the connection between MPTP and Parkinson's), and that was worse, despite the fact that (or maybe because) we know much more about it.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 26 - 2960 BC (Part 1)

Donovan Zoi accepted my peace treaty, so we no longer have that turn split which I sort of forgot about.

Wandering Aengus goes to look for Elkad; he's Shaka and I want to have something vaguely resembling advance warning of if he's going to rush me.



That might take several turns of not-making-contact-with-anyone-else, but I think it needs to be done.  It's not like I'm going to be making full world contact nearly as soon as I did in PB37.

Antigonus's next obvious move is onto a bare hill.  I did sight that bear near there a few turns ago, and I don't want him to get killed by one, but what's the chance that it'd even still exist (animals are eligible to vanish in favor of barb warriors now); that it'd happen to wander near that hill; that it'd choose to attack; and that it'd actually win?  Very low, I'd think.



Ayup, no bears to be seen.  Though there's a lion I can see with Glaurung's expanded borders, which I was confused by because my own third-ring light-gray culture doesn't jump off the screen.  

[Dark Savant]

Turn 26 (2960 BC) - Part 2 (C&D)

17000 soldiers appeared this turn.

Donovan Zoi grew Thought Control to size 3 (also visible in my screenshot).  He also discovered a technology; that has to be Bronze Working this time, right? 

naufragar finished a technology in 10 turns, probably either Agriculture or The Wheel.  He then soon planted the game's first second city, which claims 8 new land tiles.

Shallow Old Human Tourist grew from pop 2 to pop 3, and are probably right now chopping out a settler (they're Imperialistic).

That's 9000 soldiers, so 4 warriors were produced this turn most likely.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 27 (2920 BC) - Part 1

My worker completes the cow pasture, which is just enough for me to exactly complete a settler in 3 turns.  (Hey, I'm Exp/Imp, I have to be extra cautious about avoiding dividing overflow!)

Okay, let's have Wandering Aengus move east and ... whoa, I totally missed that he could see someone's borders last turn (yeah, it's in the screenshot).  Let's double back so I can get a better look (oops ).



It's GermanJoey, Charlemagne of Mongolia.

Antigonus is uneventually doubling back home through forests.  The nameless warrior starts busting fog:



No one's there, and are those islands across the water?

[Dark Savant]

Turn 27 (2920 BC) - Part 2 (C&D)

This might be the last quiet C&D turn I'll ever have.

Only 2000 soldiers appeared this turn, which has to be a warrior somewhere.

B4ndit is the only rival to gain score, both growing from pop 2 to 3 and discovering a technology ... in only 6 turns, so probably Fishing.