The audience of Ars isn't "general" and the usage wasn't colloquial. The article is about evolution and the pressures that caused the adaptation. It would have been nice if the author had demonstrated a bit more knowledge of the topic. Its a mistake that grows less forgivable the more years that pass. Hell, I recall the days when people frequently called whales fish. That wouldn't fly in article about evolution now, and neither should this.
Dinosaur literally means ‘terrible lizard’. It was originally coined as a description for the large, extinct, giant lizards. T-Rex, etc.
That it has later come to encompass things like seagulls is more a bait and switch on the public, than the public being idiots.
You might as well beat up on someone for calling Pluto a planet. Oh wait, it technically is again? My bad. Oh wait, it’s technically a dwarf planet. My mistake again!
Clearly, I’m the one who is an idiot, and it has nothing to do with experts causing confusion because it gets them headlines/justifies their existence and makes them feel superior to everyone else.
Bait and switch? Idiots? We are just saying we expect more from science communicators. Adding "non-avian" before the word "dinosaurs" wouldn't have made the article inaccessible to folks who haven't internalized the whole notion of clades.
Do penguins and cassowary count as "non-avian dinosaurs?" The videos of cassowary definitely give me Jurassic Park vibes.
In any case, many people are aware birds are not extinct. As a result, a claim of a "mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs" would implicitly not include "avian dinosaurs." Adding the "non-avian" qualifier does not assist in describing the particular global change to which the article refers.
Honestly, I think it’s just paleontologists sticking to the Dinosaur name because it gets them funding. ‘Doing a dig for dinosaur bones’, or being a ‘Dinosaur specialist’ is a lot more sellable than ‘expert in late Cretaceous avian precursors’, or digging for ‘bird precursor fossils’.
Which is what non ‘terrible lizard’ dinosaur studies are about.
Egyptology has a similar problem. Everyone wants to be known as someone who studies the pyramids, because being the dude that digs in the middens near a random Mastaba for a pharaoah nobody ever heard in the middle of desert that no tourist will ever want to visit is a lot harder to sell, even if it is better actual archeology.
Back in the 1800s when the name Dinosaur was coined no one suspected their connection to birds. The point has never been that the word, in most peoples minds, doesn't conjures up pictures of t-rex and triceratops. There's no argument there. The point is that someone writing an article for Ars should have not have perpetuated the common misconception that they all went extinct.
The clade has been expanded well beyond its literal, historic, or popular understanding.
Which is why the popular science article is confused, because the articles point is actually more correct from a popular point of view, while being at odds with the technical (but weird) newer definition.
Because the ‘terrible lizards’ DID go extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, and what ended up evolving from their not really terrible, and not really land bound brethren at the time, while still with us, weren’t generally what any reasonable person would call a Terrible Lizard.
The taxonomy argument is a technical one that for the most part only interests people whose sole job is arguing about taxonomy. Which is a thing, but c’mon.
Which is why stuff like this exists and isn’t really wrong. [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/when-did-dinosaurs-become-extinct]. Because 99.99% of people looking for Dinosaur Bones are going to be really really confused if you hand them some chicken drumsticks. Even if technically it is correct.
If someone asked for a dinosaur fossil and you showed them a small winged thing embedded in a rock they likely would be confused too. Wind the clock back 65 million years to before the Cretaceous extinction event. The first bird like dinos appear in the Jurassic, ~100 millions year before the extinction. The time of the dinosaurs was full of small and large dinos adapted to all sorts of niches. In the end the flying therapods were the survivors.
We clearly have different view points, but I've enjoyed the discussion.
MC02 had a lot of problems but calling it a zerg rush exposes your ignorance-- it was a very sophisticated and well-coordinated surprise attack. The people running the wargame rejected the outcome as a likely tactic to be used by the hypothetical adversary and guess what, they have been proven right, see: the war in iraq. The iraqi army completely failed to hold initiative against the coalition or organize coherent resistance nevermind launch a coordinated surprise attack ahead of the invasion.
The other aspect that is missed in criticisms of this particular wargame is the fact that there were specific doctrine elements that were to be tested-- now the claimed outcome of those can be debated, for instance the fact that opfor had many restrictions on how they were allowed to employ their anti air defenses-- but a wargame is NOT meant to be a giant game of paintball where when one side gets hit they just pack up and go home, that would be incredibly wasteful. In many cases you have formations planning and training for months to participate in the exercise. The purpose is testing out many different aspects of doctrine, and often times that involves 'ignoring' results of one part of the wargame.
Cheap as in material cost, not cheap as in subpar tactics. No doubt the Marine dude in charge of that was very good at strategy, but by definition he had less resources for the exercise do anything he did would have to be cheaply thrown together.
And a successful zerg rush kinda has to be well coordinated, with pretty tight timing, otherwise it doesn't work. It wasn't meant negatively. Maybe I've just watched way too much OGN StarCraft.
That's precisely why I'm calling it a zerg rush. It's cheaper units, en masse, defeating a technology and cost-wise much more expensive foe.
You make a good point about the reset though, it would be a waste of resources to not reset at that point.
Maybe there's some negative context I'm missing about the phrase zerg rush. I like zerg rushes, they're difficult to execute in high level competition, and there's comparatively fewer dominant zerg players (compared the one zerg bonjwa savior vs like alllll the terran from the heyday of sc1)
If you investigate all banned weapons though, you'll find it's more to do with practicality+cost+optics than some high minded agreement. Wars fought today are still brutal, and people use anything that will get them ahead.
So e.g. chemical and biological weapons are pretty poor performers when you put them up against conventional weapons.
For one thing, both can backfire greatly if for example they are improperly handled behind the frontlines. Weapons need to be stable and easy to handle and able to deal with fuckups without killing your own people.
They also are expensive as hell, it costs a lot more (and is probably harder) to find competent people willing to make these types of weapons, and per dollar, they don't kill as many people as conventional bombs do. (See: World War 1) So, they are 'banned', but mostly because they aren't very effective.
When you look at so-called chemical weapons that are in use, they are usually used for temporary area denial, are stable, not that lethal, if at all, and easy to produce: white phosphorus, CN and CS gas, etc. The US of course calls white phosphorus for 'illumination' but the people firing it know what they're using it for. So when they do beat out the alternatives, they get used anyway.
Laser weapons are being developed but they are basically just not there yet. Batteries are heavy and the usefulness seems pretty limited to shooting down incoming drones/missiles possibly. Just using anti-missile missiles or just a stream of bullets is still cheaper and more reliable. Again, if you can see and hit someone in the eyes with a laser, why not just shoot them with a normal bullet? The economics don't make sense.
Poisoned bullets I haven't really heard of, I'm not sure what kind of poison would survive being coated onto a bullet and fired out of a gun, or how making a really expensive nerve agent bullet and then shooting someone with it is better or more sensible than just shooting them with a regular bullet so I can't really comment.
Expanding ammo was 'banned' but again, it was essentially replaced with spitzer style rifle bullets that are more accurate and effective anyway, and can have a similar result on impact.
tldr it's not a good comparison to call these things actually banned in a meaningful sense.
A good complementary example is cluster munitions. They’re banned but the big players like Russia and the US never signed those treaties because they found the cluster munitions too useful, while signing plenty of chemical and biological weapons bans because they weren’t very useful.
> If you investigate all banned weapons though, you'll find it's more to do with practicality+cost+optics than some high minded agreement.
The only "banned" weapons that aren't still being used routinely are nukes.
I don't think it makes sense to ban weapons of war. People don't go to war for fun; they fight out of desperation, whether it's a desperate struggle for national survival, or a desperate struggle for the political survival of some despot. If they can't buy precision glide-bombs and cruise missiles, they use barrel-bombs and gas. Rape as a weapon of war is banned as a warcrime, but it happens in every war, because killing seems to give men a stiffy.
Waging war on civilians is a warcrime, but all wars are fought against civilians; siege warfare is as old as warfare itself, and is the epitome of war against civilians. The same applies to carpet-bombing, and most kinds of economic sanctions. Armies don't usually go to war - countries go to war.
(The situation in Sudan looks anomalous to me; the warring parties seem to be two branches of the same military force, fighting over control over illegal mines).
> Laser weapons are being developed but they are basically just not there yet.
If lasers were available in WW2 I think they would have been used as blinding weapons against kamikazes. One could make the argument the rules of war against blinding don't apply to someone who is already going to kill themselves to attack you -- he's not planning on having usable eyes anyway.
Of course if we were advanced enough to have laser weapons in WWII, we'd likely have laser guided bombs, hence laser guided planes which would have made any attacks against ships more deadly.
I'm not sure laser guidance works how you think it works. The laser is probably the least important part of laser guidance. It's basically being used as a highly collimated and monochromatic photon source. Radio-guided weapons were already being deployed by the end of WWII. The presence of lasers which probably could have been invented with 1940s tech had priorities been different, wouldn't really have drastically changed much. Semiconductors and microelectronics are what enabled practical laser-guided weapons, by reducing the size, fragility and cost of guidance packages.
Yea, the fact the US/Britain had RADAR while Germany/Japan did not, or did not in the same fashion the allied forces did dramatically shifted the favor towards the allies.
Hitler had (poor) intelligence that the Soviets had thousands of tanks (they actually had more than the germans thought); he refused to believe that such a 'backwards' country could have such a strong modern military however.
Just to expand on that - we sent multiple millions of tons of aid - probably $120-150 billion, in current dollars. Thousands of tanks, thousands of planes, plus trains (locomotives and cars), food, fuel, anmmo, explosives, and industrial supplies. Not to minimize the tremendous price the Soviets paid in lives (soldier and civilian), but they almost certainly would've lost the war without lend-lease.
The entire point of Monads, is restricting the ability to do these operations into functions that are tagged with having this ability, precisely so you _cannot_ invoke IO in a random pure function. It's the entire point of the language in fact.
If you want to just write IO, you can just define a function with an IO () value and use it in any other function that resolves to IO (), or call other functions that live in IO *, or any pure functions, etc etc.
I think much of the song arrangement is likely from Lars.
There is a video somewhere of Hammett describing how he shared a riff for one of their songs and Lars said "play that but 3 times them end on that" or something to that effect.
Live performances may not be super tight but it's OK because Hetfield is a better drummer (at least he keeps the rhythm)
For sure, the band is Lars and James. People like to hate on Lars and Hammett out of jealousy I guess, they’re both really successful in a genre that celebrates technical prowess, while not being technical players.
Really, people had to be told that people with white(r) skin, are similar..?
How stupid do these people think 'everyone else' is. This is the most absurd thing I've read all day.
Humans, who divide themselves along such lines as _what tv shows they like_, had to have the concept of _skin colour_ invented for them. Really think about how ridiculous this assertion is.
It wasn't that they just said that they looked different obviously, what a ridiculous assertion . They seeded talking points of racial supremacy amongst them to divide them when before they saw themselves more unified as workers with their race not having inherent merit.
The worst feeling in the world is being a bit lonely, and then being by yourself in a place where you are surrounded by groups of people. I got more depressed more often trying to go do social things in uni than I ever did physically being separated from others and actually by myself.
It was this type of setting that showed me the huge difference between being lonely and being alone. I'm rarely lonely when I'm alone. Thankfully I have long since engaged in social activities and have a great social life now, but even still that feeling is just below the surface. I went to the club with two girls the other night and when they both went to the bathroom together I was by myself in a club and even though I knew it was just for a few moments that old feeling was right there again. We are indeed social creatures.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this recently. As I spend more time with my current friend group in the new city I live in, the worse I feel because it seems like we’re just surface level friends, whereas when I spend time with my friends back home it greatly lifts my spirits because it’s a genuine connection.
It’s a an extremely odd feeling because from the outside I’m sure it looks like I have a great social life and good friends, but I’ve never felt more alone in my life. And I’m not sure how to address this conundrum, on one hand I want a stronger friendship with this new group of friends and don’t want to be alone, but at the same time it seems as if I would be happier if I disconnected myself from the group and was actually alone.
