Why we will never have true realistic first person shooters

by Megagun

We won't, because it won't really make any particular kind of sense in most modern popular multiplayer shooters.

You see, realism has some massive drabacks: it's slow, boring, and imbalanced. Think about what would happen if Battlefield had a realistic flight model with a realistic flight ceiling. A single jet or chopper pilot could dominate the battlefield without putting himself in much danger. Snipers could position themselves at strategic positions and only really have to worry about enemy snipers and vehicles. Close-quarters combat would be nearly nonexistant, and most engagements would be fought by eliminating all opposition from afar, and then slowly walking in to take over enemy bases.

But to improve the game, they've added respawning. They've lowered the flight ceiling so that everyone knows there's a jet around at all times, and so that anti-air could be a bit more effective. The battlefield is limited in landscape size so that the entire battle is focused around a few choke points. All of this has been done to improve the game experience; to make engagements between you and an enemy happen often, and with both players understanding that there's an engagement.

This last part is especially important. Games that have lots of 1v1 battles within a larger game are popular. I think it has to do with the adrenaline rush you get when you're walking around, spot an enemy, the enemy spots you, and it's a short one-versus-one match to the death, followed by the victor running off to find another target to kill. Even in games that aren't as fast-paced (ArmA, DayZ), these moments make the game. Nobody likes walking around and suddenly dying because an enemy shot you in the face without you being able to do anything about it. People like being put against an enemy and trying to out-skill him.

Now think about what happens if the damage model becomes more realistic. The first person to fire a bullet will have a far greater advantage, and will win a lot more engagements. Engagements will also be a lot shorter: the first proper hit will be fatal or incapacitating enough so that the opponent can't do anything anymore. Although this can be quite interesting and exciting (high tension level), it changes the entire nature of the game significantly.

In engagements where one person is left crippled, and the other is left dead, the game may become rather annoying. If the game has respawning, this means that even though one person was the victor of an engagement, his crippled state means that he'll spend the next few moments in the game being bored/annoyed at his character's health, especially if he has a broken bone and can't move effectively around the battlefield. The loser of the engagement died and lost the engagement, but he's able to respawn into a fresh body and continue to have fun! So, really, who was the victor in that engagement? The one who died, or the one who got crippled?

So, only having a realistic damage model in a multiplayer shooter won't really work, as respawning becomes an issue. Introducing a new feature (the realistic damage model) broke another. So now this problem has to be fixed, perhaps by removing respawning altogether, which will in turn create another problem (people being bored after dying). And so on, and so forth.

Perhaps there is a nice solution for this, but I doubt that it'll be able to break into mainstream multiplayer gaming, and I bet that these games with truly realistic damage models will continue to be a niche.

How 4.5 Petabytes can be compressed to 42 Kilobytes

Theoretical part by I_Wont_Draw_That

Compression comes down to information theory, which is the branch of mathematics and computer science devoted to describing the amount of information in some string of characters. The attack involves compressing a string which is extremely long, but also contains an extremely low amount of information.

Consider the string: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

That is 26 characters. However, the amount of information stored in it may be lower. I could instead represent it as "the english alphabet", which is only 20 characters, and you still know what I mean. Given enough context, I could represent it as "alphabet". And given a shared understand that "0 means abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", I could represent it as 0.

Now consider this string: aaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbbaaabbb

That's 72 characters. But what if I gave you something like: 

0=aaa 1=bbb 010101010101010101010101

That's only 36 characters. Or what if I compressed it more? 

0=aaabbb 000000000000

That's only 21 characters. So we compressed our input from 72 characters to 21 characters without losing any information. This is effectively what zipping a file does. It builds a dictionary of common patterns, aliasing them to shorter strings, and then uses the aliases in their place.

The fewer unique substrings there are, the more compressible the data is, because the dictionary can be smaller, so each alias can be shorter. What happens, then, if the entire input is one pattern repeated many, many times?

For instance, suppose the original string had been 0 repeated a trillion times. To write that string out completely would require 1 terabyte (1 byte per "0" times a trillion of them). But as you just saw, I can easily represent it just as well as "0 repeated a trillion times", which is much, much shorter. That's basically what's happening here. The original content is extremely large, but equally simple, so it compresses into almost nothing. When inflated, it's gigantic.

This extreme runs the other way, as well. For any given compression algorithm, there are inputs which cannot be compressed at all.

Practical part by Rohaq

Basic zip bombs are pretty easy to make.

Create a massive file, let's say, a gig in size, which is full of zeroes, then zip it up. Because the content of the file is uniformly repeated throughout, it compresses very easily:

$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1000000 | zip zipbomb1.zip -
  adding: -1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 9.97309 s, 103 MB/s
 (deflated 100%)
$ ls -lh zipbomb1.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 971K 2012-08-01 18:21 zipbomb1.zip

(The above is under Linux, and pushes 1024*1000000 '0' characters into a zip file with standard compression)

Copy that zip file ten times over. Then add all of these zip files into a single zip file. Because the file content across each zip file is exactly the same, again, this compresses very well:

$ zip -9 zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip zipbomb*
  adding: zipbomb10.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb1.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb2.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb3.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb4.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb5.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb6.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb7.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb8.zip (deflated 100%)
  adding: zipbomb9.zip (deflated 100%)
$ ls -lh zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip 
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 28K 2012-08-01 18:26 zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip

(The above adds all of the copied zip files into the zip file zipbomb-lvl2-1.zip with the highest level of compression)

Now copy that zip file ten times over, and zip it them all up again. Rinse and repeat, let's say 10 layers deep.

So following from the compression basics people have been mentioning, ignoring individual file headers, etc. the above could be compressed as something as simple as:

[[[[[[[[[[[0]{1024000000}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}]{10}

Now a virus scanner comes along, and then attempts to scan the zip file. It decompresses the first set of zips, then decompresses each of those, then decompresses each of those. Eventually it gets to the lowest layer, and attempts to decompress these files into memory. At this point you're attempting to decompress 10¹⁰ 1GB files into memory, so unless you have about 9.3 exabytes of RAM at hand, you're in trouble, and since some scanners automatically scan new files, well, you could be in trouble as soon as you receive or open the file.

Scanners nowadays generally have checks in place to make sure that they're not affected by zip bombs, however, which is probably why MSE is no longer detecting it as a threat.

The Four Forces of Nature

by bkanber

There are four "fundamental interactions" -- these are the four very basic types of forces that affect particles. They are the strong interaction, the weak interaction, the electromagnetic interaction, and the gravitational interaction.

Electromagnetic: we're most familiar with this interaction, and it has the most direct effect on our day to day lives. It is very, very strong -- many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. The EM interaction dictates all of chemistry. If you've ever picked something up, or felt friction, or drank water, oranything that has nothing to do with radiation, nuclear forces, or gravity, then it's dictated by the electromagnetic interaction. The study of the electromagnetic interaction at the quantum level is called QED: [1] Quantum Electrodynamics, and is mediated by the photon. Richard Feynman made a lot of progress here.

Strong Interaction: if we look closely at the nucleus of an atom, we'll find that the strong interaction shows up in two places: it holds protons and neutrons together inside the nucleus, and it also holds quarks together to form protons and neutrons and other hadrons. The strong interaction is even stronger than EM--but its effects fall off very quickly with distance so we don't really experience it at the macroscopic scale. We discovered the strong interaction because we couldn't figure out how EM could hold things together inside the nucleus. The study of the strong interaction is called [2] Quantum Chromodynamics, and is very interesting.

Weak Interaction: This one dictates radioactive decay; the forces are mediated by the W and Z bosons.

Gravity: gravity is very, very weak -- many orders of magnitude weaker than the strong force. We don't see gravity at human scales; it only appears at galactic sizes (planets, stars, etc). Because it's so weak, it's exceedingly hard to study. When looking at subatomic particles, the EM and Strong forces are so much more powerful than gravity that it's nearly impossible to see the effects of gravity at a small scale. Because of gravity's weakness, we have not been able to study it closely at the quantum level. Gravity is "split off" because it's too weak to study at a quantum scale. It's hard to see and it's hard to study. Perhaps if we understood more of its characteristics at the quantum scale we'd get some more hints about how to reconcile the maths.

Now it turns out that some very smart people discovered that Electromagnetism and the Weak interaction are actually two aspects of a single interaction which we call "the electroweak". Electromagnetism and radioactive decay are therefore two facets of one "parent" interaction -- leaving us with only 3 fundamental interactions! We also have strong evidence to suspect that the Strong interaction can be combined with the Electroweak interaction, and I think we've made progress there, but I'm not up to date on this.

So there's evidence that the Strong, Weak, and EM interactions can be combined into one. Given that, whywouldn't we be able to bring gravity into the mix? We should be able to unify the four into one big theory, and show each one as a different facet of the "unified field theory". The main problem is that we don't understand gravity as much as we'd like to, because it's too weak to study. We haven't figured out the math yet -- because with our current understanding of gravity, the math doesn't work out correctly. If we could more accurately characterize gravity (perhaps there's something that's too small to see yet), our understand of gravity might change slightly and we'd be able to fit it in with the others.

Slight clarification: We don't understand quantumgravity as much as we'd like to. General relativity, however, gives us an excellent framework for macroscopic gravity. Our main issue is using what we know from relativity in conjunction with quantum physics. Einstein's relativity works so well that it's hard to imagine describing gravity any other way; this is what I mean when I say "we don't understand quantum gravity well enough"--we understand gravity excellently, but we don't understand it at the quantum level.

Why don't hair cells heal themselves like cuts and scrapes do? Will we have solutions to this soon?

by Uncle-Dads-Whistle

I work on the development of neurosensory cells in the cochlea, with the goal being figuring out the secret to hair cell regeneration.

Mammals have lost the ability to regenerate hair cells (the types of cells that translate sound waves into a neural signal) after damage. Birds and reptiles, however, have maintained that ability, and after enduring trauma or infection, or drug-induced hair cell loss, a non-sensory supporting cell will transdifferentiate (change from one differentiated cell type to another) into a mechanosensory hair cell. Why exactly can't mammals do this? Well, we're not exactly sure. There are all sorts of inhibitory signals within the mature mammalian cochlea that prevent cell division or transdifferentiation (which is also one reason why we never see any cancer in this system; the body basically has all the proliferation completely shut off). So we try to figure out if there are ways around this apparent moratorium on proliferation/differentiation in mammalian cochleae, and if there's a way to open up the possibility of regenerating hair cells in mature mammalian cochlea.

With gene therapy or viral vectors, we have been able to grow hair cells in vitro. That's true, in fact it doesn't even take anything that complicated to grow hair cells in culture - you just need to dump atoh1 protein (the master gene for hair cell development) on some competent cells and they will turn into hair cells (they'll even recruit neighboring cells to become supporting cells). But that doesn't really help us regenerate hair cells in mature mammalian cochlea - those cells aren't really competent to respond to that signal once they're past a certain point. There's been a few studies that have succeeded in generating transdifferentiated hair cells from support cells using genetic systems to overexpress those genes that direct a hair cell fate - but this only lasts about a month after birth before you start losing that effect. And on top of that, the functionality of the hair cells that were generated was questionable. And of course, these animals were genetically engineered to have these genes turned on at certain points, this is obviously not a viable option to translate into human treatment.

So it still remains that gene therapy is probably our best shot to regenerate hair cells in a mature human cochlea. The only problem is we don't know exactly what combination of genes will do the trick on a mature cochlea. So a lot of work is done on figuring out how this happens normally, then trying to find a way to manipulate that system. Since this is my field, I could go on forever about this, but I don't want to start getting too tangential or far out, especially since I don't have time to look up sources (gotta go work on some of my mice right now) but if y'all have any questions I'll do my best to answer them when I get a chance.

Why do you like your own mirror image but hate your photo image?

by sychosomat

It is an extension of the mere-exposure effect/hypothesis. Very basically, it states that the more you see or hear something, the more you like it. Because we see our "reflected" image far more than our "photo" image, we subjectively like it more.

Here is one study from the literature that found support for the hypothesis - Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis. (Warning: possible pay-wall for full article, abstract can be viewed by anyone however).

As a summary, the abstract states that they took 33 female college students and a close female friend (in study 1) or a lover (study 2) and had them rate a picture of the participant as well as an image like one that the participant would see in a mirror as well as a "true" picture, like one would see in a photo/real-life. As the researchers hypothesized, the participant rated their "mirror" image as preferable, while their friend/lover rated their "photo" image as preferable, supporting the mere-exposure hypothesis.

For those behind the paywall: In study 1, the participant preferred their mirror print 21-12, the friend preferred the photo print 20 to 13. In study 2, (different as instead of friends, the girls identified and brought lovers) the participant preferred their mirror print 20-8, the lover preferred the photo print 17-11 (only 28 continued in the study). Note that by the statistics, the difference between lovers and friends in their preference of the photo image is non-significant.

I also wonder if beyond simply mere-exposure, some element of self-image is involved. People may self-identify with their mirror images far more than their photo images and thus become disconcerted when seeing themselves "looking wrong" due to the reflection of the minor imperfections in symmetry most of our faces contain. Pure speculation on my part if this cognitive connection exists, however, so take it with a grain of salt.

As a note to anyone interested, google has a great academic search function called Google scholar (http://scholar.google.com). You may only get access to abstracts, but it is a great first source to go to beyond wikipedia.

The Two Sides of Marijuana

by Staying_On_Topic

If you want to be educated on why drugs are illegal read this The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School

There is increasing evidence that marijuana can cause long term damage to young people, namely teens.

There is truth in both sides of the spectrum. There are limited studies done on Schedule I drugs, because of it's listing it is considered to have no medicinal value. To understand why Marijuana was listed as a Schedule I drug you have to look back through history to the early 1900's. The medical problems with marijuana stem from side effects, long term and some that only affect some users and addiction. The societal problems extend far beyond that. It is best to take what information is available, from both sides, and come to conclusions from the facts.

Is a good pro marijuana advocacy groups listing of studies relating to marijuana:

http://norml.org/component/zoo/category/recent-research-on-medical-marijuana

The National Institute of Drug Abuse:

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

There was a study done on the effects of marijuana use on youth in Canada. They found that smoking marijuana before the brain is fully formed (The medical community agrees that your brain fully forms around the years of 18 to 25) can create long term issues. Here is a quote from the researchers study:

“Teenagers who are exposed to marijuana have decreased serotonin transmission, which leads to mood disorders, as well as increased norepinephrine transmission, which leads to greater long-term susceptibility to stress,” Dr. Gobbi stated.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091217115834.htm

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/pot_smoking_could_leave_lasting_neurological_impression_teenagers

Interesting the second link from the same doctor and resource states that in another study they found that synthetic THC in low doses was a potent anti-depressant, but that in high doses it reversed itself and can worsen depression and other psychiatric conditions like psychosis.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071023183937.htm

http://www.mpp.org/states/wisconsin/news/pot-ingredient-eases-worsens-1.html

This recent study from the University of New South Wales finds that

Heavy teenage cannabis use linked with anxiety disorders in late 20s

http://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/news/heavy-teenage-cannabis-use-linked-anxiety-disorders-late-20s

Here is a CBC Nature of Things documentary that. explores studies on teens who start smoking marijuana before the age of sixteen are four times more likely to become schizophrenic. That's the startling conclusion of some of the world's top schizophrenia experts, whose research is featured in the new documentary The Downside of High

We should legalize it, tax it, and regulate it so teenagers under a certain age aren't legally able to buy it. Drug dealers have no regulated body to manage them, or any formal code of ethics. The major problem, both from the standpoint of marijuana being bad, and it being good, is the absurd declaration of making marijuana a schedule I drug, which means it has no health benefits and thus no studies will be done on it's benefits or dangers. Let us not forget that the marijuana prohibition laws were passed largely due to racism and as a means to keep poor minorities below the white man. This is why there is such a large black and latino population still in jails, many for non violent drug offences.

The drug policy of the United States and the eagerness of it's allies to adopt it's policies has done nothing to prevent the usage of drugs or prevent it being sold. If anything it has criminalized it, glamorized it, made it taboo, and thus there is no education.

The drug policies of the future focus on education, health, and science.Like with Portugals staggering results. The drug policies of today are archaic machinations of a predominately racist white power structure that permeates the United States Government and most western nations.

People who pick a side tend to stick with information that confirms their ideas, instead of reasoning and science. Unbiased facts.

I would also like to state than when quantifying the dangers of a drug you have to look at it from a few different angles, addiction, side effects, long term effects, and how dangerous a lethal dose would be for each drug. Obviously drugs like alcohol, and nicotine via tobacco on an overall scale can cause a lot more damage than marijuana, but marijuana shouldn't be free from the scrutiny of science just because of a previous and currently flawed policy.

This picture displays the Active/Lethal Dose Ration and Dependence potential of Psychoactive Drugs 

This rates the harmfulness of 20 psychoactive drugs according to 16 criteria and finds that alcohol comes out on top. 

Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists, met in a 1-day interactive workshop to score 20 drugs on 16 criteria: nine related to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven to the harms to others. Drugs were scored out of 100 points, and the criteria were weighted to indicate their relative importance.

http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/01/the-most-dangerous-drug

Now look at the current drug scheduling in the USA compared to toxicity 

Here are possible uses for marijuana in the medical industry 

A recent study suggests CBD is safe and non toxic and numerous studies on it's effects on cancer

There are instances where psychotropics are used to treat addiction from drugs or alcohol. A doctor in BC Canada was shut down by government officials after treating 150-200 patients using ayahuasca with some success.

And instances like this, where a team of researchers in Norway have analyzed previous research into LSD and have come to the conclusion that a single dose of the drug may work just as well against alcohol addiction as daily doses of medications currently in use today.. There are cases like in this documentary that explores the potential medicinal value of LSD and psilocybin for people suffering from cluster headaches but can't because it's illegal. It is time to give up our idea that legal drugs are ok and illegal ones have no value, because it isn't rooted in science. We must look at the potential of drugs previously found to have no value, because it has the power to change the way we look at addictions and drugs.

Watch this documentary about LSD, Albert Hofmann, and it's use in Canadian Psychiatric Institutions in the 50's and 60's, as well as a brief history on LSD. The Doctors from the institutions treated severe alcoholism with LSD, and found it to work quite well. The patients having a psychedelic experience saw how much they were hurting their family, and the harm they were doing to their lives. The Doctors themselves ingest LSD to see what it might be like for a patient suffering from schizophrenia. It is wild watching these old, scientific men, recount their experience of LSD. A beautiful documentary in a sober or non sober state.

Watch on the Canadian National Film Board.

Watch on youtube

Here is a torrent (TPB).

If you are really interested in the history of drug prohibition in the USA, the issues with the legal system, and want to watch documentaries about these issues, this comment has a long list of them.

I envision marijuana horticulturalists to work closely with scientists and the medical community in the future because they are an untapped resource when it comes to the studies. There is also limited research into CBD and CBC, but studies are slowly being done.

I have a huge problem with both the culture of misinformation and prohibition, as well as the modern drug culture that fosters no respect for drugs.

I disagree with the recreational use without the awareness that it is medicine and that you are self medicating, and from the standpoint of media glorifying it to teens in music, movies the internet, and television, without them having proper understanding of what it does.

I approach drug use from an anthropological standpoint, that human beings have been experimenting for thousands of years with them, and previous to this generation of drug use, drug use in almost all areas of the world was regarded as spiritual, a source of knowledge. People who were witch doctors, or medicine men, had intimate knowledge of powerful plants. This knowledge has come and gone in cycles, wiped out only to resurface.

In closing, we know a little about cannabis, and new studies are done all the time. Imagine though, if we started studying this plant during the spiritual awakening of the 60's. How much more we would know about it, it's effects, and what potential uses it could have as medicine.

The Art of Storytelling

The original post was made in the context of seduction/pick up.

by LS_NickHoss

I love storytelling and love teaching it. You have to understand before creating a story that every phase of a pick up has the undercurrent of emotions. Attraction arouses interest, qualification spurts praise and comfort should span an array. These can be happy, fearful, moderately angry, horny, etc. A girl wants to see the whole spectrum your capability so she can get an idea of you at your best and your worst. If she can figure out how you tick, she’ll know how you tock, so to speak.

The basic, face to face way of doing this is through storytelling. Being a good storyteller involves two keys:

1) Emotion over Logic

Speak from an emotional perspective, not a factual one. Back in the barrens of Canada where I grew up, it’s almost hunting season right now. If I was to describe to a woman how hunting goes, I wouldn’t say “You walk through the snow in the bush for about five hours and then you shoot at a deer when it pops out.” That doesn’t have much emotional cache.

However, if I say…

“A lot of people think hunting is just shooting a gun, but there is so much more to it. Last week, we were pushing bush (1), and God, we had to trudge through the snow forever. Seriously, I thought (2) my feet were going to freeze off. I couldn’t feel them. Anyway, we finally stopped at this little creaky warm-up shake, like the kind where you expect an chainsaw murder to pop out from behind the door (3), so we got all undressed and fired up the stove and all. Anyway, my buddy looks up and goes, ‘Hey, did you just see that?’ And sure as shit (4), we looked out the window and there was this dark, blotch standing against the trees. The thing is that we can’t see if it has a rack or not–you can only shoot so many deer each season, so sometimes you don’t want to shoot a girl deer too early because you want horns right (5). We were both undressed already, but I couldn’t let this chance go by, so I’m like to Jeremy (6), “Fuck it! Let’s get it.” So I open the window on the shack, but I’m really slow about it because I’m scared to scare off the deer, eh. I stick out my gun and have it clutched against my shoulder, and I’m timing it to my heart beat (7), so I can get the shot off between beats. Then… BOOM! I fire it, and we just looked at each other like (8)…”

(1) This saying draws a person into the story. It’s not, “We were walking through the forest.” It will get a little laugh and engage her.

(2) If I say, “My feet were really cold,” it won’t resonate emotionally. When you say, I thought, I felt, I believed, you’re injecting character into the story because the listener can get inside the head of the hero (you).

(3) The listener can relate to the feeling of the cabin through this relatable phrase. They get a feeling for the cabin.

(4) Another regional saying. I’m being real with here and if I say this right, I’m really into the story. When trying to elicit emotion, this will draw her in. So far we’ve gone from a light-hearted start to eerie to dramatic.

(5) Providing clarification. A person needs to understand the terrain of the story in order to navigate it. If I give her context for what I’m saying, I set its level of importance.

(6) Spiking emotion back up. Instead of saying, “We went after the deer.” I put her in the cabin with me and say this to her like she was hunting with me.

(7) Slowing down the pace of the story. Controlling the pace controls the emotional spikes, which keeps the listener on their toes, which draws them in more. Also would be a good chance to touch in this instance.

(8) Giving her a certain look here will resonate more emotionally than saying, “We looked at each other funny.” Body language over words. It’s also building character and emotion, not jumping to the facts.

You get the picture. Everything you say will play in her mind like it’s on a movie screen. If you want to let her know what hunting is like, tell her a story about hunting. Don’t read her the facts like you’re a talking Wiki.

If you want it to be more of a heart-melter, steer the emotions and characters toward that. If you want it to spike attraction, shorten the story up and focus on the excitement. My story above isn’t super deep.

2) Characters over Plot

Let’s keep my story from above and look at how I develop the characters. People relate to emotions, and in order to experience emotions they have to be in the shoes of the person in the story. They don’t know how the story plays out until you say the next sentence, so by telling what the character thinks or how they feel, in real-time, you put them in the story. This elicits the emotion.

If you just giving plot, it’s tantamount to just giving facts. “Nick and Jeremy went hunting. Nick got cold. Jeremy said to go into the shack. The boys saw a deer. They shot at the deer.” Pretty dull, no emotional hook. Adding the characters feeling, diction, etc. makes the story come alive.

Anyway, I realize this is a true hillbilly bush story, but it’s also a REAL story. The storyteller can’t fake it. In attraction, you can drop a quip about how you know the door girl who let you all in the club for free, but in comfort that’s not what she wants to know. She’s seen the flash; she wants something real. It’s all in how you tell that real stuff. You bring the ‘you’ to life.

The Ups and Downs of being in the Infantery

by red_one_foxtrott

Infantry is awesome. At the end of the day, you work harder and are more disciplined, combat-competent, filthy, sweaty, exhausted, freezing, broiling, hungry than any other regular job in the military. You get to become proficient with a plethora of weapons, mind-boggling communication systems, tactical vehicles, and drilled-into-you tactics that you get to doing instinctively without even thinking about it.

Infantry sucks ass. You are treated like shit by high-level leadership. You enlisted to kick doors and shoot people in the face, but there you are picking moss out of the cracks in the garrison sidewalk because General Fucknut is coming to give a 3 hour speech about whogivesafuck. You embark on an 18-mile roadmarch; 26 miles later, your feet are hamburger and your 16-pound machine gun feels like it weighs 56 pounds. You stand guard at a weapons range in the sub-freezing temps for hours on-end, hours after the range went "cold" (no more firing), on a secure garrison, because you "train like you fight." You show up for formation in the freezing rain; one guy forgot his gloves; everybody has to take their gloves off. You get your long-awaited weekend snatched away for CQ (charge of quarters = barracks desk duty) or battalion/brigade staff duty or courtesy patrol (even though there are such things as MPs) or a work detail or because your leadership fucked up scheduling and the ONLY day open for the weapons range is on the weekend.

You deploy and live in dust-caked tents while a hundred meters away, personnel clerks and finance desk-jockeys who will never leave the FOB are living in air-conditioned housing units. You go on patrol for 6, 8, 10, 12, 24, 48 or more hours at a time, come back to the FOB and get in line for a hot meal; too bad, says the dining hall guard: your uniform is too dirty to come inside. You are moved out to a combat outpost with no running water and no electricity (other than the radios at the command post) and live there for a few weeks at a time; when you're not on-mission, you're in a guard tower, or fixing vehicles, or burning shit in oil-drums, or digging ditches, or stringing razorwire, or filling sandbags, or rolling out on QRF (quick reaction force) to help a patrol who got hit, or you're cleaning your weapon. If you have time to eat, masturbate, sleep, and wipe your asscrack off with babywipes, you do it.

You train for 14 weeks to earn those blue disks, crossed rifles and blue cord (if you're a Marine, you train for 26 weeks, and I don't know what infantry-specific accoutrements USMC infantrymen get, forgive my ignorance, fellow grunts) and train for months or even a year further at your line unit to deploy to combat. You learn how to use almost every gun we have, you learn how to drive (and maybe gun) Humvees, Bradleys, Strykers, MRAPs (unit-dependent) and practice shooting with night-vision and infrared lasers, or night-vision or thermal scopes. You and your buddies give each other IVs with night-vision in the back of a moving Bradley for combat-lifesaver training. You itch for the day you deploy, while the veterans around you roll their eyes, having already seen what you yearn for.

You get there and the enemy hides in civilian clothes; he uses women and children for human shields and spotters for mortar attacks. He kidnaps people from opposite tribes/sects and rapes women and murders children and tortures people with power drills to their kneecaps and cheeks and he cuts the tongue out of a 13 year old boy because the kid chatted with you during a halt on-mission. He kills your friends with sniper rifles and IEDs and you rarely, if ever, even see him face-to-face. You probably won't get the opportunity to kill him; rarely will you get the opportunity to even shoot at him. When you finally get that chance, you won't feel a thing. You won't be happy that he's laying there in front of you, bleeding and moaning on the pavement. You'll see dead people... civilians killed by them, killed accidentally by us, indigenous security forces (cops, military, local hired militia), bad guys... you may see people die right in front of you, within mere meters. At the end of it, you'll be dull. Numb. Desensitized. You'll wish you fired your weapon more.

You'll come home and be unable to relate to the friends and family who clapped you on the back and wished you well when you left those few short years ago. You'll know that you were the very top of the food chain; only special operations direct action teams trained more, did more, saw more, and were in more danger than you were. And your future college classmates will find out you were in the military and say things like, "Oh, my cousin is in the Navy, I think he does something with computers. He went to Iraq; it must've been SCARY." Or, "My buddy Joe joined the Army. Did you know him?" Or, "Did you KILL ANYBODY?" Or, "I support you guys, but I oppose the war. You didn't really believe in what we're doing over there, RIGHT?"

The highs are higher; relationships are more passionate (and more quickly burned out), weekends and block-leave periods are cherished, and days you somehow don't get put on the tower guard roster are things to behold.

The lows are lower; I think I already summed them up.

Caveat: tankers, scouts, combat engineers, and arty guys (the other combat-arms MOS) are cool too. And medics/corpsmen, EOD, dog handlers, psyops, civil affairs, JTACs, and pilots. I don't mean to seem like I'm marginalizing every other military MOS aside from Army/USMC infantry.

The beer I'm drinking right now is one of the best beers I've ever had. Because it's Labatt-Infantry-Blue, bitches.

When I turn off the lights, where does all the light go?

by Thecat5001

Light is a form of energy, but when you turn the light off, the light goes away, so where does the energy go?

The short answer is: it gets absorbed by the wall as heat.

The longer answer needs a bit of a more detailed mental picture. The wall is a solid, which consists of a (fairly) regular structure of atoms. Just imagine a grid of hard spheres laying against each other. This is the surface of the wall. At absolute zero, these atoms do not move and are simply at rest, one just touching the next. Having a temperature means that the wall contains thermal energy. This thermal energy is a random motion of the atoms around their equilibrium point, they're basically vibrating. Such a vibration can travel rather far through the lattice in the form of a wave. One ball pushes the next, which pushes the next, which pushes ... etc. Such a wave is commonly called a 'phonon', because it is also the way in which sound can move through solids.

Now think of the light. Light consists of tiny particles called photons, not to be confused with the phonons in the wall. Each photon is a tiny packet of electromagnetic energy and momentum. If such a photon hits (an atom of) the wall, its energy and momentum is absorbed. Since both these quantities need to be conserved, it means the atom will get a little "kick" from absorbing the photon. It will move, and kick against its neighbor, etc etc. So basically the photon has been converted into a phonon.

If enough photons get absorbed, this will result in the wall warming up slightly. So the light gets converted into thermal energy in the wall.

It's rather analogous to a stone falling into a lake. The energy of the stone will spread out over the surface of the water in the form of waves. The water itself doesn't move much, but the waves can carry the energy quite far. Likewise, the atoms don't move much, but the energy/momentum from the photons can carry rather deep into the wall.

How different would the movie Jurassic Park be with today's information?

by paleoguy4

The appearance and behavior of dinosaurs is largely a factor of speculation. There are a few things that would be updated. The Velociraptors would have some sort of feathery integument, as would the baby T. rex. Maybe some of the animals would show more color than gray, brown or moss-green. But that doesn't take much thinking, and the science of paleontology hasn't been able to ascertain much about dinosaur color, unless preserved feathers are found (they have been and colors include black, white, and sort of an umbery, rusty color- I believe someone else mentions this in a post.)

Jurassic Park is now 20 years out of date. If you're looking to update the science and still retain a compelling story, you're going to end up with something like this:

The crucial part of Crichton's idea was that the amber which preserved the mosquito served as a preservative barrier- a seal which locked away the precious dinosaur blood from contaminants and harm- a simple idea which ultimately proved very compelling for a story.

Now there are definitely issues with this. You're not going to set up a lab and get extinct animal blood from a dead bug anytime soon. Plus, after sitting in a chunk of resin for millions of years there is certainly going to be some mingling between the mosquito DNA and the DNA of whatever it fed on and anything else trapped in the sap. Wouldn't it be nice to see THATcome out of an egg? Yeesh! I degress.

The one thing that people have heard about Jurassic Park if they've heard anything in the last 20 years, is that "you cannot clone dinosaurs from blood in mosquitoes trapped in amber." So how do we move away from that, bsoftut still make dinosaurs? Because no one is going to be amazed by the trapped mosquito/dino DNA idea anymore. They know it. It's part of popular culture, like "don't cross the streams" or "He's been dead the whole movie!" How do we make the core part of Jurassic Park new?

Easy.

One of the biggest developments in paleontological research in the last few decades has been the discovery of soft tissues preserved in fossil bone interiors. These bones come from the badlands, like any other dinosaur fossil, but they are excavated using sterile field techniques and without polymer consolidants (glues) to keep contaminants from entering the bone' interiors (I know this because I have done it). The fossils are then taken back to a sterile lab where the mineral components are dissolved in baths. If the dinosaur bones were truly permineralized (eg- all 'rock') then the entire fossil would basically dissolve in solution. BUT! That didn't happen when the first lab tests of this kind were conducted back in the early 2000's. There was stuff left over after the mineral components had dissolved away.Spongy, squishy, stretchy, soft stuff. Paleontologists have documented what appear to be bits of collagen (connective tissues), and remnants of blood and bone cells from those samples. There are also bits of proteins that may be preserved. This was absolutely unheard of when Crichton wrote Jurassic Park 30 years ago. Now, in the real world accessing DNA hundred million year old soft tissue is not yet viable, but in 1990, neither was sucking out a fossilized mosquito's guts. But it was brilliant science fiction. And while no one has ever actually pulled blood from a fossilized mosquito...

I'm sorry but take a moment and get ready for this realization:

WE HAVE ACTUAL HONEST-TO-GOODNESS DINOSAUR TISSUE AND CELLS. HOLY SHIT!!

What does this mean? It means that there's no more need for the old amber-bug-blood plot line! Now, instead of mining for amber in the jungle playing roulette with mosquitoes (there's no way of knowing what kind of animal a mosquito had bitten just by looking at the thing--Hammond would have had to sort through thousands of mosquitoes before finding one that had actually bitten a dinosaur), you can go to the badlands and look for soft tissue from ANY DINOSAUR YOU WANT. How's THAT for an overhaul? It completely updates the heart of Jurassic Park's story and allows it to remain a sort of beacon for trendy Sci Fi (yes, and you can have your cloning morality play too). It also removes a lot of inconsistencies, like "How did they clone extinct plants? Mosquitoes don't drink plant blood" and for scientists, it seems more plausible because if you want a park with, say, aTriceratops in it, all you have to do is go to Montana, South Dakota or Wyoming, poke around until you find some Triceratops bones poking out from a nice, thick sandstone unit, and BAM- pretty damned good chance you could get some soft tissues out of there.

The second big change for Jurassic Park would have to be the DNA gap-filling. No more amphibian DNA. Birds. They would need to use a more ancient bird, like an Emu, Cassowary, Rhea or Ostrich. These large, flightless birds (collectively known as Ratites) are some of the most primitive-looking birds living. There has been a lot of genetic work done on chickens lately, and chicken DNA might work as well because we know so much about it. In a Sci Fi story it would not be much of a stretch to say that we have control over the chicken genome, and thus could reduce it back to a sort of "stem" state, where the genetic instructions basically say to build a archosaur-like animal, and the combination of the Dinosaur DNA with the trimmed chicken genome causes the dinosaur DNA to take over and build a dinosaur.

If I had my way and could write a Jurassic Park sequel, it would go like this:

Soft tissue in fossil bones has changed paleontology. Alan Grant and co. are leaders in this area of research do to their years of field experience.

Lewis Dodson is the bad guy who never got his chance. He was instrumental in the first two books, but gets 3 minutes of screen time in the first movie. He's sinister, greedy, selfish, and cares only for profit. He has no moral scruples, other than his desire to make a profit for himself. Use him as the antagonist for the 4th movie. He's never gotten over his loss at Nedry's Hands. He never really gave up cloning dinosaurs. He sees money in them. His company has been sequencing genomes, and he has focused on birds- domestic fowl, endangered species, you name it. He spends a long time waiting. Then he hears about soft tissue preservation in fossil bones- blood cells, proteins...could there be DNA? Perhaps he is tempted to sneak out some of Grant's specimens without permission...

Point is- not only could you clone dinosaurs with the soft tissue story line, but marine reptiles, too. Giant ichthyosaurs, mososaurs, plesiosaurs...there's a lot of scary stuff in the ancient sea! For the purpose of Sci Fi, anything that's fossilized could be fair game! There's a lot of cool, extinct animals out there, people. Big, scary extinct animals...