Blood Red Arachnid

The problem isn't the merits from the packs. The problem is the benchmark set for players who want to get ATOs but don't want or have the IRL cash to pay out for them. If you are going for the set instead of just the proc, it'll cost 400 merits for each piece, with the full set being 2500 merits.




Anyway, after spending some money, I have slotted two of the ATO sets into my characters. My stalker has that ATO set, and my Dom has that ATO set. I have only tested out the stalker set, and it rocks out loud sweet suzie.

With the proc where it is now and all the recharge that comes with it, I can fire off triple, quadruple, and even in one case quintuple consecutive assassin strikes from hide! Since each AS does 1000 damage on an even conning enemy, I'm dishing out 5000 damage in a rapid burst fashion! Seriously, my attack chain is like this now:

BU -> AS from hide -> concentrated strike -> smashing blow (proc) -> AS from hide -> another attack -> placate -> AS from hide -> build up concentrated strike -> smashing blow (proc) -> AS from hide...

keep on repeating. Every time AS is charged up, either the proc triggers or I have placate up. I'm shredding AVs like they were EBs with this power output. It is unfortunate that the ability to instantly recharge buildup isn't working correctly.


I haven't had a chance to really test out the dominator one yet. I'll get back to you on that.

Pretty much. I don't think he realizes that our discussion is over. Online I have met so many people like Durakken that I know that it is useless trying to reason with them. I learned this the slow way, however, after arguing with someone on a daily basis for over a month. Deliberate misinterpretations, intellectual dishonesty, reassuming the premise, accusing the other of outright lying, it is all the hallmarks of someone who can't listen, and likewise doesn't know when to stop. Anything I say will not be taken into consideration; their modus operandi is to immediately search for an argument in their favor, and then put it up regardless if it actually deals with the point at hand.

The argument with the previous person ended when they were banned. My experience on these forums is that the mods are very light and highly absent on these issues, so to save myself the trouble of talking to a wall it is best to only cast pearls before those who have shown the capability to listen and learn. The inability to accept that I'm a biblical creationist (the whole 6000-8000 year old earth) is evidence of severe myopia, and thus unreasonable.



However I digress.


Yes, I know that different bases are strange only when first new to them. The point is that a different base system can come up with different number results, including results that appear impossible when compared to our ten base system. I picked 7 x 7 particularly because it produced a number that was prime in our 10 base system.

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Looking at the actual wikipedia article...

This affirms the cracked version more than your explanation. As for the age, it was stated that the total work on the project was 60 years, and ending at 80 years old the math seems correct. The confusion that stems from the article can be understood under a different interpretation: Harrison was making clocks by the age of 20, and since clocks were essentially the whole of the marine chronometer, it can be said that the totality of the work on the project spans 60 years if you consider the premises for laying the groundwork for a theory as part of the theory. As to whether the columnist was lying, incorrect, or misunderstood is left to the whims of the reader to impose their own idea onto it.

The "clock" being the obvious correct answer wasn't true for the board. There was competing theories in tracking the motion of the moon in the sky. Regardless of initial funding, the board wrongfully denied Harrison the full prize that he should've won and the reward for solving the longitude problem. When the predictive power of any device is attributed to luck over and over again, then this is a blatant disregard of that device. There is clearly a difference between caution and agenda, and the board crossed it.

There is also this idea that scientists are somehow disconnected from society. This couldn't be further from the truth. There is no experiment or phenomena that, when observed, is not contingent upon the observer to analyze and describe it. There is never any case where science is independent of scientists, so all the factors that come with humanity in general (culture, agenda, intelligence, wars, politics, beliefs, paradigms, psyche, quantity, trade, technology, biological needs, social interaction, dissonance, etc.) are infrastructure to the institution of science whether it be the past, the present, or the future.



There was a lot of evidence to conclude continental drift. In fact, it takes an experimenter very little effort to see that India is moving six centimeters per year. Some of the evidence later that helped to solidify continental drift in geological circles were the paleomagnetic ribbons on the ocean floor. Regardless, the information I had listed prior was dismissed because matching fossils is pseudoscience somehow, and because there wasn't an adequate explanation as to why the continents were moving. Denying observed phenomena because the phenomena doesn't have an adequate explanation is a glorious flaw in reasoning. It would be like denying the double-slit interference pattern of light because I don't like the idea of wave-function collapse.


DNA was first isolated by Friedrich Miescher in 1869 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Miescher).
Phoebus Levene's tetranucleotide hypothesis in 1910 stagnated the of research by declaring that DNA could not hold information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_Levene). It wasn't until Erwin Chargaff set the record straight 40 years later. Until then, DNA was thought to not be complex enough to hold information (highlighted for emphasis).



From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall:

So it did happen, btw. The reason why this is an example of science holding things back is because the cause of an illness needs to be identified before a correct treatment can be prescribed or a cure can be made. The time that H. Pylori is being denied as the cause of ulcers is the time that H. Pylori isn't being studied and treated in ulcer patients. Thankfully Barry Marshall was a tad bit crazy, or it could've taken a generation to get to solving the problem.



The whole point of those few sentences was talking about how science doesn't come up with the right answer, and the perpetual correctness of science as a whole is a perceptual illusion. Not sure how you came under the idea that I was saying the exact opposite of that.

I have been stressing the whole "generation" thing for awhile now. It is a reoccurring trend that the truth doesn't convict, and that new schools of thought are adopted only after previous ones die off, so because of that many great advancements in society take over 30 years. BTW, any explicit statement can be either correct or incorrect, since there is no alternative. If a statement is not correct, then it is incorrect. If a particular theory is based upon a series of statements, and one of those statements is incorrect, then that theory is incorrect. Modifying a hypothesis is a new hypothesis that is similar to the previous one, and is done so because the previous hypothesis was (get this) incorrect.

A confusion you seem to be having is that a statement can be half correct. If you have a series of statements bundled together, then this isn't one big amorphous super-statement. Each component is evaluated upon itself, and those components are either true or not true. Newton was correct when he developed mathematical functions to plot the motion of celestial bodies. He was incorrect that it was "spooky action at a distance".




I take offense because I AM a biblical creationist. If you refuse to listen because of that, then I thank you for summarily proving throughout these posts that you are fallacious via the genetic fallacy (ad hominem, in particular) and circular reasoning (biblical creationists are wrong because they're biblical creationsists), myopic, offensive, discriminatory, hostile, intellectually dishonest both to yourself and others, dismissive, existentially tunnel-visioned, un-empathetic, and self-unaware. I think this is probably going to be the last time I correct you on wikipedia articles you are quoting since honestly you lack the ability to listen first, understand second, and give a damn third. 1650s and Han Solo? Seriously, did you even bother to read the articles?

The logic chain you listed is a perfectly reasonable form of thinking called affirming the antecedent:

If A, then B.
A
Therefore B.

Or "People who eat pizza covered in tar are crazy".
"You eat pizza covered in tar".
"Therefore, you are crazy".

See how once the premise is set the conclusion follows naturally? Yep, perfect example of formal logic. The issue you are taking up is that you chose a deliberately silly premise to argue in order to say the chain of reasoning is incorrect. This is just more of the genetic fallacy: you're calling what you disagree with silly names.




Anyway, I find this conversation on numbers interesting. I worked with a grad student who specialized in theoretical algebra, and he told me that the proof for 1+1=2 was 40 pages long about group theory, set theory, and various other axioms would allow us to do simple addition. I'm not a theoretical algebrist (what do you call them?), but I did learn something interesting about our number system.

There is something called the modulo, which is the amount of digits that make up our number system. Our most popular system is 10 base, with 0-9 constituting the separate digits. Once we go past nine, we expand to a new placeholder. Another common system we use is the 12-base system for time keeping and clocks, and its subset that is 5 x 12 system that expands into the primary 12 system. Now, I bring this up because different modulos can create very strange mathematical results. For example, in a 0-7 system, 7 x 7 is equal to 61; a normally prime number. I believe in a modulo 2 system, you can get things like 1+1=0.

Our base number system is extremely arbitrary: It is based on the number of fingers we have on both of our hands! If we had a different number of limbs, or a different number of fingers, or we invented our number system through some other method, then we can get some very strange results for universal numbers like e and pi while still performing the same functions. Now, the reason why I'm bringing this all up is because it provides that, in theory, if an alien race that engineered humans could determine a couple of key factors such as the number of limbs and our "digits" on them, then they would have a method of controlling our eventual number system, and thus could mathematically hide a message into some constants in the universe. This will be hard as hell to do, but if these aliens came up with a way to genetically engineer a planet from the ground up, then you couldn't put it past them to pick a modulo system that couldn't hide something.

It doesn't have to be pi. Going through physics I've come across so many constant proportions I can't even remember them all.

When the equivalent exchange below happens, it is obvious that someone is a troll.

Person A: I like to do something.
Person B: No you don't. You're lying and an evil man for it.

There are many instances of this happening. My first example is the marine chronometer made by John Harrison. In the 1700s, when cross-continental transport by boat was becoming more common, navigation encountered a problem in that there was no way to adequately determine longitude. John Harrison invented a solution by making a precise clock, and by comparing the position of the sun with the time on the clock, you could easily determine how far you have traveled. It took Harrison three years to make this.

The British Empire had established a board of scientists to award a ton of money to whomever came up with a solution. This board of scientists was made up almost entirely of astronomers. Astronomy was the primary way of determining latitude, by comparing the angle between the horizon and the North Star at precisely midnight you could determine latitude. Now, this board of scientists was locked into the paradigm that the only way to solve the longitude problem was astronomical, so they kept turning Harrison away. First, they requested that he make more precise clocks, which he did twice in the following 30 years. Then, upon deciding that the new clocks were too precise to be a machine, they said it was cheating and hid away the clocks so they couldn't be tested.

After Harrison made another clock (over 60 years to accomplish this in total), he went directly to the King who had to force the board of scientists to quit acting like five year olds, and the board never admitted that Harrison had come up with solution.

So the genius that invented the clock and could've revolutionized naval travel and possibly many other future inventions that Harrison could've invented was halted by science.


Of course, this is taken from a rather hilarious article about petty feuds. It has some other interesting examples, though not following the best writing for telling the whole story. I would also like to expand on the #1 listing:

Alfred Wegener wasn't he first person to suggest continental drift. This goes to Antonio Snider in 1859, who derived the idea from an interpretation of Genesis 1:9-10. His research drew little attention, since it coincided with Darwin's publishing which drew most of the attention, and that his research was published in French. The scientific community that spurred the ideas of Wegener didn't do so just by calling Wegener names; their claims were that the mantel strength was too high to allow rocks to drift, and this strength was derived by studying the way seismic waves behaved as they traveled through the mantle. It took 50 years for geologists to accept that the continents were moving. The whole thing about similar fossils on both continents, radiometric similarities between coastlines, matching rock layers from across the continents, and the fact that from a topographical map the continents look like a jigsaw puzzle were dismissed as pseudo-science.

Another case is the delayed acceptance that DNA is the code that which life is accepted. I am having a very hard time getting the specifics on this, since all of my searches keep turning up with "50 year anniversary" stuff, so this won't have as much information as the above examples. The original theory in biology was that the information was stored in the protein components of chromosomes, and that DNA (isolated in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher) was a static and regular sequences that didn't hold information. You can thank Phoebus Levene for that theory in 1910. It wasn't until around 1950 (closest thing to a date I could find) that Erwin Chargaff finally showed that Levene was wrong. Until then, the theory that DNA held information was rejected due to Levene's tetronucleotide hypothesis, which had very little evidence to support it. Each time an experiment came up with different amounts of bases (which was EVERY experiment), it was considered error in the system because the A, C, T, and G bases just had to be equal. So, for 40 years, DNA was pigeonholed.

A final case, and my most informal one, is peptic ulcers. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren did several studies to confirm that Ulcers can be caused a bacteria. The scientific consensus at the time was that Ulcers were caused by stress. Their proposal was rejected because Ulcers just had to be caused by stress. But there was no 40 year wait for this case: one of the scientists to prove his point took the mad scientist route, and then guzzled a vial of the bacteria. Later, when he developed several ulcers, whomever was reviewing him had to accept that he was right.


So there are many instances where "science" (whether it be the process, the people, or just the institution) has hindered a correct cause more than helping it. Whether or not the world "corroborated" on many of the things is up for question, because generally history documents the wealthy, powerful, and influential instead of the everyday man. Now, if only I could find that yahoo news article about how half of all scientific theories are disproved in 20 years or so... But regardless, science tends to give the appearance that it is always correct because it is taken as correct until it is incorrect, and then the new theory is "correct" until it is disproved again. As to whether or not what the community at large believes is correct, that is anyone's guess. There isn't anything else to compare it to.


That is strange, because last time I checked I believed that e=mc^2. I'm also not sure what group you are referring to, since the only group I can be described as belonging to is, according to the more recent gallup polls, is over one third of the U.S. But thank you for correct me on what I believe as if I wasn't here. At least it is good to know that all of the criticisms for modern theories are misunderstandings because it is too complicated to understand. All of this time I thought the criticisms everybody had were sincere. Silly me.