The Gaming Den

SphereOfFeetMan wrote:

ckafrica wrote:I look at the mantis shrimp (the pictures on wiki aren't good but you can google image search it) and ask, "how the hell did this evolve?"

Either God or some demented wizard must have had something to do with it. Cool critter in any case.

I think it would be awesome if TNE included some monsters inspired by little-known real world creatures like the mantis shrimp. There are tons of real world creatures with unique abilities and senses that are not replicated in any game.

I would love to see an encounter with a giant sea monster that used a supernatural cavitation attack. Pow!

Wikipedia wrote:Both types strike by rapidly unfolding and swinging their raptorial claws at the prey, and are capable of inflicting serious damage on victims significantly greater in size than themselves. In smashers, these two weapons are employed with blinding quickness, with an acceleration of 10,400 g and speeds of 23 m/s from a standing start [5], about the speed and force of a .22 caliber bullet. Because they strike so rapidly, they generate cavitation bubbles between the appendage and the striking surface [5]. The collapse of these cavitation bubbles produce measurable forces on their prey in addition to the instantaneous forces of 1,500 N that are caused by the impact of the appendage against the striking surface, which means that the prey is hit twice by a single strike; first by the claw and then by the collapsing cavitation bubbles that immediately follow [6]. Even if the initial strike misses the prey, the resulting shock wave can be enough to kill or stun the prey.

:shock:

It's the Anime Shrimp!

'Some cities'?

The majority of the world's population and the entirety of the world's advanced civilizations live in areas which are threatened by abrupt heating climate change.

The basic truth is that most people live by the sea, and live where it's flat. Throw in the movement of rains - more in places which are flat and less in places where we traditionally farm - and you've got problems.

Two dozen countries have had food riots over the increasing price of basic foods in the last year. This isn't starving people, this isn't even unemployed people; this is people being unable to buy staple foods because their countries do not grow enough and were not able to import enough to feed everyone.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Two dozen countries have had food riots over the increasing price of basic foods in the last year. This isn't starving people, this isn't even unemployed people; this is people being unable to buy staple foods because their countries do not grow enough and were not able to import enough to feed everyone.

Maybe we should stop burning food for biofuel and see if that helps.

Biofuels are a nice scapegoat, and the whole "burning food" thing is a great sound bite, but there are much greater inefficiencies: Meat and the Biofuels Debate

"Burning Food"?

Who's burning food?

Where? What countries 'burn' a significant portion of their crop? I can name one. Only one. Do you know what the majority of the US grain crop goes to do?

Should countries really be importing staple foods?, I think is the question you should be asking. And what's the alternative you're providing to burning food? If you have a corn chip, and it can keep you warm and dry by providing heating oil vs a few calories of sustenance, which is the more pressing concern?

-Crissa

I don't know... Using one third of your annual corn crop for fuel seems like it would make a change in food prices. And paying people to switch to growing corn from other food crops seems like it sure would have an effect on other types of foods that were grown.

Not that there aren't other contributing factors - like cows who are eating corn when they ought to be eating grass like the ones in the commercials - but my biggest issue with using corn for fuel is the fact that it really doesn't seem to save much on the CO2 end.

And people are hungry.

So why not stop?

It's Hindus that don't eat cows, not Muslims. Muslims don't eat pork.

Cielingcat wrote:It's Hindus that don't eat cows, not Muslims. Muslims don't eat pork.

I'm pretty sure Hindus don't eat pork, either, but I'm not certain.

Edit: I did a quick burst of research. Muslim, Jewish, and 'Adventist' people don't eat pork. But Hindus don't eat beef.

A lot of Hindus are vegetarians, I think. Or so my old teacher would have me believe, but then, he's been to India many times.

Yeah, Hindus eat hella pork.

Koumei wrote:

Jacob_Orlove wrote:Biofuels are a nice scapegoat, and the whole "burning food" thing is a great sound bite, but there are much greater inefficiencies: Meat and the Biofuels Debate

Yeah, but people are supposed to eat red meat. Hell, so many females suffer iron deficiencies because we don't eat enough of it and we bleed the rest of our iron out. We don't need to burn corn, but we need to eat red meat.

Yeah, but the article isn't calling for us to stop eating meat. It's the factory farms that are huge wastes of grain, not the cattle that actually sit around and graze.

From one of the sources linked in the above article:

With only grass-fed livestock, individual Americans would still get more than the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of meat and dairy protein, according to Pimentel's report, "Livestock Production: Energy Inputs and the Environment."

An environmental analyst and longtime critic of waste and inefficiency in agricultural practices, Pimentel depicted grain-fed livestock farming as a costly and nonsustainable way to produce animal protein. He distinguished grain-fed meat production from pasture-raised livestock, calling cattle-grazing a more reasonable use of marginal land.

Animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein, according to the Cornell ecologist's analysis.

Tracking food animal production from the feed trough to the dinner table, Pimentel found broiler chickens to be the most efficient use of fossil energy, and beef, the least. Chicken meat production consumes energy in a 4:1 ratio to protein output; beef cattle production requires an energy input to protein output ratio of 54:1. (Lamb meat production is nearly as inefficient at 50:1, according to the ecologist's analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics. Other ratios range from 13:1 for turkey meat and 14:1 for milk protein to 17:1 for pork and 26:1 for eggs.)

edit: fixed link

JO wrote:It's the factory farms that are huge wastes of grain, not the cattle that actually sit around and graze.

Grass-fed beef is also better for you.

Koumei, pretty much everything you said in your post is BS. The bleeding, the needing iron, everything.

Eat your collards like a good girl.

I'll come back in the morning and give some links.

...In no way does a third of any country's production go to biofuel. The country with the largest production of biofuel is Brazil, and they use very little of their annual produce to do so.

-Crissa

Here's some bland articles, some with numbers, some without:
Ten Myths about vegetarian nutrition
Myth: "Red Meat" is a good source of Iron
Beef - wikipedia (Halal is Islamic approved foods)

Maj wrote:

JO wrote:It's the factory farms that are huge wastes of grain, not the cattle that actually sit around and graze.

Grass-fed beef is also better for you.

Yup, the cow converts the AHA Omega3 fatty acids found in the grass into the other two more useful varieties that we basically only get from fish these days.

Maxus wrote:

Cielingcat wrote:It's Hindus that don't eat cows, not Muslims. Muslims don't eat pork.

I'm pretty sure Hindus don't eat pork, either, but I'm not certain.

Edit: I did a quick burst of research. Muslim, Jewish, and 'Adventist' people don't eat pork. But Hindus don't eat beef.

I'd like to eat every creature you mentioned.

For whatever reasons I would have no qualms over eating human flesh if need be. But due to societal restrictions (as in... jailed for life), I don't.
Has anyone else noticed a distinct lack of 'normal' reflex such as deep-set disgust at even the thought of cannibalism? It just doesn't to bother me.

Aside from the cumulative buildup of absorbed environmental toxins the further up a living thing thrives on the food chain, it would seem a valid option in the not-so-near future of a worldwide food crisis.
Is a cannibal a throwback to a forgotten past, a fluke, or an evolution in response to external stimulus?
Or rather, cannibalism by nature or nurture?

Dude, adult human meat would be like grade Z, why would you even want to eat it if you had a choice?

Crissa wrote:...In no way does a third of any country's production go to biofuel.

My bad. I got the stat off Wikipedia, and since then have tried to actually find some back up of said fact. I haven't. Numbers have ranged from 17% of the US corn supply to 50% in various articles from Time to ENN articles, and I've yet to find anything concrete.

However, I don't care if it's one fifth or one third - if you're burning it, you're not eating it. And since it's not environmentally saving anything, and people are hungry, why bother at all?

Crissa wrote:The country with the largest production of biofuel is Brazil, and they use very little of their annual produce to do so.

They're also using a more efficient crop, sugar, which I don't give a crap about since no sugar I eat comes from sugar cane.

Calibron wrote:Yup, the cow converts the AHA Omega3 fatty acids found in the grass into the other two more useful varieties that we basically only get from fish these days.

DHA and EPA.

And you have to watch fish for mercury now.

Caliborn wrote:Dude, adult human meat would be like grade Z, why would you even want to eat it if you had a choice?

Curious?
I agree, it would be one of the worst possible meats to eat, given how most of us humans eat. A long lifetime of collecting manufactured or byproduct chemicals would then be concentrated in anything or anyone that eats humans.

Maj wrote:However, I don't care if it's one fifth or one third - if you're burning it, you're not eating it. And since it's not environmentally saving anything, and people are hungry, why bother at all?

I thought the story is the US has a large grain oversupply that they refuse to donate to famine wracked countries. Its not the biofuel, its some other policy keeping the grain away from the hungry.

The US burns more food in order to destroy it to maintain food prices than it does to actually power anything. If we wanted to feed everyone we would, but the USA has a policy of limiting food supplies in markets. There is no shortage of production in the United States. Other countries have less crop diversity and less mechanization and are more weather dependent. As for biofuels "saving" things, they actually do.

See when you burn synthetic hexane and "natural" hexane you put the same amount of Carbon Dioxide into the air. But if you are burning fuels that you made out of fast growing plants, the Carbon Dioxide you are putting into the air is Carbon Dioxide that you took out of the air in order to grow the plants. The entire affair is Carbon Neutral.

On the other hand, if you burn oil you dredged out of the ground, you're taking Carbon that has not been in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years and putting it back into the air. That's very much not Carbon Neutral.

---

Biofuels take carbons from the air and use biological processes to transform them into something that can be burned back into the air to make energy. Oil products take carbon from the ground and use chemical processed to transform them into something that can be burned into the air to make energy. The second one is much more destructive as an over all process despite the fact that once it's available for burning it "doesn't matter" which one you burn.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:See when you burn synthetic hexane and "natural" hexane you put the same amount of Carbon Dioxide into the air. But if you are burning fuels that you made out of fast growing plants, the Carbon Dioxide you are putting into the air is Carbon Dioxide that you took out of the air in order to grow the plants. The entire affair is Carbon Neutral.

As I understand it, unless the plants are grown with carbon-neutral fertilizer, planted, tended, harvested, processed, and transported with carbon-neutral-powered machines, electricity etc etc, or some other offsetting method is used, biofuels of whatever type are not going to be entirely neutral.

Are there any biofuels actually produced in this way?

Right now? No. But the point is that we are running out of oil in the ground. Even if we don't make the switch to all biofuel economies in time to keep our atmosphere from returning to Precambrian levels, we'll have to make the switch eventually.

But recall that the oil in the ground is dug up using non-carbon neutral machines, cracked into gasoline in non-carbon neutral refineries, and transported across the globe in non-carbon neutral tankers. The carbon footprint of biofuel is currently tiny compared to the firebreathing behemoth that is crude-based fuel.

And it will get even better. Science and infrastructure are moving in that direction.

-Username17

Indeed. Given that those people who are spending all their time studying it are right that climate change is a problem, then our only hope of a solution is that technology will save us.