Historical embellishment for the sake of drama kind of annoyed me. Only got through 6 episodes and kind of lost interest. Ragnar's wife is a babe however, it was really her that kept me going for the 6 episodes.

Fun thought, whenever they're drinking "mead" throughout the show (constantly) keep in mind how vikings made it. Ground grain with some honey, then all the "warrior-brothers" spat in the bowl. It was the spittle that fermented it.
They're drinking each other's spit.
It appears for the sake of not grossing out audiences the producers have separated historical viking mead production from the practise of drinking alcohol by allegorically depicting method using a communal wash/rinse bowl in which the vikings blow their snot then the next one washes his face in it. Well actually that's how they made mead, not cleaned up.

Considering probably 50% of drunkeness was likely more to do with bacterial infection than intoxication it's not really that surprising they had such a fatalistic cultural/religious ideology.
Regarded as a method of reinforcing community, it's also not so surprising becoming sickly was a greater crime than many offences of criminal intent.

Trust me, you would not want to live in a viking world. Not a real one, the series is utter fictional depiction for fantasy entertainment.

Well on the other hand, being "near your house" also means being near your collection of knives or a basement and shackles...

Don't make your thoughts and life revolve around relationships or you'll just become a vacuum to others. Have a solid, independent lifestyle, then simply allow others to enter or leave as they choose and you'll find the ones which become consistent personal relationships are meant to be with you. Some reliable friends and others much more.

Going about it another way means you're going to be paranoid about losing a relationship even when you're in one, and even if it was meant to, it won't work out.

I think when your date plan reflects you as a personality, then it is like an accurate introduction. How is that bad? The right person for you would respond excellently, the wrong person would be screened out.

The only issue with it is that our egos prefer to be the one dismissing inappropriate suitors rather than being rejected by them, but that's just egotistical. When your screening method works accurately, you're doing better than most right there.

The hard thing about breakups is you tend to have built a mental framework with your partner, now they're no longer there and that really throws you.

Time bud, takes time to settle back down to earth in a calm and relaxed way, when your personal situation at rest is completely changed from how it used to be at rest with someone else.

What helps is just try to remember that you began this life completely alone and then met your mother, met your schoolfriends, met your girlfriends. Alone is not a broken state. It is your natural state. You should be perfectly well adjusted and healthy when completely alone, and then every person that enters your life from there is a bonus, not an entitlement.

This puts you back in the right frame of mind to meet new people and start over.

I see it as some degree of conservative attitude towards the role of women as motherhood (and by default, housewife) is remnant of an earlier age with slightly different rules. It made sense once, eg. in a time where medicine was less developed and it was simply necessary to outpace high death rates with higher birth rates.

Consider an 18th century rural community, the bread and butter of a pre-industrial nation with high rates of mundane fatality and a need to effectively birth a workforce, even on an individual level with more than one generation of a family working a successful farmland, at the time probably the most viable small business plan. Even regional institutions were highly nepotistic in this regard, the infamous petit bourgois of family run business from butcher to carpenter to candlestick maker, children and descendants carried the business. This is old school, the way it worked and still, high death rates under mundane conditions. Back then a child death was not uncommon, and it was almost impassionate responsibility to the family unit to hit the bedroom and make another to replace lost potential. It was cultural and common sense of the time.

And keep in mind though these ages seem so far from our modern eyes, they're a mere few generations behind us, the generations of this culture wrote publications and birthed ideologies that still line modern libraries without appearing out of place until one really dives into the minds of their authors with an objective view, eg. I feel pretty confident the US Constitution would be an entirely different document were it written for the first time today as opposed to a tentative struggle with those times, yet the common belief is that it remains a progressive ideology, which is sort of like saying hanging is more progressive than beheading.

Then onto the industrial revolution whereby it became patriotic to birth a national workforce. Previously mothers supplying soldiers for warfare had always been a nationalist duty and now in the age of factories and mass labour the political resource of equal or greater value became the common worker, or the rise of the semi-skilled labourer in a role of importance to the national and industrial economy.

So added to the conservative attitudes of an age past lay in the interim one of propaganda for the purposes of creating a usable national resource, from simply giving birth. And it was better than importing an ethnic workforce although this ancient practise (conquering neighbours, putting them to work and living big until they revolted and took you over from within), also found its way into the new age through the establishment of industrial fiefdoms; nevertheless it seemed intuitive in nationalist interests to prefer birthing the industrial workforce to greater extent and thus maintain racial themes in yesteryear's cultural identities, an overview of cultural perspectives of the late-19th to early 20th centuries. This is a mere one or two generations behind us, the firm beliefs of grandparents and the majority of authors on the shelves, or traditional modern businesses.


However, during this time certain primary conditions have vastly changed. Legislative reform has taken leaps and bounds, despite rule of law often being considered mere lip service among conservatives even within the courts themselves; and more importantly medicine and public health has taken leaps and bounds. Mundane death rates have plummeted in all but third world nations or those in extreme economic poverty and political disarray.

So I think we're now at an age where it has become a simple adult responsibility to seriously consider and self govern options when it comes to the decision of having children. In yesteryear an average quality of life was roughly equivalent to living in a cardboard box, it was hardly going to get much worse and probably give more chances to escape by having as many kids as you can pump out. These days quality of life is both a far higher readily achievable standard, and far more tentative, so if one goes about getting pregnant like a surprised deer in the woods, they shouldn't then be too surprised if they wind up living in a cardboard box.

The thing about conservative ideals is there's no such thing as halfway, as it is more an adoption of cultural perspective than any isolated decision. If you take the perspective that your biological role as a woman is motherhood, you will find all the trimmings associated with the ideology would also enter your personal world. Finding yourself in the midst of a feminist struggle, which simply doesn't exist for the woman next to you. And thus we have one of the establishments of inequality.

These days the real dirty little secret is any decision about having children needs to firstly be self governed, and secondly is one which directly involves the financial security to afford them at what you would consider a reasonable quality of life, which obviously should be established prior to the undertaking. You can't trust a government or even a community to share any responsibility financial or otherwise without paying a cost, let's face it in these predatory capitalist times, an indordinately high cost.

On top of that, it'd also be a terrific idea if you were actually capable of competent parenthood somewhat before you had them too.

Cancer, like a few other unsolvable illnesses is the result of your cells doing exactly what they're supposed to do...but under conditions in which doing so is unhealthy.

ie. cancer is like a fry pan into the fire situation, it's a correct response to jump out of the fry pan yet by doing so you wind up in the fire.
They're a cellular mutation, conditional from a stem cell perspective not so much hereditary, but the act of trying to be healthy causes the body to destroy itself, a bit like a crazy person in a crowd when the crowd starts to wonder who is really the crazy one, so what happens is more crazy people in that crowd until the whole crowd is crazy. But in this case crazy is dead.

Lots of confounding illnesses work this way, mental illness for example, works just like this. It is because a brain is perfectly healthy that it becomes mentally ill, not because something is wrong with it. The causal influences are conditional.

ie. nobody is really born broken, it's a completely fallacious, popular assumption.

If you think of the expanding universe as a balloon, the content of the universe is not the volume inside the balloon getting bigger like a bubble. It is the surface of the balloon stretching as the balloon gets bigger. All existence is on the surface of this balloon.

No matter how much you blow up this balloon, there's nothing for it to run into because the balloon doesn't really exist, only the galaxies dotted on its surface and the space between them exists. The balloon just gets bigger, but there's nothing to run into because nothing other than the surface of this balloon exists.

The strict definition of this, and the Current (cosmological) Model, is flat, curved spacetime, ie. the surface of a balloon without the balloon itself existing.

You're thinking of the universe as a bubble. It's more like the skin of a bubble without the bubble, all existence is within the skin of the bubble.

Mind bending, isn't it? That's fourth dimensional spacetime for you. Even many perfectly qualified experts can't actually picture 4D-spacetime, instead they use 3D models with a series of thought-experiments confounding them with paradoxes.

eg. empty space has a pressure density called gravitation, it's caused by relative rates of time influenced by the presence of mass-energy, ie. when you walk faster you get heavier in the direction of travel, which causes the distance you are travelling to become shorter in excess of the speed at which you are negotiating it.
Motion warps space. Activity warps space. Energy is activity. An object is energy.
So, the universe is curved, flat spacetime.
The surface of a balloon without the balloon. No balloons to run into even if there were more than one, and if there were, they would
warp our space and so automatically be a part of our curved, flat spacetime, and the observable universe.


The multiverse theories are all about other dimensions, as in science fiction dimensions, not spatial ones like all the real (5) dimensions.

Here's an exercise, who can name the 5 dimensions? ;)
And, how is time a spatial dimension? :D

if OP is that stingey in his flat on ventilation, some indoor plants, a few scented oils and some toilet deodorant, his little flat must absolutely ferment in his own stink and I'm guessing some unsavoury cooking habits, to start with anyway.
o_o

Amoscarine, do I have any thought of the splendid muse you provided? Where to start, where to start.

Firstly, kudos for your own thoughts there. Clearly you're a keen mind who'll go far, and more than worthy of serious discussion with anyone.
Now down to business. Guess I'll go with point form, I noticed a bunch of things that twitched my eye.

1. The astrophysics term "information" is nomenclature, it's incapable of organizing and like the term "singularity" doesn't really relate to anything which intrinsically exists by and of itself. It is something which needs to exist in order to serve the standard model we use for the math, since it's all we have to use any math with.
Take atomos at face value, keep dividing up the subatomic particles until you just plain run out of ways to describe the divisions and what do you have? A nothingness? No, that's impossible if you want to use thermodynamics like, ever. But what do you have when we run out of ways to describe the divisions of divisions of things? Well, there must be the latent potential for the smallest divisions we can name to come about within, and after all there is never nothing, it is always, always some type of field, yes? So this potential, this virtual particle field, is termed information, the latent potential for something to happen. The information of what isn't, in order for it to ever be.
It's not really very literal, it's a mathematical expression. Could be a giant space dragon just magicking it all into existence, but if it is, then that is what the term "information" describes, that magic dragon's thought or will to create things.
So information won't be organising itself into anything, it just is, because of what comes about. Theoretical physics is actually surprisingly simple logic, ultimately virtually based on greek or similar philosophy, but evolved to scientific method (testable results of reproducible experimentation somewhat prior to making a scientific statement, etc.). This logic itself, is super basic. I guess that's just what truth is supposed to be, it has a mechanic, not an argument, it's observable, not provable. Simple logic gets you complicated theorum. Counter-intuitively, complicated theorum only comes about by ultra super simple childlike logic, 1+1=2 and exactly that simple unless it's a falsehood or a wild claim. Hence the calling card of theoretical physics to any claim is "show the math."

2. By observation, nothing much has changed about homo sapiens sapiens cranial cavities and brain structures for 180,000 years. Take early man as a child in a time machine from 150K BCE and put him in a modern family, send him to university and it's an identical result to anyone you grabbed from down the street today, there's the direct inferrence talking palaeoanthropology. We never got any smarter, never. And we never "intellectually evolved", we're just the same as we've always been, until another species replaces us, that might be smarter, or dumber, but more successful.

There's just so much to say about this. Firstly, hominid evolution is not linear. Not linear. Neanderthal was renamed Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis specifically in recognition that it was a cohabitating hominid species from common early roots with independent evolution and utterly identical technological and cultural artefacts. It is now published that the only method palaeontologists had ever used to distinguish Mousterian (Neandertal) and Aurignacian (human) technologies from similar periods was by which hominid remains were found nearby, we had identical technologies from clothing to teepees to toolmaking, to musical instruments, to altars and shrines, to burial practises, in every way identical except the hominid remains. We cohabited, appeared around the same time, they died out and we didn't. By palaeoanthropological study, the current postulate tabled is that in fact we are a blind evolutionary branch of hominid, and Neandertal was a more linear hominid evolution from ancestors, but significant climate change ca.35-25K BCE altered the game and made us more successful where Neandertal should've been more successful if the planet was a little more consistent with its climate over epochs. There have been several blind branches, especially among Australopithecans but also many Homo.

So hominid evolution isn't about getting smarter and isn't even a linear kind of evolution, it's a diversity type of evolution with lots of cohibitation and then overwhelming conditional influences to promote/handicap species success. Speciation is like tossing a handful of grains, not like arranging them in a string. Several Neandertal skulls have been found with cranial cavities capable of housing a brain some 30% bigger than any there has ever been in our species, the Uni of Wyoming palaeontology department describes Neandertal as a Silverback gorilla with the brain of Einstein. If hominid evolution was linear, we got dumber, not smarter. Also, all significant leaps of early civilisation, from clothing to the diatonic musical scale and examples of anoxic chemistry, religious worship, astronomy and surgical practises, appear in Neandertal finds long before us, longer than the time we've ever heard of farming and domestication. In fact the first farm identified in the archaeological record is Neandertals actively farming fish in greece, ca.35K BCE. The first human farming is around 8K BCE. Ancient mythologies are filled with tales of highly civilized, intelligent (but invariably "evil") giants which competed with mankind for rule of the land, sounds a lot like Neandertal and there is undisputable evidence of both active trade and interbreeding between species from the Middle East to Romania. All modern humans have a Neandertal DNA marker that is not present in very ancient human remains. Other evidence of intbreeding was found in Romania recently; we didn't come from them, we screwed them.

Secondly, the perception that "human intellect has evolved since ancient times" is a blind assumption based on the subjective example of technological evolution, which is linear. It is nowhere near or even anything like intellectual evolution, which is non-sequiteur without speciation. It is like a math equation that successive generations continue to develop based upon previous work. No generation being actually any more intelligent than the one before it. That statement follows the physical evidence, like brain cavity shown in remains of various ages, and the postulates of great minds of earlier ages, no less intelligent than Einstein or any other. Was Newton less intelligent than Einstein? No, he had different tools and bodies of work to utilize, but what he did with it was just the same. As will be the next great mind, starting from where those before have left off. Not by birth, by activity and records of other activity to build upon.

Neurological structures are conditional and adaptive, the ones formed when learned by rote are different to those learned by verse. Published MRI studies by anthropologists have shown communities in which primary learning is done by verbal tradition form different neurological structures for memorization than those in which primary learning is done by written linguistics. Different, not more evolved. In fact, recall accuracy is shown to be far greater by verse than rote, ie. there is far less tendency for the phenomenon of chinese whispers when taught lessons by singing than when taught lessons from books. And after all, isn't it intuitive that you'll remember exactly a nursery rhyme to a much older age than you will a page from a book you read as a child?

No, we didn't get any more intelligent, ever. We have Homo Sapiens Sapiens intelligence, it is a common intelligence and a finite one, perhaps the next species will be smarter, certainly the last one no longer around was, in some cases.

Sorry Tengo, the whole Hitler thing means the world already had its antichrist, I'm afraid you'll have to pretend to be someone else. Try an alien, you have alien knowledge for us. That might get a suicide cult happening or something you can put your name to and act like you've ever done anything but masturbate with your life.

o_O

Way old rehashed news again from the science-journalism community. Not the discovery of 2012 VP113 I mean, but the postulate of a full size planet way out in the Oort cloud.

How old is this news? It dates before Pluto was even discovered, and it relates directly to how Pluto was discovered (and Sedna, and this object).

Pluto was discovered because, under the advice of astrophysicists, astronomers began to look for it.
Prior to the discovery of Pluto it was tabled in publication that preturbations of Neptune and Uranus could only be caused by another outer planet, one which had not been discovered yet. So astronomers started looking for it and finally found Pluto.

Here's the thing. Pluto isn't anywhere near massive enough to cause those preturbations, and the math is quite correct on the preturbations.

So absolutely, there has to be another, massive planet out there somewhere. Absolutely, it hasn't been found yet. Absolutely, it has to exist or Neptune and Uranus wouldn't do what they do, that simple.
And Sedna, or this new object, they just don't cut the mustard.

There is another massive planetary body out there.


Or...wait for it...a binary black hole much much farther away (I'm playing jeopardy with this, the question is: if there is a massive planet even at ca.250AU why can't astronomers easily find it? They should be able to...and point 2 is, the primordeal solar disc from which planets are formed doesn't carry heavy elements that far out, that's why everything out that far is basically a cometary body of ice and dust, pluto and sedna and this new one, are just big ones, not massive as in heavy ones, they're light, would float on water, can't preturb ice-giants like Uranus and Neptune, no way, so if there's a massive ie. metallic-rocky planet out there, where did it come from, not our solar disc, not from our solar system, and why can't we see it, the only other mundane possibility is a brown dwarf and that would show up on radio telescopes like a beacon, so again, why can't astronomers find it? Unless...).

You might want to try to step outside your own wonton desires if you're the one interested in discovering a serious relationship.

Yes that's right, discovering a relationship because that's how they're found, they're discovered like a diamond in the sand. They're not caused like a contractual obligation or buying a vacuum cleaner.

Try this thought: every guy, absolutely every guy in the entire universe will automatically have a serious loving relationship with the right person.

And that's what you need to discover: the right person.

How is it so many ridiculous people enter the dating forum believing it's all just like picking lollies in a candy store and all up to whomever to just plain make themselves feel a certain way about you because you want that.
Just doesn't work that way.

You want a person to like you? You find one who likes you. It's not even about what you do, it's not a technique.
You want a person to love you? Get to know them and see if that is discovered or not. More often not, because again, it's about being with the right person.

All this entitlement crap, "I'm entitled to a relationship on demand," where are you picking this up from? Dr Phil tv shows?
It just plain aint real life lady.

Not sure how I feel about the question, to be honest.
I know all the right things to say in my head, all the positive self reinforcement for doing the right thing in life and feeling secure and comfortable in your own skin.
But at the same time my feelings get programmed by experience and the reactions are too quick to govern. So I've had at times a pretty harsh time and find myself often fighting feelings of worthlessness.
I know all the right thoughts to think, but I'm not god so I can't control my feelings so easily.

eg. after enough good looking women look at you with disinterest, the next time a good looking woman smiles at you, the lightning quick reaction is to look down or look away or think some dismissive thought of her.
And it doesn't matter if you notice it and stop yourself, you can scream inside your own head "NOOO! Don't sink your own boat in life," but by then it's too late. Good looking women don't give second chances, they don't need to.
It's lose-lose, human psychology. Until one day somebody does make a utopic world for everyone, some will always be the losers no matter what they do. That's just how it is, the life you were born into is everything that will control your life and that's that.

www. realdoll. com



lmao :D

Well they're crazier than a two-bob watch so I'm guessing you'll fit right in :D

awesome. Depending on the purpose of your visit and what you'll be getting up to, worth a thought to make use of local security companies. And walk on the safe side of the road, etc.

People can disappear around there, for many reasons. Local journalists have been machine gunned in cafe's for saying the wrong thing. By men in cars suspiciously the same model and layout the FSB uses in Moscow. But it's not a good idea to talk about it, if you're going to be there.
Not exaggerating, it really has been that bad up until very recently, and what guarantee is there that anything's changed?

The chechens still want to keep the oil fields, the ossetians still back whichever side is going to win, the tblisi government still isn't recognized by the kremlin and the abkhazians are still wackados who think it's the height of the cold war. And they're all heavily armed with war materiel.
Oh and the russian frontier bases are still there, not paying rent, and consider themselves sovereign russian territories in georgia with complete lawful autonomy.

Don't forget the black sea fleet launched volleys of 1-ton warheads on the place just a few years ago. A "rogue admiral acting without sanction" the Russians claimed.

On top of all that, they consider themselves far more asiatic (semitic, turk, mountaineers, horsemen and catholics) than russian by heritage. It was once part of the Old Silk trade route (the black sea route, with stopover at Odessa, then on through Iran to the far east).
And on another side of things, during the soviet empire georgia was the primary nuclear research centre. And singly responsible for the production of Russian antitank attack aircraft.

A weird, dangerous, interesting, ancient place of epic proportions.

And FYI crime figures reporting are non-sequiteur, not just because correlation does not infer cause, but because it is already shown in extensive publication that neither the availability of tools (like firearms) nor the severity of punishment, nor the effectiveness of policing in any way affects the core statistics of violent crime.

The singular factor which does directly correlate to violent crime statistics is socioeconomic status. It also contributes more severely towards health issues pro rata than smoking, the road toll and drug abuse: combined.

How you're treating your people as a community controls crime, health and average quality of life, not guns. Guns doesn't do anything for anything one way or another.
It just means a random idiot in a car park is more likely to be equipped with a firearm. A bad thing, not a good thing.

It's exactly the same thing as talking about drivers licensing to drive vehicles on public roads.

Even with some degree of regulation, geared so that basically anyone no matter how irresponsible can get a license so long as they pretend to do what they're told as far as getting licensed. Even so the vast majority of drivers are incompetent imbeciles that shouldn't be allowed to drive and they're largely responsible for the road tolls, not speeders or hoons but idiots who can't handle responsibility and don't understand consideration or responsibility. They just weren't parented well enough to handle it and that's more than half the damn population.

But whoa, imagine if you no longer needed licenses or registration and anyone could drive anything anytime "because it's their constitutional right".
You'd have death traps instead of roads, with everything from intentional vehicular murders to careening idiots with no idea how to drive racing along at 170mph into school zones.

And that's what the situation is with gun control legislation. You need some regulation, there already is some degree of regulation, way too lax in the case of the US compared to every other, more evolved democracy on earth, but it is some regulation at least. It's just not enough.


The question isn't "should there be firearms regulation?", it is, "how much firearms legislation preserves the freedom of liberty for the community at large, meaning the liberty to keep breathing when some moron gets drunk and pulls his ready firearm because he's allowed to have it and be an idiot?"

It's about how much gun control. Not should there be gun control.

Silly twats.

Doing something that gives you a sense of accomplishment is an excellent cure for loneliness.
Meeting strangers out of loneliness I've found either tends to annoy people or invite others you'd rather not meet. Cold canvass socialising is usually best done on neutral ground, confidence and clarity keep you safe, loneliness is neither.
Unless you like being a leaf in the wind.