[v302] Passage of Time?
John B. Whelan
Scores of dead characters, and never below 700'.
But that's not my problem. I'm new to the group, so forgive if the
following question has been asked before.
I've noticed that about 10,000 turns (give or take a digit) equals one
day in the town. I became curious to find out then, if I manage to
make 365 such time periods pass, will my Half-Troll warrior's age
change from 21 to 22?
So far, after extensive town scumming, and lots of eating (Half-Trolls
eat 10 food per day), I have managed to make about 90 "days" pass.
But then it occurred to me, that someone on this group might satisfy
my curiousity before I waste any more time on the question.
I know there have been debates in the past about whether "aging"
should be incorporated into the game as something that actually has
in-game effects (like stat-loss or eventual death). I would say not.
But if age-numbers themselves don't change with the passage of time,
then that would, I thing, be a bit of a shame from a purely flavor
standpoint.
Thanks.
someog
news:fd166f83.0301...@posting.google.com...
After a brief source-dive, I find that age doesn't change with the passage
of time. But it is affected if you cheat death. I haven't tried it, but it
looks like you'll have an age of 1 and a different social class (maybe 0).
-David
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> I've been playing Angband not very successfully for a while now.
> Scores of dead characters, and never below 700'.
>
> But that's not my problem. I'm new to the group, so forgive if the
> following question has been asked before.
>
> I've noticed that about 10,000 turns (give or take a digit) equals one
> day in the town. I became curious to find out then, if I manage to
> make 365 such time periods pass, will my Half-Troll warrior's age
> change from 21 to 22?
Hmm...1 year is about 3,650,000 turns, then.
I'm recording this as a potential feature for ZaiBand.
> So far, after extensive town scumming, and lots of eating (Half-Trolls
> eat 10 food per day), I have managed to make about 90 "days" pass.
> But then it occurred to me, that someone on this group might satisfy
> my curiousity before I waste any more time on the question.
>
> I know there have been debates in the past about whether "aging"
> should be incorporated into the game as something that actually has
> in-game effects (like stat-loss or eventual death). I would say not.
Considering how *much* of aging is "use it or lose it", I don't think "time
lived through" should be affected this way. Normal games don't last that long.
On the other hand...:
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"It breathes time."
"You're not as powerful as you used to be."
[stat drain]
"You die of old age."
Incidentally (DarkGod, Tolkein experts!):
Ignoring game balance, is it in-theme for high-elves to have Time Resistance?
Or is their natural lifespan merely multiple millenia?
--
H(1.2.1) +(Color out of Space) "Aethelas" HE Pa(Cr) L:26 DL:13(Yeek)/11(Orc
caves) A R- !Sp w:The Broad Axe 'Thymine' (+16,+13)
H/A W H- D c- f PV+ s !TT d P M+
C- S+ I So B- ac GHB++ SQ RQ+ V+
Eytan Zweig
"someog" <dsv...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:b14tdn$vasqd$1...@ID-175339.news.dfncis.de...
> "John B. Whelan" <nys...@cs.com> wrote in message
> news:fd166f83.0301...@posting.google.com...
> > I've been playing Angband not very successfully for a while now.
> > Scores of dead characters, and never below 700'.
> >
> > But that's not my problem. I'm new to the group, so forgive if the
> > following question has been asked before.
> >
> > I've noticed that about 10,000 turns (give or take a digit) equals one
> > day in the town. I became curious to find out then, if I manage to
> > make 365 such time periods pass, will my Half-Troll warrior's age
> > change from 21 to 22?
> >
> > So far, after extensive town scumming, and lots of eating (Half-Trolls
> > eat 10 food per day), I have managed to make about 90 "days" pass.
> > But then it occurred to me, that someone on this group might satisfy
> > my curiousity before I waste any more time on the question.
> >
> > I know there have been debates in the past about whether "aging"
> > should be incorporated into the game as something that actually has
> > in-game effects (like stat-loss or eventual death). I would say not.
> >
> > But if age-numbers themselves don't change with the passage of time,
> > then that would, I thing, be a bit of a shame from a purely flavor
> > standpoint.
> >
Ah, but you're assuming that Angband is located on a normal planet. But does
any normal planet have towns with no exits? Vanilla Angband, and one-town
variants, obviously take place in some magical plane where time has no
meaning. That's why there are day and night cycles, but no actual dates -
these are just fake day and night created by magic; real time doesn't
actually go by.
Variants which introduce actual time keeping, and exits to the town, should
probably introduce aging as well, though.
>
> After a brief source-dive, I find that age doesn't change with the passage
> of time. But it is affected if you cheat death. I haven't tried it, but
it
> looks like you'll have an age of 1 and a different social class (maybe 0).
>
If you activate cheat_death, you're "age" becomes a life-counter. So, for
each death, it's incremented by one.
Eytan
> -David
>
>
Arturus Magi
Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.angband
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 04:05:10 +0000 (UTC)
>Incidentally (DarkGod, Tolkein experts!):
>Ignoring game balance, is it in-theme for high-elves to have Time Resistance?
>
>Or is their natural lifespan merely multiple millenia?
It would fit theme-wise. The lifespan of an elf is the same as that of Arda,
more or less.
____________________________________
Arturus Magi
69th INF BDE (YAOI), AGFFH Sec.
LTC Commanding
AIM: ArturusMag, NHogue
ICQ: 19106776
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who PRESS ENTER Here
rm -rf /bin/laden
Juan Heguiabehere
Dude, that's so last-year. The Evil Arch-Enemy of All Humanity Which
Used to be Our Lackey But Decided He Didn't Like Us After All So He Has
to Die is someone else now. Although he's not quite the same, his title
has to be expanded with 'Plus The Bastard Has Oil And If We Get Him By
Election Time All the Better'
George
>
> > rm -rf /bin/laden
>
> Dude, that's so last-year.
and valley-speak is, like, so two decades ago....
<<snip>>
George
John B. Whelan
> Incidentally (DarkGod, Tolkein experts!):
> Ignoring game balance, is it in-theme for high-elves to have Time Resistance?
> Or is their natural lifespan merely multiple millenia?
Difficult question. In Tolkien, all Elves (High or not) are
"immortal", in the sense that their spirits are tied to the World for
the duration of the World's existence. They cannot "die" in the sense
that Men do, in that the destruction of their (current) body does not
mean the release of their spirit from the World.
This does not mean, of course, that their bodies cannot be destroyed.
They can, of course, be "slain" suddenly in battle, and their bodies
can be worn down with passage of time, by the slow accumulation of
injury, to a degree that can resemble aging. Cirdan, after countless
millenia in Middle Earth, had white hair and beard. Another Elf, in
the Silmarilien, came to resemble an old Man, after tortures and
trials of a far briefer duration.
With the help of the Valar, slain elves are sometimes provided with
new bodies. This cannot happen to Mortals.
In the Undying Lands to the West, where the Elves live under the
protection of the Valar, conditions are presumably ideal enough so
that an Elf's body will, for all practical purposes, last until the
final upheaval and the World's end.
This is not true in Middle Earth, where time wears down all things.
It primarily to resist change and the passage of time that Elf Exiles
of Middle Earth created the Rings of Power. These gave them power to
resist change, and create near-timeless havens where Elves could seek
refuge from the change in the world around them. It is not said
specifically that such Rings helped Elves resist a sort of physical
aging; but that is perhaps implied by the fact that they allowed the
creation of havens analagous to those of the undying lands; and by the
effects the Rings had on Mortals. The Rings caused Mortals who held
them to cease to age, or grow, or change ... eventually becoming
wraiths; and such side-effects were directly related to the
time-and-change resistant purpose of these Rings.
Juan Heguiabehere
But after ten years it counts as retro, before that it's just passé.
George
lol... heh heh... I guess so....
George
R Dan Henry
Heguiabehere <j.hegu...@chello.nl> declared:
>George wrote:
>> Juan Heguiabehere wrote:
>>
>>>>rm -rf /bin/laden
>>>
>>>Dude, that's so last-year.
>> and valley-speak is, like, so two decades ago....
>But after ten years it counts as retro, before that it's just passé.
And that's the main problem with these people having kids late in
life. By the time the kid rebels against his parents, what they were
into will have become retro and be in again. The child is doomed to
alienation from his generation.
--
R. Dan Henry, Emperor of the Universe
Is an Earth Hound at 4950' a low-down dirty dog?
Juan Heguiabehere
> On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 20:20:56 GMT, in a fit of madness Juan
> Heguiabehere <j.hegu...@chello.nl> declared:
>
>
>>George wrote:
>>
>>>Juan Heguiabehere wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>>rm -rf /bin/laden
>>>>
>>>>Dude, that's so last-year.
>>>
>
>>>and valley-speak is, like, so two decades ago....
>>
>
>>But after ten years it counts as retro, before that it's just passé.
>
>
> And that's the main problem with these people having kids late in
> life. By the time the kid rebels against his parents, what they were
> into will have become retro and be in again. The child is doomed to
> alienation from his generation.
>
LOL! Some of those parents avoid the effect by switching to their own
parents' tastes tho. I shoulda known it was out of wisdom and kindness ;)
--
Juan
John B. Whelan
>
> > I've been playing Angband not very successfully for a while now.
> > Scores of dead characters, and never below 700'.
> >
> > But that's not my problem. I'm new to the group, so forgive if the
> > following question has been asked before.
> >
> > I've noticed that about 10,000 turns (give or take a digit) equals one
> > day in the town. I became curious to find out then, if I manage to
> > make 365 such time periods pass, will my Half-Troll warrior's age
> > change from 21 to 22?
>
> Hmm...1 year is about 3,650,000 turns, then.
>
> I'm recording this as a potential feature for ZaiBand.
Actually, I just rechecked, & I missed a nought. It is 100,000 turns
per day, and therefore 36,500,000 turns per year. Does anyone
actually have characters much older than this?
A day seems to equal the maximum rest time (9999), which number
apparently designates units of 10 turns each. As I understand it, it
takes 10 turns to move 1 space at normal speed.
Most characters will die of starvation in less than 18 hours (75,000
turns)if they start at full (less than 7 hours for Half-trolls).
Doesn't seem like much time "realistically". But rations seem to
consist of both food and water, and if the pits are very hot ...
Do any other races/classes besides Half-trolls have variable digestion
rates?
Shadow Wolf
news:fd166f83.03012...@posting.google.com:
> Most characters will die of starvation in less than 18 hours (75,000
> turns)if they start at full (less than 7 hours for Half-trolls).
> Doesn't seem like much time "realistically". But rations seem to
> consist of both food and water, and if the pits are very hot ...
>
> Do any other races/classes besides Half-trolls have variable digestion
> rates?
The reason Half-Trolls starve faster is regeneration :-) Any character with
regen will experience the same problem.
--
Shadow Wolf
shado...@softhome.net
Stories at http://www.asstr.org/~Shadow_Wolf
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote in message news:...
> > On 2003-01-28 00:24:07, nys...@cs.com (John B. Whelan) wrote:
> >
> > > I've been playing Angband not very successfully for a while now.
> > > Scores of dead characters, and never below 700'.
> > >
> > > But that's not my problem. I'm new to the group, so forgive if the
> > > following question has been asked before.
> > >
> > > I've noticed that about 10,000 turns (give or take a digit) equals one
> > > day in the town. I became curious to find out then, if I manage to
> > > make 365 such time periods pass, will my Half-Troll warrior's age
> > > change from 21 to 22?
> >
> > Hmm...1 year is about 3,650,000 turns, then.
> >
> > I'm recording this as a potential feature for ZaiBand.
>
> Actually, I just rechecked, & I missed a nought. It is 100,000 turns
> per day, and therefore 36,500,000 turns per year. Does anyone
> actually have characters much older than this?
Depends on how you look at it. The game tracks internal time in tenths of a
(normal-speed) turn in order to support variable speeds cleanly. However, the
score table reports internal time readings.
> A day seems to equal the maximum rest time (9999), which number
> apparently designates units of 10 turns each. As I understand it, it
> takes 10 turns to move 1 space at normal speed.
Close enough.
> Most characters will die of starvation in less than 18 hours (75,000
> turns)if they start at full (less than 7 hours for Half-trolls).
> Doesn't seem like much time "realistically". But rations seem to
> consist of both food and water, and if the pits are very hot ...
Heat is not required. Even in an ideal climate, going without water for 18
hours while doing hard labor will incapacitate.
> Do any other races/classes besides Half-trolls have variable digestion
> rates?
Regeneration costs. So does speed.
Neodymium
wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
Time must be going by if novel events are occurring. For that matter,
someone just has to time an oscillating mechanism of some kind. Count
oscillations and you have a crude timekeeping system. Heartbeats will do
for an imprecise one, and those are certainly in existence if there's
anyone alive in there.
--
Quicquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Replace nospam.invalid with Microsoft's shoddy free email
provider domain to reply.
Neodymium
Whelan) wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
> I know there have been debates in the past about whether "aging"
> should be incorporated into the game as something that actually has
> in-game effects (like stat-loss or eventual death). I would say not.
Who's even going to notice? You wouldn't reach that kind of age with a
normal character. It'd take some heavy macro & golfball worm farming
style abuse to rack up that many hundreds of millions of turns.
Neodymium
<ju...@science.uva.nl> wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
Yeah, but somehow
rm -rf /saddam/hussein
just doesn't have the same ring to it, know what I mean? :)
Nystulc
>A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, nys...@cs.com (John B.
>Whelan) wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
>
>> I know there have been debates in the past about whether "aging"
>> should be incorporated into the game as something that actually has
>> in-game effects (like stat-loss or eventual death). I would say not.
>
>Who's even going to notice? You wouldn't reach that kind of age with a
>normal character. It'd take some heavy macro & golfball worm farming
>style abuse to rack up that many hundreds of millions of turns.
Does not seem that difficult to me, if you play a character a long time. Took
me only a few days of play to reach 120 days with my Half-troll (and it would
have been easier with slower digestion, because you can rest longer before you
get hungry).
BTW, he is now dead - killed by a dark elf mage at 550'.
BTW, what is "macro & golfball worm farming"? I'm just a newby, you know.
In any event, while most characters will not reach this age, for those who do,
it is a sort of achievement, and it is a shame if it is not reflected. Would
the programming be difficult?
Furthermore, if one is concerned that it would happen too rarely to have
"flavor" value, one could simply have 100-day years or 50-day years. But I
guess, that also slightly ruins the "flavor" value (if you can count)
Mark Alexander Wotton
> Neodymium wrote:
>
>>A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, nys...@cs.com (John B.
>>Whelan) wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
>>
>>> I know there have been debates in the past about whether "aging"
>>> should be incorporated into the game as something that actually has
>>> in-game effects (like stat-loss or eventual death). I would say not.
>>
>>Who's even going to notice? You wouldn't reach that kind of age with a
>>normal character. It'd take some heavy macro & golfball worm farming
>>style abuse to rack up that many hundreds of millions of turns.
>
> Does not seem that difficult to me, if you play a character a long time. Took
> me only a few days of play to reach 120 days with my Half-troll (and it would
> have been easier with slower digestion, because you can rest longer before you
> get hungry).
>
> BTW, he is now dead - killed by a dark elf mage at 550'.
>
> BTW, what is "macro & golfball worm farming"? I'm just a newby, you know.
It's sometimes possible to get into a situation where not a lot of intelligence
is required to survive. With breeding monsters like worms, for instance, it's
pretty easy to sit outside the room and attack them when they come out.
If you're dumb, like me, you get two golfballs, put one on Ctrl and one on
the appropriate direction. This seems to work ok for a while, but doesn't
take into account your character's need to eat. Goodbye, Fancy Dasce: I'll miss
you.
If you're smarter than me, you set up a macro that takes this into account, bind
it to a key, and put a golfball on *that* key. I don't know how to do this, and
it's cheating, really.
> In any event, while most characters will not reach this age, for those who do,
> it is a sort of achievement, and it is a shame if it is not reflected. Would
> the programming be difficult?
It's not a particularly wonderful achievement... you could sit at level 1
eating rations for that long pretty easily.
mrak
--
realise your life was only bait for a bigger fish
-- aesop rock
Neodymium
wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
Actually I was referring to aging to death, not just to aging one year.
One game-world year is *sometimes* achieved by characters -- that much is
indicated in the thread. One game year is around 35 million game turns,
or three million normal speed player turns.
I don't know if anyone's ever played a character for two game years -- so
their final score entry said over 70 million turns.
I doubt anyone could reach, say, forty game years without macro and
golfball abuse. That's 1400 million game turns, or 140 million normal-
speed player turns. It's a game around forty times longer than normal.
That's supposing that old age kills the character relatively young, in
his/her sixties or thereabouts.
Of course, you might argue that this game represents medieval times when
life expectancies were closer to 30-40 than the modern 70-odd. However,
people have always tended to die of old age after 60. It's just that in
medieval times people usually died of something else -- the plague, being
burned as a heretic, or in some silly war or another -- well before that
point. No antibiotics, poor sanitation ... basically a third world
country situation, without even any food and clean water aid from
WorldVision. In Angband, this corresponds to the fact that most
adventurers tend to kick the bucket well before facing Morgoth, and that
lots of low level characters die of poison or something similar. :)
Of course all of the above assumes the human race. The other races
presumably have varied lifespans. LOTR makes these pretty clear though:
* Hobbits have similar life expectancies to humans with respect to old
age. Bilbo's state of youth and preservation at 111 is remarked upon as
unusual, and proves to be due to the ring, and the impression is that
sixty or seventy is a more typical age for a hobbit to look that old.
* Elves have considerably longer life spans than humans, exceeding a
thousand years.
* Ents live a very long time -- possibly tens of thousands of years.
From these we can infer:
* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps at
70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age reached
is 106.)
* Elves and high elves should die of old age somewhat after 1000, perhaps
after 5000 or so, or maybe never. (The natural spans of elves are
discussed in more detail elsewhere in the thread by people more
familiar with the details of Tolkien's world. The consensus seems to be
that elves of the West have potential immortality but those of Middle-
earth are of finite span, but several thousand years. Perhaps high
elves should then be immune to aging, and regular elves get 4000 years
or so.)
* Ents get 10,000 or so years, in variants that have ents.
* Half-elves should have at least the same lifespan (before old age) as
humans, and probably quite a lot more. Even if the human aging speed is
the dominant trait in these hybrids, no less. So if Aragorn and Arwen
had children they could surely expect at least human lifespans, barring
misadventure.
That just leaves the natural lifespans of half-trolls, half-orcs, and
dwarves open questions.
Bahman Rabii
> From these we can infer:
> * Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps at
> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age reached
> is 106.)
A dunadan lives between 150 and 400 years, depending on where they
lived, when the lived, how corrupt they were, and whether they were
descended from Elros.
> * Elves and high elves should die of old age somewhat after 1000, perhaps
> after 5000 or so, or maybe never. (The natural spans of elves are
> discussed in more detail elsewhere in the thread by people more
> familiar with the details of Tolkien's world. The consensus seems to be
> that elves of the West have potential immortality but those of Middle-
> earth are of finite span, but several thousand years. Perhaps high
> elves should then be immune to aging, and regular elves get 4000 years
> or so.)
Elves never die. There is a danger for elves who remain in middle
earth to 'fade' - diminishing in mind and body - but this is more a
function of the age of middle earth (ie. the time of the elves being
over) than the age of the particular elf. Cirdan would not fade
sooner than Legolas, despite being tens of thousands of years older,
though both would inevitably fade if they remained in mortal lands.
One of the chief powers of the Elven rings was to prevent this fading
in a limited area. In a game context, if Morgoth is still around, the
time of the elves probably hasn't ended, so they should not be fading
yet.
The immortality of Elves is one of the most fundamental laws of Arda.
Even if physically killed their spirits remain and most will
eventually be reborn in the Halls of Mandos. Either way, they are
stuck here. Humans can't escape death, but Elves can't escape the
world no matter how much sorrow they have seen and how much they may
wish for a final rest. They can only die when the world dies. That
is their gift and their doom.
> * Ents get 10,000 or so years, in variants that have ents.
There is no suggestion that Ents ever died of old age, though they
might grow sleepier. Fangorn was the oldest and still the mightiest.
> That just leaves the natural lifespans of half-trolls, half-orcs, and
> dwarves open questions.
I don't have RotK on me, but many examples are given in the appendixes
about Dwarven lifespans. Think it was ~200 years. What is not clear
is what happens to dwarves when they do die. The dwarves believe that
some of them are reincarnated, like Durin before his final defeat by
the Balrog.
I have no clue what happens to orcs and trolls.
--
Bahman Rabii
Neodymium
<bah...@unmaker.house-of-toast.com> wrote in
rec.games.roguelike.angband...
> Neodymium <neo_...@nospam.invalid> writes:
>
>> From these we can infer:
>> * Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps
>> at
>> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age
>> reached is 106.)
>
> A dunadan lives between 150 and 400 years, depending on where they
> lived, when the lived, how corrupt they were, and whether they were
> descended from Elros.
Forgot about the dunadan race in that post -- thanks. So I think we have
these average spans before old age death/senility/whatever:
* Elves, high elves: immortal
* Ents: 10,000
* Half-elves: Presumably more than human lifespan, possibly immortal.
* Dunedain: 300
* Dwarves: 200
* Humans, hobbits: 75
* Half-orcs, half-trolls: ?
Igenlode Wordsmith
> On 2003-01-28 00:24:07, nys...@cs.com (John B. Whelan) wrote:
> > I've noticed that about 10,000 turns (give or take a digit) equals one
> > day in the town. I became curious to find out then, if I manage to
> > make 365 such time periods pass, will my Half-Troll warrior's age
> > change from 21 to 22?
>
> Hmm...1 year is about 3,650,000 turns, then.
>
> I'm recording this as a potential feature for ZaiBand.
>
[snip]
I'd rather like to see characters age visibly, personally (being one of
these dreadful 'role-players' who persists in attributing character to
all my adventurers!) Starting out as an apprentice human mage at the age
of, say, seventeen makes sense. After real-time weeks of play and
endless experience gained, my character is now a grand master mage, or
whatever... and still a fresh-faced youth of seventeen!
I'm not advocating penalising characters by simulating aging effects,
nor having them die of old age as a punishment for Borg-like play. I
think I'd prefer it if character age were simply tied to character
level, in a sensible racial ratio, rather than character turns.
Currently, characters start out at what would be a sensible age for a
novice of their race, and then never get any older. A level 50 human
ought to reach the early forties or so before winning :-)
I know it doesn't tie in with the observed day and night cycle,
particularly for those variants which have a 'show-time' command.
But from a role-player's point of view it feels much more as if each
dungeon expedition lasts for several weeks or months, rather than just a
few hours. Age, like sex, is entirely cosmetic in Angband anyway, so it
would be entirely possible to implement something along those lines...
and it would make life just that little bit more interesting.
You'd have to watch out for EXP-drainers, though. Obviously they
wouldn't rejuvenate you... so a straight EXP/age tie wouldn't work. It
would have to be relative only to EXP *gained*, I think... so if you
were drained and worked back all the experience lost the hard way, you'd
be older than you would have been for the same EXP level; if you were
drained but eventually got back to the town and quaffed a potion of
Restore Life Levels, you'd be a bit older, and if you had the potion in
your rucksack and quaffed it straight away there would be no net effect
at all.
Obviously, getting drained a lot would cause premature aging - you might
face Morgoth with a haggard face and greying hair - but I think that's an
entirely intuitive result of being preyed on by the undead :-) And,
since it's cosmetic, it wouldn't actually penalise the player.
--
Igenlode
Ey/C/A (Di)(Ca)(O)(Kn)(Z)(Km)(Un) X H+ D- c? f- PV s TT? d P+ M-
C--- S-- I-- So-- !B ac? GHB SQ+ RQ+ V-
Nathan Tenny
Igenlode Wordsmith <Igen...@nym.alias.net> wrote:
>I'd rather like to see characters age visibly, personally
"Visibly" meaning your @ symbol grows a beard and turns grey with the
passage of time, or what? :-)
>I'm not advocating penalising characters by simulating aging effects,
>nor having them die of old age as a punishment for Borg-like play. I
>think I'd prefer it if character age were simply tied to character
>level, in a sensible racial ratio, rather than character turns.
>Currently, characters start out at what would be a sensible age for a
>novice of their race, and then never get any older. A level 50 human
>ought to reach the early forties or so before winning :-)
I take your point, but experience is supposed to measure, well,
*experience*, not just age---you can be old and naive if all you ever
did was sit around on the town level.
Stipulating for the moment that we're incorporating some kind of aging
mechanism, I think the correlation between experience and age should
take care of itself; it takes time to farm all those wor^W^W^W^Wkill all
those dragons, and by the time you're done with it, you've gone up a
couple of levels and had a couple of birthdays.
>I know it doesn't tie in with the observed day and night cycle,
>particularly for those variants which have a 'show-time' command.
>But from a role-player's point of view it feels much more as if each
>dungeon expedition lasts for several weeks or months, rather than just a
>few hours.
Well, it depends on the expedition, of course. But perhaps the answer
to this clash of expectations is to change the length of the day-night
cycle to something more in keeping with your sense of "dungeon time".
Note that turns-per-game varies quite a bit between variants; from a
quick Google, I think it's not uncommon for Z winners to take a million
turns or so, while V winners can be over ten million. I'm not sure
whether this means that time passes at different speeds in the two
gameworlds, or that what a V player takes 30 years to do can be done in
Z in a mere 3 years. (Let's see; what is it, 10K turns per day? So
the Z player takes, geez, only a hundred days to go from newbiedom to
defeating the Serpent of Chaos? Damn, I wish my career moved like that.
Well, for the above, read 3 years for V and 3-4 months for Z.)
Personally, if I were going to write age into a variant, I'd give it
some gameplay relevance. The early (pre-"Heroes") Might & Magic
games used it to good effect, without making a gimmick of it.
NT
--
Nathan Tenny | Space is where your ass is.
Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego, CA | -William S. Burroughs
<nten...@qualcomm.com> |
Otto Martin
>* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps at
> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age reached
> is 106.)
ISTR a French lady getting as far as 122. Longer claims have been made,
but not by much. Still, it makes little difference to angband.
Otto Martin - pretty sure there've been Finnish people older than 106
--
"Soon, I will have the most powerful lemons in the universe."
http://www.goats.com/archive/030117.html
Andrew Perron
<oma...@students.cc.tut.fi> wrote:
>Neodymium <neo_...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps at
>> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age reached
>> is 106.)
>
>ISTR a French lady getting as far as 122. Longer claims have been made,
>but not by much. Still, it makes little difference to angband.
I definitely remember someone making 120 in the Guiness Book of World
Records, and someone else being 116-ish dying in the late 80s/early
90s.
>Otto Martin - pretty sure there've been Finnish people older than 106
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, and wasn't the last emperor of
Japan in that area?
Caradhras
news:3e3b06d5...@news.cox.net:
> On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 22:52:09 +0000 (UTC), Otto Martin
> <oma...@students.cc.tut.fi> wrote:
>
>>Neodymium <neo_...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>>* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps
>>>at
>>> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age
>>> reached is 106.)
>>
>>ISTR a French lady getting as far as 122. Longer claims have been
>>made, but not by much. Still, it makes little difference to angband.
>
> I definitely remember someone making 120 in the Guiness Book of World
> Records, and someone else being 116-ish dying in the late 80s/early
> 90s.
Mme. Jeanne Calment was born in 1875 and died in 1997. See
http://lubbockonline.com/news/080597/frances.htm
AFAICR she was the longest-lived person on record (at least, whose
age was verifiable).
Matthew Furrow
mfurrow at mail dot md
Neodymium
rec.games.roguelike.angband...
> I take your point, but experience is supposed to measure, well,
> *experience*, not just age---you can be old and naive if all you ever
> did was sit around on the town level.
Which brings up a tangential point. The terminology of V and many
variants is confusing regarding wisdom and experience -- for example, if
you get a message saying "You feel very naive" it means your wis, not
your xp, was drained! Suggested renamings:
"You feel very naive" -> "You feel more foolish" (and "very" -> "more"
for all stat drains, or remove the adjective altogether);
"Potion of Naivety" -> "Potion of Foolishness"
"You feel your life slipping/draining away" -> "You feel
inexperienced/naive"
"Restore life levels" -> "Restore Experience"
"Potion of lose memories/lose life levels/lose life force" -> "Potion of
Naivety"
Then we have nice opposed pairs like Potion of Foolishness with Potion of
(Restore) Wisdom, Potion of Naivety and Potion of (Restore) Experience...
Of course, there *is* a connection between naivety and foolishness, and
between experience and wisdom. Makes me wonder if maybe wis shouldn't
increase with experience, and xp drains have a chance to cause wisdom
loss. A possible way to implement this is to have a +1 wis per 10 levels
or something that is treated as part of the equipment bonus, rather than
base stat, so passing level 25 grants +1 wis but being drained below
level 25 costs that point of wis; if the internal stat is 18/100 it stays
that way so this isn't a gain that gets absorbed during stat gain nor can
the drain be fixed with !oWis after stat gain. Of course it's a bit of a
crock to call it an *equipment* bonus, but nasty to add a whole extra
category just for this bonus as well. That change would require
rebalancing, particularly where priests are concerned. (Without
rebalancing the difference is equivalent to a freed amulet slot for
priests, as the extra +5 wis by cl50 compensates if they dump an AoWis (+
5) for something else, such as Carlammas or an amulet of ESP, and then
upgrade to a hypothetical future version with this wis bonus.)
Of course, all of this stuff may very well prove to be a "who cares" or
an "it's unbalancing" or even just an "it's too much of a pain in the
neck to balance just to make the game more consistent". Well, take it or
leave it. I do no harm just by suggesting it.
atarlost
> pwe...@comcast.net (Andrew Perron) wrote in
> news:3e3b06d5...@news.cox.net:
>
> > On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 22:52:09 +0000 (UTC), Otto Martin
> > wrote:
> >
> >>Neodymium wrote:
> >>>* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps
> >>>at
> >>> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age
> >>> reached is 106.)
Well, the old took lived to 130 without the benefit of the ring. Lobelia
Sackville-Baggins lived to something like 90, and that was dissapointing. I
recall it being said that hobbits reach the century mark as often as not. This
is not surprising considering their small size and fairly healthy lifestyle,
excluding their smoking. Taking pipewead into accoubnt I would expect them to
pass 50 as often as not, and usually die of lung cancer.
Neodymium
<nbr...@hotmail.com> wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
Lung cancer from smoking is due to chemically treated paper that burns
with nasty toxic byproducts in modern cigarettes. Pipe smoking caused
oral cancers instead. :P
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
Unless they're genetically immune to lung cancer induced by smoking.
Since the modern human prevalence of this trait is about 25% (it has to do with
the right choice of homozygosity of a single locus), we really can't rule out
such oddities in Middle-Earth races.
Arturus Magi
From: Neodymium neo_...@nospam.invalid
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 19:06:34 GMT
>* Half-elves: Presumably more than human lifespan, possibly immortal.
I don't have a direct Tolkien reference, but the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game
lists the following note for half-elves: 'Upon reaching adult-hood, a Half-elf
must decide whether to live as a mortal Man or an immortal Elf. Those who
become Men recieve the Gift of Death and are not bound to Fate like their Elven
kin.'
The lifespan listed for mortal hlaf-elves is 250-500 years.
____________________________________
Arturus Magi
69th INF BDE (YAOI), AGFFH Sec.
LTC Commanding
AIM: ArturusMag, NHogue
ICQ: 19106776
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who PRESS ENTER Here
rm -rf /bin/laden
R Dan Henry
<bah...@unmaker.house-of-toast.com> declared:
[life-spans of Middle-Earth races]
>I have no clue what happens to orcs and trolls.
It isn't even established whether or not orcs are immortal. As for
trolls, there isn't even any evidence, AFAIK. But you only need to
worry about half-orcs and half-trolls when discussing Angband PCs.
Just figure them for a human lifespan and leave it at that.
R Dan Henry
Martin <oma...@students.cc.tut.fi> declared:
>Neodymium <neo_...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps at
>> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age reached
>> is 106.)
>
>ISTR a French lady getting as far as 122. Longer claims have been made,
>but not by much. Still, it makes little difference to angband.
The Old Took reached 130, so that won't do for hobbits at any rate.
Martin Bazley
> Stipulating for the moment that we're incorporating some kind of aging
> mechanism, I think the correlation between experience and age should
> take care of itself; it takes time to farm all those wor^W^W^W^Wkill all
> those dragons, and by the time you're done with it, you've gone up a
> couple of levels and had a couple of birthdays.
That's something I had odd dreams about once upon a time; it's your
birthday and you're required to walk down a long line of townspeople or
something, or maybe a surprise party at the dungeon entrance!
How's this (if you can read it:)
________________________
_____/| | |--\ | |--\ ---- |\_____
____/|--\ \ / | | | | | | | | \____
___/|--\ | | \ / | | | | | | | | |-\ \___
__/|-| | | | | | | | | |--/ | | | | | /-\ | \__
_/ | | | |--/ |--/ | |--< | |\ | |---| | | | | | | \_
| | | |-| | | | | | | | \ | | | | | |-| \ / |
| |-| | | | | | | | | | \ | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |--/ | | | | | | |-/ | | | |
| |
| t @@@@@@@ |
| t @ @ t t |
| t @ @@@@@ @ |
| t @ @@@@@@@ @ t t t |
| t @ @@@@@@@@ |
| t @ @@@@@ t |
| @ |
| t t @@@@@@@@@ t t |
| t |
| t |
| t t |
--
- Martin Bazley - "The only good zombie is a dead zombie" /
mar...@bazley.freeuk.com _____________________________/_
Wimbledon, London, England /|> | < / /\ < |>| | | |_ < /\ |/
__________________________/ |\ | _> \_ \/ _> |\ \/ |_ |_ _> \/ |\
Martin Bazley
> I'd rather like to see characters age visibly, personally (being one
> of these dreadful 'role-players' who persists in attributing character
> to all my adventurers!) Starting out as an apprentice human mage at
> the age of, say, seventeen makes sense. After real-time weeks of play
> and endless experience gained, my character is now a grand master
> mage, or whatever... and still a fresh-faced youth of seventeen!
One thing I have always thought interesting is that Z imps tend to start
in their teenage years...
Also, I thought that nearly everyone in LoTR was with long grey hair and
beards bigger than Dumbledore's...
John B. Whelan
>> In any event, while most characters will not reach this age, for
those who do,
> > it is a sort of achievement, and it is a shame if it is not reflected. Would
> > the programming be difficult?
>
> It's not a particularly wonderful achievement... you could sit at level 1
> eating rations for that long pretty easily.
You think so? One runs out of rations pretty fast. 2/day even with
slow digestion. Nor do I see that this has much abuse potential.
Food costs gold.
In any event, while the benefit to correcting this may be minimal, I
can see no benefit to not correcting it, other than inertia. As
others have stated in this group, even some normal games take as long
as 36 million turns. A game where this results in your level 50 teen
wizard going from 15 to 16 is at least marginally better than one
where he remains at 15, (finally to commit suicide after killing
Morgoth, much to the dismay of his parents). Like I asked, would the
programming be difficult? Is this any different from another sort of
minor bug that scarcely effects game play and rarely is noticed, but
is nonetheless deemed worthy of correction?
Once corrected, one might (perhaps) then turn to the question of
making aging a little faster, so that more than a single year might
pass in the typical Morgoth-slaying career. There are several
possible options:
(1) Make days faster, say every 50,000 turns instead of 100,000.
(2) Add in age-jumps such as having characters age a day every time
they get lost in a "maze of staircases". These age-jumps need have no
game effect other than allow age-numbers to advance. Thus, characters
would not starve on staircases, presumably because they found just
enough food (or had other adventures) so as to leave in the exact same
condition as they entered.
(3) Add in age-jumps whenever characters enter stores/home; or
transact in stores/homes.
(4) Screw literal logic, and make years less than 365 days long (the
purist in me does not like this too much).
(5) Add an age-jumps (say a month) when a character advances in level
(I do not find this too logical, unless the age-jump is delayed until
the next time he enters a store or climbs stairs or some other
trigger.)
(6) Age-jumps at various other thematically appropriate events (some
of which I do not know of, never having gone below 700').
Level-switching spells and traps, for instance.
Enough tweaks of this sort, and one might end up with a situation
where your teen-hero is, at the very least, no longer a teen by the
time he faces Morgoth. This would correct somewhat a "flavor-problem"
that seems to bother some people.
John B. Whelan
>> In any event, while most characters will not reach this age, for
those who do,
> > it is a sort of achievement, and it is a shame if it is not reflected. Would
> > the programming be difficult?
>
> It's not a particularly wonderful achievement... you could sit at level 1
> eating rations for that long pretty easily.
You think so? One runs out of rations pretty fast. 2/day even with
John B. Whelan
100 is the typical life expectancy for a Hobbit; Tolkien says they
reached that age "as often as not", and his genealogical tables
support this. Hobbits, though, rarely live too much longer (I suspect
Tolkien did this on purpose - an ideosyncracy of Hobbit physiology in
part due to Tolkien's horror of extreme old age - also evidenced by
the willful dying practiced by Dunedain). 130 is near a record old
age.
Bilbo, at 111, looked exactly the same as he did at 50. Presumably,
this is about the same as a 80 year old human who appears to be in his
late 30s. No wonder folks thought it was weird.
> * Elves have considerably longer life spans than humans, exceeding a
> thousand years.
> * Ents live a very long time -- possibly tens of thousands of years.
> From these we can infer:
> * Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps at
> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age reached
> is 106.)
Typical age of death: 70 for a normal human; 100 for a hobbit; 150
for a typical Dunedan of the 3rd age.
> * Elves and high elves should die of old age somewhat after 1000, perhaps
> after 5000 or so, or maybe never. (The natural spans of elves are
> discussed in more detail elsewhere in the thread by people more
> familiar with the details of Tolkien's world. The consensus seems to be
> that elves of the West have potential immortality but those of Middle-
> earth are of finite span, but several thousand years. Perhaps high
> elves should then be immune to aging, and regular elves get 4000 years
> or so.)
For all practical purposes, elves do not age at all. The
aging-effects of life in Middle Earth would probably be better
represented by stat-drain and other hazards that effect everybody.
Obviously, if you give them a life-expectancy of several thousand
years, there is little game-reason to apply it.
> * Ents get 10,000 or so years, in variants that have ents.
Before they become too "tree-like" I guess. AFAIK, Ents do not die of
old age, and I think Fangorn was rather more than 10,000 years old.
> * Half-elves should have at least the same lifespan (before old age) as
> humans, and probably quite a lot more.
Would depend on heritage, I guess. Anything that is a bit longer than
typical for humans would acceptable.
> Even if the human aging speed is
> the dominant trait in these hybrids, no less. So if Aragorn and Arwen
> had children they could surely expect at least human lifespans, barring
> misadventure.
Aragorn and Arwen are a Dunedan and an Elf. Aragorn lived 210 years
(which corresponds to about 70 - he willed his own death before
becoming too decrepit.) We have no info on how long their children
lived.
> That just leaves the natural lifespans of half-trolls, half-orcs, and
> dwarves open questions.
Half-trolls: anyone's guess.
Half-Orcs: Probably a bit longer than a normal (non-dunedan) human.
We know of at least one Orc who lived over 350 years (& he did not die
of old age). The tradition in D&D is to make orcs and half-orcs
short-lived, though.
Dwarves: 250 years seems about the average, from the Genealogies.
Gnomes: Not a Tolkien race (though he applied the term to the Noldor
in earlier drafts). D&D versions typically live 500-700 years.
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> ....
> Once corrected, one might (perhaps) then turn to the question of
> making aging a little faster, so that more than a single year might
> pass in the typical Morgoth-slaying career. There are several
> possible options:
> ....
> (4) Screw literal logic, and make years less than 365 days long (the
> purist in me does not like this too much).
There's a long historical tradition for this. Besides, how do we know there
hasn't been significant changes to the length of the day since the Third Age
(or First Age)? Even now, the wind has the net effect of shaving a second off
the calendar year every so often. (And has, since 1970).
> ....
> (6) Age-jumps at various other thematically appropriate events (some
> of which I do not know of, never having gone below 700').
> Level-switching spells and traps, for instance.
Time breath comes to mind. In both directions.
Timo Pietilä
Neodymium wrote:
>
> * Half-orcs, half-trolls: ?
Orcs are (depending of the source) corrupted elves so they are immortals
just like elves, but very likely to get killed because of they livingstyle.
Timo Pietilä
--
A(2.9.3) DI(>) "Wanderer" DP L:43 DL:2200' A+ R+ Sp+ w:Ulmo/BoChaos
A/Gu L/W/D H- D c-- f PV+ s-(+) TT- d(+) P++ M+
C-- S+ I-(++) So+ B++ ac GHB- SQ RQ++ V+ F:Z Rod Stacking
John B. Whelan
> On 2003-02-01 02:44:35, Caradhras <cara...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> > pwe...@comcast.net (Andrew Perron) wrote in
> > news:3e3b06d5...@news.cox.net:
> >
> > > On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 22:52:09 +0000 (UTC), Otto Martin
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >>Neodymium wrote:
> > >>>* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps
> > >>>at
> > >>> 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age
> > >>> reached is 106.)
>
> Well, the old took lived to 130 without the benefit of the ring. Lobelia
> Sackville-Baggins lived to something like 90, and that was dissapointing.
No. You are thinking of Lobelia's husband, Otho, who, IIRC, lived to a
"ripe but disappointing age" somewhere under 100 (I forget precisely
what).
Lobelia, at the age of 101, was still feisty enough to attack a human
thug with an umbrella. This got her thrown into the lockholes, which
she survived. However, upon her release, the news of the murder of
her son, Lotho, broke her heart, and she died the following spring at
the age of 102 (IIRC).
>I
> recall it being said that hobbits reach the century mark as often as not.
Right. Average of 100; maximum of 130. Note that maximum is only 30%
greater than the average, which seems odd by human standards, but
could be an idiosyncracy of hobbit physiology. In general, Hobbit
life stages seem to be about 50% longer than human (full maturity
around 30, menopause around 60(*), average life-span around 100 - but
maximum lifespan rather less than 165 (which one would get by adding
50% to the human max of 110 or so.)
(*) Tolkiens genealogy charts show at least 1 hobbit female (I forget
who) who had her last child at 58.
Timo Pietilä
Neodymium wrote:
> Lung cancer from smoking is due to chemically treated paper that burns
> with nasty toxic byproducts in modern cigarettes.
+ other nasty things in them, not just paper. Cigars cause lung cancer
with same probability than cigarettes.
> Pipe smoking caused
> oral cancers instead. :P
In addition to lung cancer.
But this is Tolkien world, and different species than humans, so they
might have been immune to bad effects of tobacco (or it wasn't even
tobacco, just similar).
John B. Whelan
> Neodymium <neo_...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> >* Humans and hobbits should die of old age somewhat after 60, perhaps at
> > 70 or maybe even 66+1d40. (IIRC the oldest documented human age reached
> > is 106.)
>
> ISTR a French lady getting as far as 122. Longer claims have been made,
> but not by much. Still, it makes little difference to angband.
>
>
> Otto Martin - pretty sure there've been Finnish people older than 106
My understanding is that there have been a fair number of people who
have reasonably accuracte documentation of being 114 or 115 at time of
death.
Some claims are better documented than others, though. Records can be
inaccurate. Once you pass a certain age, the chance of the records
being inaccurate soon starts to surpass the chance that the persons in
question are actually as old as records seem to say.
For instance, the Guinness Book of World Records has a Japanese man as
having reached the age of 120. This is based on a census report of
114 years earlier that recorded his as being 6 years old at the time.
Odds are, though, that the census report was simply inaccurate about
his age at the time, which may have been 0. With billions of people
in the world, you have to be very strict about "records". The oldest
person in the world is 1 in 7 billion; but mistakes, errors, confusion
and outright lies (even well documented ones) are far more common. If
you are not very skeptical, the real record holder is sure to be
beaten out by a confused runner-up.
John B. Whelan
I have no doubt that her age is reasonably well documented by normal
standards. However, the oldest person in the world is 1 person in 7
billion. Some mistake in the 19th century records (or perhaps
confusion about her true identity), though it may seem unlikely by
normal standards, is far more likely than that she is actually the
oldest person ever.
The real record is probably held by some forgotten 115-year-old.
John B. Whelan
> > (4) Screw literal logic, and make years less than 365 days long (the
> > purist in me does not like this too much).
>
> There's a long historical tradition for this. Besides, how do we know there
> hasn't been significant changes to the length of the day since the Third Age
> (or First Age)? Even now, the wind has the net effect of shaving a second off
> the calendar year every so often. (And has, since 1970).
Well, unless one wants to quibble about a second here and there ...
Tolkien's world is fairly detailed, and it is reasonably clear that,
in the Third Age, the calendar is roughly the same as it is today.
Maybe, due to slightly longer days, leap-year occurred every 10 years
instead of every 4, but surely that is not a quibble worth mentioning.
Same goes for First Age, give or take a day here and there if you want
to be picky.
If you want to go back to a period when all bets are off, you need the
mythical period before the First Age began, and there was no sun or
moon as such.
Andrew Fenton
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
> Even now, the wind has the net effect of shaving a second off
> the calendar year every so often. (And has, since 1970).
Whaaaaa? OK, I'll bite: what'chu talkin' 'bout, Kenneth?
Caradhras
news:fd166f83.03020...@posting.google.com:
> Caradhras <cara...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> news:<Xns9314D30A06B40x...@198.164.200.20>...
>> Mme. Jeanne Calment was born in 1875 and died in 1997. See
>> http://lubbockonline.com/news/080597/frances.htm
>> AFAICR she was the longest-lived person on record (at least,
>> whose age was verifiable).
> I have no doubt that her age is reasonably well documented by normal
> standards. However, the oldest person in the world is 1 person in 7
> billion. Some mistake in the 19th century records (or perhaps
> confusion about her true identity), though it may seem unlikely by
> normal standards, is far more likely than that she is actually the
> oldest person ever.
Not quite sure what your point is here--that they got her age wrong?
Why should her age be any more likely to be wrong than any of the other
pretenders? And what makes you suspect that she wasn't really born in
1875? Furthermore, given that the 20th century saw an amazing increase in
human life expectancy in the Western world, I doubt that the longest-
lived person ever would *not* have been alive in the last, say, 20 years
or so.
> The real record is probably held by some forgotten 115-year-old.
ITYM "forgotten 125-year-old"? Or do you really think that her true
age could have been so different from her recorded age?
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
Of course, my English may be slightly garbled...but this is what I'm thinking
of:
Since 1970, the length of a solar day (as measured by overly precise clocks) has
been *decreasing*. This has necessitated a leap second every so often for the
convenience of the astronomers.
Basically, there's enough mountains for the trade winds to measurably and
systematically increase the rotation speed of the Earth by blowing against the
mountains. (Of course, this hasn't always been true -- look at some
reconstructed globes for earlier geological eras to see why). This is
interesting because the tides have the *opposite* effect: they tend to slow
down the Earth's rotation by friction.
Do this long enough, and you can turn a 360-day year into a 365.25... day year.
Nystulc
>nys...@cs.com (John B. Whelan) wrote in
>news:fd166f83.03020...@posting.google.com:
>
>> Caradhras <cara...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
>> news:<Xns9314D30A06B40x...@198.164.200.20>...
>>> Mme. Jeanne Calment was born in 1875 and died in 1997. See
>>> http://lubbockonline.com/news/080597/frances.htm
>>> AFAICR she was the longest-lived person on record (at least,
>>> whose age was verifiable).
>
>> I have no doubt that her age is reasonably well documented by normal
>> standards. However, the oldest person in the world is 1 person in 7
>> billion. Some mistake in the 19th century records (or perhaps
>> confusion about her true identity), though it may seem unlikely by
>> normal standards, is far more likely than that she is actually the
>> oldest person ever.
>
> Not quite sure what your point is here--that they got her age wrong?
Quite possible. In this case, maybe more likely than that they got it right.
>Why should her age be any more likely to be wrong than any of the other
>pretenders?
Because her age is more advanced than the other pretenders.
>And what makes you suspect that she wasn't really born in
>1875?
The fact that she died in 1997. If she had died 10 years earlier, there would
be far less need for suspicon. Similarly, if she were still alive today, this
would raise the odds that the 1875 figure were inaccurate to a virtual
certainty. The more extraordinary a claim is, the less likely that the claim
is true.
>Furthermore, given that the 20th century saw an amazing increase in
>human life expectancy in the Western world, I doubt that the longest-
>lived person ever would *not* have been alive in the last, say, 20 years
>or so.
The fact that she died recently is not a consideration in my argument.
>> The real record is probably held by some forgotten 115-year-old.
>
> ITYM "forgotten 125-year-old"?
I don't mean that at all.
> Or do you really think that her true
>age could have been so different from her recorded age?
Why is that so improbable? We are dealing with MASSIVE improbabilities here.
If she really is the oldest person in the world, she is one in 8 billion. If,
however, her real age is different from her recorded age, then she has lots of
company. Birth and identiy records may (???) be 99.99% accuracte, but that
still would leave hundreds of thousands of people on this planet of 8 billion
whose DOB and identity is not what it appears. And, of those, the, a goodly
protion will have DOB and identity records that are sufficiently convincing
that the Guinness Book of World Records cannot see through the fraud.
Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that the maximum possible human age
is 125 years. If such were the case,, then we would have a bell curve where
one person, out of 8 billion, reached 125 years of age. According to the rules
of the bell curve, this record holder would be outnumbered by thousands and
thousands of persons between the ages of 100 and 124. Of this vast number of
persons, there would be at least some who, by deliberate deceit or innocent
mistake, were younger than their records indicate. Thus, the law of
probabilities would ensure that the 125 year old record holder would have her
record stolen by someone falsely (but convincingly) claiming to be 128.
So if the oldest person to die in the last 20 years really were 121, we would
probably not be hearing about that person in the Guinness Book of World
Records., but about some "125-year old" who is really 115.
R Dan Henry
<cara...@my-deja.com> declared:
> ITYM "forgotten 125-year-old"? Or do you really think that her true
>age could have been so different from her recorded age?
Easily. If you'd ever actually dealt with the records of a government
or other large organization, you'd realize errors slip through all the
time. A single digit error in writing down the year, and she's 10
years younger than record says. (One might also research whether she
might have had a relative of the same name and the birth certificates
been switched at some point.) In any case, a birth certificate by
itself isn't that conclusive a document, nor will it be until a DNA
sample is woven into it to confirm identity.
R Dan Henry
(Arturus Magi) declared:
>Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.angband
>From: Neodymium neo_...@nospam.invalid
>Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 19:06:34 GMT
>
>
>
>>* Half-elves: Presumably more than human lifespan, possibly immortal.
>
>I don't have a direct Tolkien reference, but the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game
>lists the following note for half-elves: 'Upon reaching adult-hood, a Half-elf
>must decide whether to live as a mortal Man or an immortal Elf. Those who
>become Men recieve the Gift of Death and are not bound to Fate like their Elven
>kin.'
Which is clearly wrong. Arwen delays her choice well beyond adulthood.
As in nearly three thousand years past adulthood.
Otto Martin
>For instance, the Guinness Book of World Records has a Japanese man as
>having reached the age of 120. This is based on a census report of
>114 years earlier that recorded his as being 6 years old at the time.
>Odds are, though, that the census report was simply inaccurate about
>his age at the time, which may have been 0.
Why/how would they record his age off that much? I can see them being a
year or maybe two off, but 6 years is quite a bit for a small child. Also,
I'd like to know if there are any reasons why records would have more
people marked as too old than too young? Could there have been people
who's records showed only 115 but who were actually over 120?
Otto Martin - having definite plans on trying to break those records :-)
--
"Soon, I will have the most powerful lemons in the universe."
http://www.goats.com/archive/030117.html
Timo Pietilä
Otto Martin wrote:
> John B. Whelan <nys...@cs.com> wrote:
>
>>For instance, the Guinness Book of World Records has a Japanese man as
>>having reached the age of 120. This is based on a census report of
>>114 years earlier that recorded his as being 6 years old at the time.
>
>
>>Odds are, though, that the census report was simply inaccurate about
>>his age at the time, which may have been 0.
>
>
> Why/how would they record his age off that much? I can see them being a
> year or maybe two off, but 6 years is quite a bit for a small child. Also,
Especially that Japanise recording system was pretty good as early as
european dark ages. I pretty much doubt that it isn't any worse in
modern times than it was then.
David J. Grabiner
> On 01 Feb 2003 05:34:43 GMT, in a fit of madness nho...@aol.com
> (Arturus Magi) declared:
> >I don't have a direct Tolkien reference, but the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game
> >lists the following note for half-elves: 'Upon reaching adult-hood, a Half-elf
> >must decide whether to live as a mortal Man or an immortal Elf. Those who
> >become Men recieve the Gift of Death and are not bound to Fate like their Elven
> >kin.'
>
> Which is clearly wrong. Arwen delays her choice well beyond adulthood.
> As in nearly three thousand years past adulthood.
Arwen was not a half-elf; Elrond was half-elven but had chosen to be an
elf, and his wife was elven. Elrond's children were given the choice
only when he left at the end of the Third Age; Arwen chose to become
human. (Luthien, also an elf with a human husband, had made the same
choice in the First Age.)
Elros may be the only half-elf who chose to be human whose age at death
is known. He lived to be 500, while his descendants in Numenor lived
only three times as long as ordinary Men.
--
David Grabiner, grab...@alumni.princeton.edu, http://remarque.org/~grabiner
Baseball labor negotiations FAQ: http://remarque.org/~grabiner/laborfaq.html
Shop at the Mobius Strip Mall: Always on the same side of the street!
Klein Glassworks, Torus Coffee and Donuts, Projective Airlines, etc.
Nystulc
>John B. Whelan <nys...@cs.com> wrote:
>>For instance, the Guinness Book of World Records has a Japanese man as
>>having reached the age of 120. This is based on a census report of
>>114 years earlier that recorded his as being 6 years old at the time.
>
>>Odds are, though, that the census report was simply inaccurate about
>>his age at the time, which may have been 0.
>
>Why/how would they record his age off that much?
>I can see them being a
>year or maybe two off, but 6 years is quite a bit for a small child.
How would I know? Mistakes can be made in thousands of different ways, many of
which cannot be anticipated. If this had been an English-speaking country, I
would suggest that some record-maker just wrote a 0, but did not connect the
lines properly so it turned into a 6. How such mistakes could be made in a
Japanese country, or if they were using Arabic numerals at the time, is beyond
my knowledge. Another possibility is that an older child died, and a newborn
was named after him..
>Also,
>I'd like to know if there are any reasons why records would have more
>people marked as too old than too young?
No reason. They are no doubt equally common. You don't hear much about the
110-year olds whose records convincingly mark them as ten years younger than
they are, because people who die at 100 don't attract the attention of Guinness
Book of World Records. You only hear about the 110 year olds whose records
convincingly claim they are 120.
>Could there have been people
>who's records showed only 115 but who were actually over 120?
There could be, if it were possible to reach the age of 120.
Obviously, the more extraordinary a claim is, the less likely it is to be true.
The less likely that a claim is true, the more weight must be given to
competing explanations. There would be little reason to doubt the birth
records if they did not indicate such an improbable result.
Sherlock Holmes (AC Doyle) said "If you rule out the impossible, then whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth". Problem is, nothing is
absolutely impossible. But some things, like living to 120, are so improbable
that one can apply similar logic.
Say I have the following problem. I know that Dirty Harry started with 6 shots
in his 6-gun, and has no reloads. If you tell me that you heard 6 shots, I
have no reason to doubt you, and I will assume that Harry has no shots left.
However, if you say you heard 7 shots, I will realize that there is some
mistake - that either you miscounted or that someone else is shooting.
Competing explanations assume far greater weight.
Similar logic applies to people who claim to be 120. The only difference is,
we do not know, with absolute certainty, that their claim passes the limit of
what is possible. Even if such age is possible, it is so EXTREMELY unlikely,
that competing explanations, less extreme in their unlikelihood, assume far
greater weight in any individual case.
If it WERE possible to reach 120, and no farther, then the record would be
taken, not by the 120-year old, but by an 115-year old imposter with birth
records cliamed, inaccurately but convincingly, that he is 125. That is
because it is far easier to obtain innaccurate birth records than to actually
achieve the feat of being the oldest person alive in a world population of 8
billion.
>Otto Martin - having definite plans on trying to break those records :-)
If you want to have a snowball's chance in hell at breaking the record, then I
recommend cheating. Your chances of getting in are alot better that way.
First, assume the identity of a man 15 years older than yourself, and make it
stick. Next, lead a really healthy lifestyle. Then, if you are REALLY REALLY
lucky, you just might make 107, whereupon the Guinness people will be fooled
into actually believing you are 122.
Otherwise you don't have a chance.
R Dan Henry
grab...@alumni.princeton.edu (David J. Grabiner) declared:
>R Dan Henry <rdan...@earthlink.net> writes:
>
>> On 01 Feb 2003 05:34:43 GMT, in a fit of madness nho...@aol.com
>> (Arturus Magi) declared:
>
>> >I don't have a direct Tolkien reference, but the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game
>> >lists the following note for half-elves: 'Upon reaching adult-hood, a Half-elf
>> >must decide whether to live as a mortal Man or an immortal Elf. Those who
>> >become Men recieve the Gift of Death and are not bound to Fate like their Elven
>> >kin.'
>>
>> Which is clearly wrong. Arwen delays her choice well beyond adulthood.
>> As in nearly three thousand years past adulthood.
>
>Arwen was not a half-elf; Elrond was half-elven but had chosen to be an
>elf, and his wife was elven. Elrond's children were given the choice
>only when he left at the end of the Third Age; Arwen chose to become
>human. (Luthien, also an elf with a human husband, had made the same
>choice in the First Age.)
Elrond's children were numbered among the Peredhil (half-elven). It
isn't a mathematical term, it's a description of a state of one's fate
more than anything.
"The Half-elven, such as Elrond and Arwen, can choose to which kind
and fate they shall belong: choose once and for all." -- JRRT, Letter
154
"Arwen was not an elf, but one of the half-elven who abandoned her
elvish rights." - JRRT, Letter 345
R Dan Henry
Martin <oma...@students.cc.tut.fi> declared:
>John B. Whelan <nys...@cs.com> wrote:
>>For instance, the Guinness Book of World Records has a Japanese man as
>>having reached the age of 120. This is based on a census report of
>>114 years earlier that recorded his as being 6 years old at the time.
>
>>Odds are, though, that the census report was simply inaccurate about
>>his age at the time, which may have been 0.
>
>Why/how would they record his age off that much? I can see them being a
>year or maybe two off, but 6 years is quite a bit for a small child. Also,
>I'd like to know if there are any reasons why records would have more
>people marked as too old than too young? Could there have been people
>who's records showed only 115 but who were actually over 120?
If it had been in Europe or America, I'd say because someone hastily
scrawled a zero, leaving a tail which was later mistaken for a six
when the field entry was later read for entry into the main records.
However, I don't know if such a mistake is plausible with Japanese
numerals.
Eytan Zweig
>
[snip a lot]
Ok, what I don't get here is - how can you be sure with absolute confidence
that it's impossible to reach 120 or even further (as your post seems to
imply)? I mean, yeah, it's very unlikely, and yeah, I'm somewhat skeptical
that anyone actually achieved that, and that if anyone did he or she happens
to be alive today, but you seem to be treating 120 as a magic unattainable
number. How could you know that?
Even if all the 120+ years olds supposed to be alive these days or in the
past were results of clerical errors and incorrect age estimations, that
still doesn't mean it's impossible. Remember that anyone over 100 years old
now was born when the world was quite different, in medicine, technology,
and the state of the enviornment. Some of these changes may shorten people's
lives - others may increase them. We have no real way of knowing these
effects; perhaps most of the (Western) people in their 20s these days will
live past 100. Perhaps most of them will die in their 60s because of the
effects of pollution and fast-food. If the trend continues to be towards
longer lives, however, I'd be very surprised if 120 years doesn't become a
long, but not unheard of, life expectancy by the time I'm in my 80s.
Eytan
Otto Martin
>Otto Martin wrote:
>>Could there have been people
>>who's records showed only 115 but who were actually over 120?
>There could be, if it were possible to reach the age of 120.
Ok, I'll quit after this, but you seem almost hostile to the idea that
humans could live over 120 years. I'll admit that I don't know much about
the subject and also that currently practically no one reaches that
age, but I wouldn't be surprised if we towards the end of this century
start to see people even going past the 130 mark.
Also, the claim of 6+ billion people doesn't really apply, since there
weren't nearly the amount of people being born 120 years ago that are
being born today. The max age people can live will be somewhat better
proved once really large amounts of people will get to their old age.
>Even if such age is possible, it is so EXTREMELY unlikely,
>that competing explanations, less extreme in their unlikelihood,
>assume far greater weight in any individual case.
But as we start to get more and more cases, they can't really be
altogether dismissed...
>>Otto Martin - having definite plans on trying to break those records :-)
>If you want to have a snowball's chance in hell at breaking the record,
>then I recommend cheating.
I was planning to. Am just hoping that biology & genetics will give enough
answers soon enough...
>Next, lead a really healthy lifestyle.
so this is on the schedule too. Should exercise more, though... :-)
>Otherwise you don't have a chance.
Hard to say. The earlier generations haven't all had the health care I'm
being provided. If I don't do it, I'm sure some peer of mine will.
Otto - but yeah, there's still too much belief and too few facts...
Kieron Dunbar
> Otto Martin wrote:
>> Why/how would they record his age off that much? I can see them being a
>> year or maybe two off, but 6 years is quite a bit for a small child. Also,
> Especially that Japanise recording system was pretty good as early as
> european dark ages. I pretty much doubt that it isn't any worse in
> modern times than it was then.
It may have been, but governments aren't so good at keeping records for long
periods of time, even without the destruction of the second world war to
consider. I don't know if there's a way to find out what supporting
documentation there is.
--
kwaheri, Kieron (reverse username to reply)
Caradhras
news:20030202150001...@mb-cm.news.cs.com:
> Otto Martin wrote:
>>Also,I'd like to know if there are any reasons why records would have
>>more people marked as too old than too young?
>
> No reason. They are no doubt equally common. You don't hear much
> about the 110-year olds whose records convincingly mark them as ten
> years younger than they are, because people who die at 100 don't
> attract the attention of Guinness Book of World Records. You only
> hear about the 110 year olds whose records convincingly claim they are
> 120.
Your statement here implies that nobody *really* reaches the age of
120. Why do you believe this?
>>Could there have been people
>>who's records showed only 115 but who were actually over 120?
>
> There could be, if it were possible to reach the age of 120.
You keep questioning whether people can reach 120 years old. Do you
believe it is impossible? If so, why?
> Obviously, the more extraordinary a claim is, the less likely it is to
> be true. The less likely that a claim is true, the more weight must be
> given to competing explanations. There would be little reason to doubt
> the birth records if they did not indicate such an improbable result.
You are arguing in a circle here. To my eyes the argument is going
something like this:
A: Somebody lived to be 122.
B: Surely not. It's highly improbable that anyone would live to be 120.
A: But there is documentary evidence of her age.
B: Yes, but the documentation is most likely wrong.
A: Why?
B: Because it's highly improbable that anyone would live to be 120.
> Sherlock Holmes (AC Doyle) said "If you rule out the impossible, then
> whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". Problem is,
> nothing is absolutely impossible. But some things, like living to
> 120, are so improbable that one can apply similar logic.
But how do you know it's so improbable? Your only evidence for its
improbability is to call into question the quality of the evidence that
it *is* possible.
> Say I have the following problem. I know that Dirty Harry started
> with 6 shots in his 6-gun, and has no reloads. If you tell me that
> you heard 6 shots, I have no reason to doubt you, and I will assume
> that Harry has no shots left. However, if you say you heard 7 shots, I
> will realize that there is some mistake - that either you miscounted
> or that someone else is shooting. Competing explanations assume far
> greater weight.
Your analogy is flawed. For it to apply here, we would have to know
exactly what the human lifespan was (in the same manner as you know how
many chambers are in Harry's six-shooter).
> Similar logic applies to people who claim to be 120. The only
> difference is, we do not know, with absolute certainty, that their
> claim passes the limit of what is possible. Even if such age is
> possible, it is so EXTREMELY unlikely,
You keep making the assertion that living past 120 is "so EXTREMELY
unlikely." Both some quantification and some support would be nice.
> If it WERE possible to reach 120, and no farther, then the record
> would be taken, not by the 120-year old, but by an 115-year old
> imposter with birth records cliamed, inaccurately but convincingly,
> that he is 125. That is because it is far easier to obtain
> innaccurate birth records than to actually achieve the feat of being
> the oldest person alive in a world population of 8 billion.
You forget that not only must one obtain false birth records that
add some ten years to one's age, one must also actually live to within
ten years of the world's longest-lived person. That cuts down the numbers
rather significantly.
The most serious problem with your argument is that it is
effectively unfalsifiable. It does not appear that there would be any way
of convincing you that Mme. Calment really was the oldest person in the
world.
--
Kieron Dunbar
> Why is that so improbable? We are dealing with MASSIVE improbabilities here.
> If she really is the oldest person in the world, she is one in 8 billion. If,
The odds of a person picked at random being the oldest person whose birth and death were recorded are far smaller than 1 in 8 billion. However, someone has to
be that person, and it's almost certainly someone who looked very old before
dying.
> company. Birth and identiy records may (???) be 99.99% accuracte, but that
> still would leave hundreds of thousands of people on this planet of 8 billion
> whose DOB and identity is not what it appears. And, of those, the, a goodly
Most of those never claimed to be centenarians, so they're not relevant to
assessing this claim.
Then again, neither is anything which doesn't address the body of evidence used
to back a particular claim up.
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> Otto Martin wrote:
> ....
Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning. Qualitatively,
it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
Neodymium
<zai...@zaimoni.com> wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
> Qualitatively, it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of
> why Bell's theorem does not permit FTL communication -- that I once
> read in Scientific American. [Fortunately, I managed to get a
> competent explanation of the test that actually was done -- on a
> special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
Care to elaborate, or give a URL pointer? (Religious arguments in
scientific american??!)
--
Quicquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Replace nospam.invalid with Microsoft's shoddy free email
provider domain to reply.
Nystulc
>Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning.
>Qualitatively,
>it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
>not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
>[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
>actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
I suppose I should take that as an insult. I note that you have not actually
addressed yourself to the logic in my argument. Are you incapable of doing so?
In any event, I do not see how my POV, which is simply an application of the
skeptical and scientific principle that extraordinary claims require
extraordinary proof, could in any way be characterized as "faith-based"
Nystulc
>
>> Why is that so improbable? We are dealing with MASSIVE improbabilities
>here.
>> If she really is the oldest person in the world, she is one in 8 billion.
>If,
>
>The odds of a person picked at random being the oldest person whose birth and
>death were recorded are far smaller than 1 in 8 billion. However, someone has
>to
>be that person, and it's almost certainly someone who looked very old before
>dying.
Correct. I was merely stating that she is one in 8 billion people on earth,
which, in turn implies she is also one in a very great, great many really old
people, the precise numbers which I do not know. This is adequate to support
my position..
>> company. Birth and identiy records may (???) be 99.99% accuracte, but
>that
>> still would leave hundreds of thousands of people on this planet of 8
>billion
>> whose DOB and identity is not what it appears. And, of those, the, a
>goodly
>
>Most of those never claimed to be centenarians, so they're not relevant to
>assessing this claim.
One whose age is less than that recorded has a far far greater chance of
achieving "world record" age when he dies, than does a person with accurate
records. Everyone who does not die young, dies old. The average person alive
today will live well into their 80s (not their 70s - those figures are for
live expectancy at birth). When a person gets past a certain age, it gets
really hard to distinguish the 90 year olds from the 110 year olds. All 110
year olds are in damned good shape for their age - otherwise they'd be dead 20
years ago.
Everybody dies, and these days, most die of old age, well above the age of 70.
>Then again, neither is anything which doesn't address the body of evidence
>used
>to back a particular claim up.
You seem to believe that the nature of the claim is not relevant. By this
standard, I should as readily accept a news story about a child kidnapped by
Martians, as I would one about a child kidnapped by parents in a custody
dispute.
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
>
> > Qualitatively, it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of
> > why Bell's theorem does not permit FTL communication -- that I once
> > read in Scientific American. [Fortunately, I managed to get a
> > competent explanation of the test that actually was done -- on a
> > special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
>
> Care to elaborate, or give a URL pointer? (Religious arguments in
> scientific american??!)
Scientific American's online archive is in renovation, so I don't have a link at
hand.
It was a 1996 or 1997 issue (back when I was a graduate student at K-State).
The idea is that if you can generate 'sufficiently simple perfectly correlated
wavicles' (photons were the experimental target), then the equations dictate
that if an interaction affects one 'wavicle' in the pair, that the other
'wavicle' in the pair is *also* affected...regardless of physical distance.
I am not aware of any claims that the proper statement (Einstein-Bose-Rosen(sp?)
paradox) has been set up experimentally. Albert Einstein deliberately
constructed this paradox to document how to conduct FTL communication.
The article was attempting to explain the results of a simpler test for Bell's
Theorem, as follows:
Use a (specially constructed) laser to generate a stream of 'matched' photon
pairs traveling in opposite directions. (This 'matching' has something to do
with originating from the same atom or something like that. It's too technical
for me to remember right now.) For each pair, one of these has a 'left' spin,
and the other has a 'right' spin. Put two previously synchronized clocks (in a
lab context, atomic so you actually have enough resolution to see the effects),
one at the target for each of the laser beams. Both targets is measuring the
spin distribution of the arriving photons. Pass beam 1 through something that
can 'turned off' for no effect, or conduct a suitable measurement that induces
a strong correlation between the spins 'perfectly correlated' photon pairs.
Apparently, something like 85% was achieved. Beam 2 is assumed to be
continuously subject to a suitable measurement whose results would react to the
first one. [E.g, continuous measurement of spin.]
When this was set up in the lab (over a distance of several meters), it was
found that turning on the 'correlator' for beam 1 enabled the measurement of
that 85% agreement in spin between the 'matched' photon pairs...after the data
from both detectors was taken to a common place and analyzed. The location of
the 'correlator' along beam 1 did not matter, so the 'correlator' could (and
was!) set up very close to the beam 1 target. Close enough that if you
*presumed* that the 'correlator' reading had to propagate to the corresponding
beam 2 photons before the measurement occurred, that an arbitrary finite FTL
speed for the propagation could be required.
Since the 'correlator' does nothing about the actual spin distribution
(50%-50%), no useful information is transmitted.
The offending article botched the distinction between inducing a correlation
between the spins, and actually changing the distribution of the spins. Having
done so, they were reduced to amplifying "Bell's Theorem doesn't permit FTL
communication because it's impossible to do FTL communication." from one
sentence to several paragraphs.
--
“Thus, the background radiation of only ten rads per second of neutrons and
gamma rays from the running fission nuclear reactor in the bridge, in the very
aft of this starcraft, is not an issue for me — but would be terminal for an
unprotected human attempting to ride to Zalaisk with me.”
[Iskandran Badger Pilot-Navigator Skarlan, failing to explain why it is not
practical to transport a human on his starcraft]
Andrew Perron
>Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
>
>>Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning.
>>Qualitatively,
>>it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
>>not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
>>[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
>>actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
>
>I suppose I should take that as an insult. I note that you have not actually
>addressed yourself to the logic in my argument. Are you incapable of doing so?
And you've just replied to the *only* post which *doesn't* address the
logic.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, mekara beam.
Nystulc
>> There could be, if it were possible to reach the age of 120.
>
>[snip a lot]
>
>Ok, what I don't get here is - how can you be sure with absolute confidence
>that it's impossible to reach 120 or even further (as your post seems to
>imply)?
While you have managed to isolate, out of context, one statement where I appear
to imply otherwise, I think it is fairly clear, from the rest of my arguments,
that I am *not* taking the position that it is absolutely impossible for anyone
to reach 120 or further. I do not know this.
Specifically, with respect to this 121-year old lady in France, I have taken
the position that her claim is more likely to be erroneous than accurate. But
never did I rule out completely the possibility that her claim is true.
>I mean, yeah, it's very unlikely, and yeah, I'm somewhat skeptical
>that anyone actually achieved that, and that if anyone did he or she happens
>to be alive today, but you seem to be treating 120 as a magic unattainable
>number. How could you know that?
There is nothing magic about the figure 120. I would have no trouble believing
that humans could reach this ages if there were adequate evidence to support
this. But so far, the evidence falls short.
If, for instance, there were a dozen well documented cases of people reaching
the age of 120+, and the "World Record" were held by someone claiming to be
129, I would probably consider this adequate evidence that humans have been
able to reach the age of 120. I would suspect, of course, that a significant
number of these were frauds that managed to slip by the credibility-screeners,
and of course would be particularly suspicious about the claim of the 129-year
old. But I would consider the cumulative evidence sufficient to establish that
people can reach 120.
>Even if all the 120+ years olds supposed to be alive these days or in the
>past were results of clerical errors and incorrect age estimations, that
>still doesn't mean it's impossible.
No, not in any absolute sense.
>Remember that anyone over 100 years old
>now was born when the world was quite different, in medicine, technology,
>and the state of the enviornment. Some of these changes may shorten people's
>lives - others may increase them. We have no real way of knowing these
>effects; perhaps most of the (Western) people in their 20s these days will
>live past 100. Perhaps most of them will die in their 60s because of the
>effects of pollution and fast-food. If the trend continues to be towards
>longer lives, however, I'd be very surprised if 120 years doesn't become a
>long, but not unheard of, life expectancy by the time I'm in my 80s.
You may be correct. Advances in technology may indeed improve human life
expectancy (or pollution may shorten it).
I will believe this has happened when the evidence supports that it has, as in
the example I gave above. A single solitary report of an apparently
well-documented 121 year old is not quite enough.
But the nature of the "game" is such that it is much easier to win by cheating
than it is to win fair and square. It may be relatively hard to fool the
reasonably skeptical and cautious folks at the Guinness Book of World Records,
but it is still a whole lot easier than actually living to be 121 years of age.
Therefore, there is a heavy presumption that anyone who "wins" is a cheat,
especially when you have an entire World, full of cheaters, vying for the
prize.
If this French woman really is 121 years old, then she is doomed to have her
crown stolen by a 117 year old dude whose birth records say he is 7 years older
than he actually is. It is far easier to achieve the latter than the former.
R Dan Henry
<eyt...@oook.cz> declared:
>> There could be, if it were possible to reach the age of 120.
>[snip a lot]
*Including* the attribution line. That's a no-no, Mr. Zweig.
>Ok, what I don't get here is - how can you be sure with absolute confidence
>that it's impossible to reach 120 or even further (as your post seems to
>imply)?
I'm not sure why you say that, given that he explicitly stated that we
do not know exactly where the limit lies. For example:
||Similar logic applies to people who claim to be 120. The only difference is,
||we do not know, with absolute certainty, that their claim passes the limit of
||what is possible.
--
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
>
> >Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning.
> >Qualitatively,
> >it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
> >not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
> >[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
> >actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
>
> I suppose I should take that as an insult. I note that you have not actually
> addressed yourself to the logic in my argument. Are you incapable of doing so?
Based on the argument I read, I judged it not pragmatic to address the question
of whether inducting a hard age limit from historical data was either credible,
or not credible. I may have been mistaken in my snap opinion that such an
exercise was not useful. Such an exercise would have had to review both 'for'
and 'against' items.
An example of something lending credibility is the requirement of overactive
teleromase to 'immortalize' cancer cells. An example of something detracting
credibility are the well-documented non-prescription treatments for severely
slowing down and/or reversing osteoarthritis.
> In any event, I do not see how my POV, which is simply an application of the
> skeptical and scientific principle that extraordinary claims require
> extraordinary proof, could in any way be characterized as "faith-based"
"....extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"
Skeptical, yes. Metaphysical, yes. Historical, yes. Science, totally
irrelevant. (The auxilliary belief "I may be completely wrong about this --
let's check again", which is very helpful in science, does develop
skepticism.)
I would take your argument as giving credence to 'there have been no humans
within the past several centuries who has lived to 120.' Whether this
motivates an induction of a plausible age limit with ideal self-medical care
and environment would have to be based on one's metaphysics. *That* question
is faith-based, no matter what -- but no more so the entire branch of
philosophy called phenomenology. However, there are other concerns your
presentation (inadvertently) raised.
The procedure of *defining away* falsifiability via textual criticism (from
historical analysis) is typically used in the service of religion and/or
philosophy, rather than history. It also is an implicit denial of the
applicability of science to the question.
That is, if you agree with me that in order to have any pretense at being a
scientific statement, one must admit a way to empirically falsify how the
statement was arrived at *using theoretically currently obtainable data*.
Otherwise, we don't even agree on what "science" is in any way, shape, or form:
our metaphysical definitions of science are too divergent.
(I haven't seriously considered whether science *is* applicable to the
historical question. I believe that the medical and biological sciences
provide usable hints for the theoretical question.)
Nystulc
>Nystulc <nys...@cs.com> wrote:
>>Otto Martin wrote:
>>>Could there have been people
>>>who's records showed only 115 but who were actually over 120?
>>There could be, if it were possible to reach the age of 120.
>
>Ok, I'll quit after this, but you seem almost hostile to the idea that
>humans could live over 120 years.
Not really. I'm just not convinced that it has happened.
>I'll admit that I don't know much about
>the subject and also that currently practically no one reaches that
>age, but I wouldn't be surprised if we towards the end of this century
>start to see people even going past the 130 mark.
Its hard to predict medical advances. However, unless we also develop
foolproof scientific tests that can tell exactly how old people are, then it is
still probable that when we do, the World Record will be taken by a cheater
with a convincing claim to be 140, rather than a person with an accurate claim
to be 135.
>Also, the claim of 6+ billion people doesn't really apply, since there
>weren't nearly the amount of people being born 120 years ago that are
>being born today.
Granted, but there are still a whole lot of people available to support my
argument.
>The max age people can live will be somewhat better
>proved once really large amounts of people will get to their old age.
We will indeed, have much more data in future. But the World Record will still
probably be stolen by a cheater.
>>Even if such age is possible, it is so EXTREMELY unlikely,
>>that competing explanations, less extreme in their unlikelihood,
>>assume far greater weight in any individual case.
>
>But as we start to get more and more cases, they can't really be
>altogether dismissed...
It is precisely on such logic that I accept that it is probably possible to
reach the age of 115.
Try this for a thought exercise. It does not precisely correspond to reality,
but it should be sufficient as an illustration:
Lets imagine we have a set of 100 million Angband characters (all human). Let
us create a random system that determines when they die of "old age", by
rolling six 10 sided dice and adding 60, creating a random number between 70
and 120. This result will equal the ACTUAL age of the Angband characters when
they die of old age (assuming, of course, that some fungus creature does not
kill them first.)
This creates a situation where 1 in a million reach the age of 120 (0.1 x 0.1 x
0.1 x 0.1 x 0.1 x 0.1 = 0.000001). So, out of our 100,000,000 sample, we will
have about 100 reaching the maximum age. The breakdown, for age of death, will
be as follows:
120 = 100 Angband characters
119 = 600 Angband characters
118 = 2,100 Angband characters
117 = 5,600 Angband characters
116 = 15,600 Angband characters
115 = 25,200 Angband characters
114 = 32,100
113 = 48,600
And so on. I could go on down the line, but the calculations are getting
difficult, and its not necessary to give you the general idea. In any event,
there will be hundreds of thousands of Angband characters who will die between
the ages of 109 and 120
Now lets imagine that all these Angband characters, at the time of their death,
have convincing records establishing their age. (Assume, if you wish, that
there are another 100 million rejects whose records were either missing, or not
rigorously documented enough to satisfy the Guiness Folk's demanding standard -
so that our sample includes ONLY contains folks with acceptable records).
Now imagine that these records (because of Guinness's demanding standards) are
99.99% accurate, so that only 1 in 10,000 is wrong. Those that are wrong have
equal chance of being greater or less than actual by 1-12 years either way.
In the above situation, what do you think the official "World Record" holder is
likely to be?
Timo Pietilä
"John B. Whelan" wrote:
> Half-Orcs: Probably a bit longer than a normal (non-dunedan) human.
> We know of at least one Orc who lived over 350 years (& he did not die
> of old age). The tradition in D&D is to make orcs and half-orcs
> short-lived, though.
Are half-orcs mortal like man or do they choose like half-elves which one
they take, immortality or mortality? We do not know. Orcs are (depending of
source) corrupted elves so they are immortal.
If I had to make a decicion which category half-orcs belong I would say
mortal. But not short living (except that their life expectancy is short
because their lifestyle).
Nystulc
>nys...@cs.com (Nystulc) wrote in
>news:20030202150001...@mb-cm.news.cs.com:
>
>> Otto Martin wrote:
>>>Also,I'd like to know if there are any reasons why records would have
>>>more people marked as too old than too young?
>>
>> No reason. They are no doubt equally common. You don't hear much
>> about the 110-year olds whose records convincingly mark them as ten
>> years younger than they are, because people who die at 100 don't
>> attract the attention of Guinness Book of World Records. You only
>> hear about the 110 year olds whose records convincingly claim they are
>> 120.
>
> Your statement here implies that nobody *really* reaches the age of
>120. Why do you believe this?
For the reasons I have given.
>>>Could there have been people
>>>who's records showed only 115 but who were actually over 120?
>>
>> There could be, if it were possible to reach the age of 120.
>
> You keep questioning whether people can reach 120 years old. Do you
>believe it is impossible? If so, why?
For the reasons I have given.
>> Obviously, the more extraordinary a claim is, the less likely it is to
>> be true. The less likely that a claim is true, the more weight must be
>> given to competing explanations. There would be little reason to doubt
>> the birth records if they did not indicate such an improbable result.
>
> You are arguing in a circle here. To my eyes the argument is going
>something like this:
>
>A: Somebody lived to be 122.
>B: Surely not. It's highly improbable that anyone would live to be 120.
>A: But there is documentary evidence of her age.
>B: Yes, but the documentation is most likely wrong.
>A: Why?
>B: Because it's highly improbable that anyone would live to be 120.
You have accurately summarized my argument, but incorrectly characterized it as
"curcular". There is nothing circular about it. I have merely taken a
phenomenon (records that appear to indicate that a person is 121 years old) and
chosen the more likely of two competing explanations for the phenomenon.
Explanation #1: She really did manage to reach 121.
Explanation #2: The records are somehow wrong.
>> Sherlock Holmes (AC Doyle) said "If you rule out the impossible, then
>> whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". Problem is,
>> nothing is absolutely impossible. But some things, like living to
>> 120, are so improbable that one can apply similar logic.
>
> But how do you know it's so improbable?
Huh? Are you honestly, seriously asking me why I think it is improbable that a
person might reach the age of 121 years? How many people do you know who are
even over 100?
>Your only evidence for its
>improbability is to call into question the quality of the evidence that
>it *is* possible.
My evidence of its improbability comes from the fact that, before 1997, there
is no recorded case of anyone ever reaching this age. That makes it pretty
damned improbable.
>> Say I have the following problem. I know that Dirty Harry started
>> with 6 shots in his 6-gun, and has no reloads. If you tell me that
>> you heard 6 shots, I have no reason to doubt you, and I will assume
>> that Harry has no shots left. However, if you say you heard 7 shots, I
>> will realize that there is some mistake - that either you miscounted
>> or that someone else is shooting. Competing explanations assume far
>> greater weight.
>
> Your analogy is flawed. For it to apply here, we would have to know
>exactly what the human lifespan was (in the same manner as you know how
>many chambers are in Harry's six-shooter).
You mistake the intent of my analogy. It was to rebut the idea that a person
claiming to be 120 is just as likely to be 10 years older than recorded than 10
years younger.
If I count 5 shots, then perhaps it is just as likely that I undercounted than
overcounted.
If I count 6 shots, then I may have overcounted, but I cannot have undercounted
If I count 7 shots, then I KNOW I overcounted.
Obviously, if you apply similar logic to age-claims, it is not as clear cut,
because we do not know what exactly limits are. But obviously, their comes a
point where the older they are claimed to be, the more likely the claim is to
be wrong.
This in turn must be weighed against the evidence supporting their claim, but,
once again, eventually one reaches a point where almost no evidence one is
likely to have can meet the burden required.
>> Similar logic applies to people who claim to be 120. The only
>> difference is, we do not know, with absolute certainty, that their
>> claim passes the limit of what is possible. Even if such age is
>> possible, it is so EXTREMELY unlikely,
>
> You keep making the assertion that living past 120 is "so EXTREMELY
>unlikely." Both some quantification and some support would be nice.
Already provided.
>> If it WERE possible to reach 120, and no farther, then the record
>> would be taken, not by the 120-year old, but by an 115-year old
>> imposter with birth records cliamed, inaccurately but convincingly,
>> that he is 125. That is because it is far easier to obtain
>> innaccurate birth records than to actually achieve the feat of being
>> the oldest person alive in a world population of 8 billion.
>
> You forget that not only must one obtain false birth records that
>add some ten years to one's age, one must also actually live to within
>ten years of the world's longest-lived person. That cuts down the numbers
>rather significantly.
Not enough, I suspect, to change the probability that anyone "winning" the
worlds records contest will not be genuine. It won't change the fact that for
every winner their will be an enormous number of "runners up" that come within
10 years of the record. All you need is one of them to have convincingly
inaccurate records.
> The most serious problem with your argument is that it is
>effectively unfalsifiable. It does not appear that there would be any way
>of convincing you that Mme. Calment really was the oldest person in the
>world.
Too bad. The world is an uncertain place, and some things cannot be known for
sure. Right now, my assessment is that the chance that the records are wrong
outweighs the chance that the records are genuine. If I knew alot more about
it, and I found the evidence unusually convincing (more so than it is likely to
be) then I might adjust the probabilities somewhat. But I would not alter the
assessment by much. Anything good enough to fool the Guinness people could
probably fool me as well.
Also, if there were a lot more well-documented cases of persons passing the age
of 120, and the "World Record" were held by someone claiming to be 128, I would
be far less likely to doubt the case of Mme. Calment. If this were to happen,
and I were to personally investigate the records and find them unusually
convincing, THEN I might alter my assessment and say that Explanation #1 is
significantly more likely than Explanation #2, in her individual case, and that
the combined evidence of all the cases makes it extremely probable that people
can really live to be 120. Of course, in that case my skepticism would be
focussed on teh 128 year old, Mme Calment would be forgotten, and we would
still be here having the same argument.
So you see, I'm not completely impossible to satisfy. If there was as much
evidence of people reaching 120 as there is for people reaching 115, i would
think it highly likely.
Peter J King
> I am not aware of any claims that the proper statement
> (Einstein-Bose-Rosen(sp?) paradox) has been set up experimentally.
> Albert Einstein deliberately constructed this paradox to document how to
> conduct FTL communication.
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR).
The claim about Einstein's reasons for setting up the paradox is somewhat
odd. He was actually concerned to refute the Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics.
PJK
Nystulc
>And you've just replied to the *only* post which *doesn't* address the
>logic.
You must learn PATIENCE, my son.
Glen Wheeler
> [..]
>
>Half-Orcs: Probably a bit longer than a normal (non-dunedan) human.
>We know of at least one Orc who lived over 350 years (& he did not die
>of old age). The tradition in D&D is to make orcs and half-orcs
>short-lived, though.
>
As Timo already pointed out orcs are simply corrupted elves...thus
their lifespan should be comparable. There is no reason they can't be
immortal.
--
Glen
Nystulc
As for Orcs, it is my opinion that they are immortal. But my paragraph above
addressed Half-Orcs. While their are many sort of Man-Orc crossbreeds
(including those who are, for all practical purposes, Orcs), the Angband
Half-Orcs are almost certainly intended to be based on those who are Mortal Men
with significant Orc heritage.
In other words, the Angband Half-Orc is based on the Southerner at Bree, and
others of Sharkey's Men, who can pass for human, rather than on the Uruk-Hai..
Therefore, like Mortal "Half-Elves", they might merely have a somewhat extended
life-expectancy.
BTW, I see no reason to assume that Orcs are immortal in the sense of having
eternal bodies. Morgoth's attempts to corrupt them could have had negative
effects on their physical longevity. Nonetheless, they are spiritually
immortal in that their spirits do not leave the World upon death. I always
imagining that they keep getting killed, and then reincarnated as (surptise!)
Orcs.
Which might explain why some of them still remember Biter and Beater from
Gondolin.
Glen Wheeler
>As for Orcs, it is my opinion that they are immortal. But my paragraph above
>addressed Half-Orcs. While their are many sort of Man-Orc crossbreeds
>(including those who are, for all practical purposes, Orcs), the Angband
>Half-Orcs are almost certainly intended to be based on those who are Mortal Men
>with significant Orc heritage.
>
>In other words, the Angband Half-Orc is based on the Southerner at Bree, and
>others of Sharkey's Men, who can pass for human, rather than on the Uruk-Hai..
>
>Therefore, like Mortal "Half-Elves", they might merely have a somewhat extended
>life-expectancy.
>
Actually it is my opinion that this whole age thing is a little
silly. Implement counting years, that sounds good for flavour. Life
expectancy? Too much realism for my taste.
BUT IF the general consensus is to go ahead with aging, then
half-elves (and therefore half-orcs) should choose either elven
(orcish) immortality or human death.
>BTW, I see no reason to assume that Orcs are immortal in the sense of having
>eternal bodies. Morgoth's attempts to corrupt them could have had negative
>effects on their physical longevity. Nonetheless, they are spiritually
>immortal in that their spirits do not leave the World upon death. I always
>imagining that they keep getting killed, and then reincarnated as (surptise!)
>Orcs.
>
Er. Does anybody else get a sense of contradiction here?
The 'eternal body' syndrome is a symptom of the eternal life.
Morgoth's corruption had many effects, but one such as weakening the
body and spirit...this seems like something Morgoth would abolish.
"Great Lord of Darkness...this one is evil, cruel and vicious...but
the body is not eternal, the spirit is not immortal."
*squish* goes the poor minion. And so the corrupting starts again.
> [..]
--
Glen
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
Einstein was out to illustrate why quantum mechanics is philosophically
bankrupt, without regard to interpretation. This is commonly thought to imply
an advocation of "hidden variables" alternatives to the standard model. I
don't have a firm enough historical understanding to say whether this is
correct, or not. The paradox does superficially document how the standard
model of quantum mechanics explicitly permits FTL communication, which would
make it very difficult to integrate with General Relativity.
Bell's Inequality (1964) documents how to use Bohm's restatement (1951) of the
EPR paradox (1935) to empirically discriminate between a wide variety (if not
all) "hidden variables" alternatives to the standard model, and the standard
model. Basically, FTL communication is possible with a Bohm-style setup only
when Bell's Inequality is violated -- which requires serious deviations in
predictions from the standard model. Without easy access to both papers, I
refuse to have an opinion as to whether Bohm's restatement is actually
equivalent. This was very controversial at the time.
As one of several metaphysical interpretations of quantum mechanics, the
Copenhagen interpretation is as equally susceptible to refutation as the
many-worlds interpretation: that is, not at all. AFAIK, there is no difference
to the empirical predictions between these two (or any of many other)
interpretations of (the standard model) of quantum mechanics. You're welcome
to present, or mention indexes to, explicit counterexamples.
The Copenhagen interpretation is particularly offensive to philosophical
materialism because its refusal to consider observation as an operation
*within* a sufficiently isolated quantum mechanical system is formally related
to the notion of a purely non-physical spirit. (Before I could claim
equivalent, I would have to pin down a number of concepts so that it was clear
what I was saying.)
Andrew Perron
wrote:
>On 03 Feb 2003 12:00:58 GMT, nys...@cs.com (Nystulc) wrote:
<snip>
>>BTW, I see no reason to assume that Orcs are immortal in the sense of having
>>eternal bodies. Morgoth's attempts to corrupt them could have had negative
>>effects on their physical longevity. Nonetheless, they are spiritually
>>immortal in that their spirits do not leave the World upon death. I always
>>imagining that they keep getting killed, and then reincarnated as (surptise!)
>>Orcs.
>
> Er. Does anybody else get a sense of contradiction here?
> The 'eternal body' syndrome is a symptom of the eternal life.
>Morgoth's corruption had many effects, but one such as weakening the
>body and spirit...this seems like something Morgoth would abolish.
> "Great Lord of Darkness...this one is evil, cruel and vicious...but
>the body is not eternal, the spirit is not immortal."
> *squish* goes the poor minion. And so the corrupting starts again.
The thing is, though, bodies are much easier to corrupt than spirits,
and after all it was Eru who caused the Elves to be tied to the World
in the first place. Surely even Morgoth wouldn't have veto power over
him in that case.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, who thinks the reincarnation idea
makes sense.
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
>
> >Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning.
> >Qualitatively,
> >it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
> >not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
> >[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
> >actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
> ....
> In any event, I do not see how my POV, which is simply an application of the
> skeptical and scientific principle that extraordinary claims require
> extraordinary proof, could in any way be characterized as "faith-based"
Skepticism, as a dominant philosophy (rather than an auxilliary trait) is
fundamentally incompatible with the falsifiability criterion I use as the
fundamental trait of science: true application of skepticism will blind the
devout skeptic to contrary evidence. Along the way to that extreme, it becomes
an operational religion.
Caradhras
news:20030203011734...@mb-mg.news.cs.com:
>>Then again, neither is anything which doesn't address the body of
>>evidence used to back a particular claim up.
> You seem to believe that the nature of the claim is not relevant. By
> this standard, I should as readily accept a news story about a child
> kidnapped by Martians, as I would one about a child kidnapped by
> parents in a custody dispute.
Read the text you quoted again. Your example ignores the
(fundamental) concept of addressing the evidence backing a claim. Your
use of this example implies that you would reject, a priori, a story
about Martians abducting a child before even examining the evidence in
favour of it. Unless the claim is logically contradictory or impossible,
you must examine the evidence behind it before making a judgement.
(Perhaps you believe that the concept of Martians existing is totally
impossbile--but the concept of a human being living to 120 years old is
far from impossible.)
Timo Pietilä
Nystulc wrote:
> Matthew Furrow wrote:
> "curcular". There is nothing circular about it. I have merely taken a
> phenomenon (records that appear to indicate that a person is 121 years old) and
> chosen the more likely of two competing explanations for the phenomenon.
>
> Explanation #1: She really did manage to reach 121.
> Explanation #2: The records are somehow wrong.
So you say that it is more probable that records are wrong than that she
did manage to live past 120? If you do not have opposite evidence then I
would say that records are very probable right and there is nothing
unlikely that she lived past 120. After all 120 isn't *that* high. I
don't see any reason not to believe that one can live past 120.
And I can believe that these particular records are checked _very_
thoroughly.
Why do you think that it is more probable that records are wrong than
that she lived past 120?
John B. Whelan
> On 2003-02-03 06:51:03, nys...@cs.com (Nystulc) wrote:
>
> > Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
> >
> > >Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning.
> > >Qualitatively,
> > >it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
> > >not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
> > >[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
> > >actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
> >
> > I suppose I should take that as an insult. I note that you have not actually
> > addressed yourself to the logic in my argument. Are you incapable of doing so?
>
> Based on the argument I read, I judged it not pragmatic to address the question
> of whether inducting a hard age limit from historical data was either credible,
> or not credible. I may have been mistaken in my snap opinion that such an
> exercise was not useful. Such an exercise would have had to review both 'for'
> and 'against' items.
I don't know what you mean. I was not aware of having attempted to
induce a hard age limit from historical data. The closest I have come
to this was a very tentative estimate that 115 is the highest age for
which there is, at present, sufficient evidence of human attainment.
But I could just as easily have guessed 113. It is perfectly possible
that all higher claims are the result of inaccurate records.
> An example of something lending credibility is the requirement of overactive
> teleromase to 'immortalize' cancer cells. An example of something detracting
> credibility are the well-documented non-prescription treatments for severely
> slowing down and/or reversing osteoarthritis.
Right you are!
> > In any event, I do not see how my POV, which is simply an application of the
> > skeptical and scientific principle that extraordinary claims require
> > extraordinary proof, could in any way be characterized as "faith-based"
>
> "....extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"
> Skeptical, yes. Metaphysical, yes. Historical, yes. Science, totally
> irrelevant. (The auxilliary belief "I may be completely wrong about this --
> let's check again", which is very helpful in science, does develop
> skepticism.)
I don't get you. Are you saying that the principle that
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is irrelevant to
science? I'm not sure how many scientists would agree with that.
It is a well known phenomenon in the field of science that, if a
scientist makes an extraordinary claim, or announces an extraordinary
discovery or breakthrough, then 19 times out of 20, he turns out to be
wrong, and he simply screwed up his data, or is lying, or is gone
bonkers. Yet for some mysterious reason, scientists who report boring
results of their experiments, are far less likely to be mistaken,
lying, or bonkers.
> I would take your argument as giving credence to 'there have been no humans
> within the past several centuries who has lived to 120.'
Bzzzt. Wrong. I never said such. I have merely pointed out that
there is not, under the circumstances, adequate evidence that this has
ever happened (which at most suggests, but does not prove, that it may
be beyond what is presently humanly possible, given the enormously
large pool of humans from whom data is drawn).
Specifically, my claim in the case of this French Lady, is that the
most likely explanation for her claim is that the records are wrong.
Even if I knew, with absolute certainty, that humans do have a 1 in a
billion chance of passing the age of 121, I would still doubt her,
because the odds of her being a fraud would be far greater than her
being that one in a billion.
In short, she is the winner of a game that, logically, can be expected
to reward convincing cheaters over genuine claimants. The mere fact
that she has won such a game is powerful evidence that she is a
convincing cheater, and not a genuine claimant.
John B. Whelan
> On 03 Feb 2003 12:00:58 GMT, nys...@cs.com (Nystulc) wrote:
>
> >As for Orcs, it is my opinion that they are immortal. But my paragraph above
> >addressed Half-Orcs. While their are many sort of Man-Orc crossbreeds
> >(including those who are, for all practical purposes, Orcs), the Angband
> >Half-Orcs are almost certainly intended to be based on those who are Mortal Men
> >with significant Orc heritage.
> >
> >In other words, the Angband Half-Orc is based on the Southerner at Bree, and
> >others of Sharkey's Men, who can pass for human, rather than on the Uruk-Hai..
> >
> >Therefore, like Mortal "Half-Elves", they might merely have a somewhat extended
> >life-expectancy.
> >
>
> Actually it is my opinion that this whole age thing is a little
> silly. Implement counting years, that sounds good for flavour. Life
> expectancy? Too much realism for my taste.
Well, okay, but ... I said it first. See the first article in the
thread.
I was engaging in debate for the sake of those who like to experiment
with variants. The changes I suggested for Vanilla were not radical
at all.
I'd like to restate them, if no-one minds:
Suggestion #1:
Reduce the length of the day from 100,000 turns to 25,000 turns.
This is still more than enough time to visit every store in town
several times over without the light changing, so it will hardly
affect game play (but see suggestion #4).
Suggestion #2:
Have characters "age" increase by 1yr for every 9,000,000 turns
(corresponding to 360 days a year x 25,000 turns).
Suggestion #3:
Make the time jump ahead a day (25,000 turns) every time a
character gets "lost in a maze of staircases" or otherwise activates a
level-switching effect. This time passage has no effect on game play
(nobody suddenly dies of starvation or poison because of it).
Suggestion #4:
Cause time to pass whenever characters spend time in stores.
(Currently, one always leaves a store exactly 10 turns after entering
- representing merely the cost of moving that one space.) A simple
formula might be 1000 turns each store entry, no matter what you do
there. Alternatively, it could be 100 turns for each transaction.
Again, this would have no effect on game play - no starving to death
while haggling - except one might leave the store to find that the sun
has gone down while you were inside.
These modest changes would add a small amount of flavor without
changing the nature of the game. This flavor value would consist of
seeing ones age numbers go up a small handful of times, so that one is
perhaps no longer a teen by the time one faces Morgoth.
John B. Whelan
>
> >As for Orcs, it is my opinion that they are immortal. But my paragraph above
> >addressed Half-Orcs. While their are many sort of Man-Orc crossbreeds
> >(including those who are, for all practical purposes, Orcs), the Angband
> >Half-Orcs are almost certainly intended to be based on those who are Mortal Men
> >with significant Orc heritage.
> >
> >In other words, the Angband Half-Orc is based on the Southerner at Bree, and
> >others of Sharkey's Men, who can pass for human, rather than on the Uruk-Hai..
> >
> >Therefore, like Mortal "Half-Elves", they might merely have a somewhat extended
> >life-expectancy.
> >
>
> BUT IF the general consensus is to go ahead with aging, then
> half-elves (and therefore half-orcs) should choose either elven
> (orcish) immortality or human death.
You are confusing Angband Half-Elves with those in Tolkien. They are
clearly not intended to be the precisely the same.
The "Half-Elves" we encounter in Tolkien are the offspring of
High-Elves and Dunedain (or Men of even greater Mythic stature). The
design of the "Half-Elves" in Angband clearly indicates they are
supposed to be a cross between Lesser Elves and Normal Humans.
Furthermore, the choice was granted to Tolkien's High-Elves by the
Valar. Their is no reason to suppose that Morgoth or Sauron or
Saruman had the power to grant Half-Orcs a similar choice.
Furthermore, not all "Half-Elves" were granted this choice.
Certainly, it was not granted to the children of Arwen and Aragorn.
Angband Half-Elves seem to have been inspired, in part, by those in
old-edition D&D, where they were mortal and had a life expectancy of
about twice that of a normal human. Unless we are to totally redesign
"Half-Elves" to resemble superior type encountered in Tolkien, I see
no reason to change this.
> >BTW, I see no reason to assume that Orcs are immortal in the sense of having
> >eternal bodies. Morgoth's attempts to corrupt them could have had negative
> >effects on their physical longevity. Nonetheless, they are spiritually
> >immortal in that their spirits do not leave the World upon death. I always
> >imagining that they keep getting killed, and then reincarnated as (surptise!)
> >Orcs.
>
> Er. Does anybody else get a sense of contradiction here?
> The 'eternal body' syndrome is a symptom of the eternal life.
No. In Tolkien, they do not necessarily go hand in hand. Dwarves,
for instance, had limited life-expectancies. But their spirits were
tied to Middle Earth, and, on some occasions at least, they could be
reincarnated. They were therefore not "Mortal" in the sense of Men
and Hobbits, because they could not truly "die" from the World. Elves
and Wizards could both be slain, and, absent the ideal conditions of
the Undying Lands, their bodies could be worn down and ultimately
destroyed with the passage of time. Nonetheless, Elves and Wizards
were "Immortal" in the sense that their spirits remained tied to the
world after the destruction of their bodies, and, with the help of
greater powers, they could sometimes be reincarnated in new bodies.
> Morgoth's corruption had many effects, but one such as weakening the
> body and spirit...this seems like something Morgoth would abolish.
> "Great Lord of Darkness...this one is evil, cruel and vicious...but
> the body is not eternal, the spirit is not immortal."
> *squish* goes the poor minion. And so the corrupting starts again.
I'm not sure I get what you are saying. Orcs were designed to be fast
breeders, so Morgoth would have little need for physical longevity in
individual specimens. They slaughter eachother at an alarming rate in
any event, and are used as cannon-fodder in wars, so longevity would
not do them much good. The Orc's spirit would remain Immortal and
enslaved to Morgoth, and he can probably reincarnate slain orcs every
time a Orc-lady gets pregnant.
Still, as I said, we know that at least one Orc lived over 350 years,
so they may possibly be immune to physical aging (which is not nearly
the same thing as saying their bodies are eternal - lots of things can
kill you besides old age).
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote in message news:...
> > On 2003-02-03 06:51:03, nys...@cs.com (Nystulc) wrote:
> >
> > > Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
> > >
> > > >Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning.
> > > >Qualitatively,
> > > >it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
> > > >not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
> > > >[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
> > > >actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
> > >
> > > I suppose I should take that as an insult. I note that you have not actually
> > > addressed yourself to the logic in my argument. Are you incapable of doing so?
> >
> > Based on the argument I read, I judged it not pragmatic to address the question
> > of whether inducting a hard age limit from historical data was either credible,
> > or not credible. I may have been mistaken in my snap opinion that such an
> > exercise was not useful. Such an exercise would have had to review both 'for'
> > and 'against' items.
>
> I don't know what you mean. I was not aware of having attempted to
> induce a hard age limit from historical data. The closest I have come
> to this was a very tentative estimate that 115 is the highest age for
> which there is, at present, sufficient evidence of human attainment.
> But I could just as easily have guessed 113. It is perfectly possible
> that all higher claims are the result of inaccurate records.
My evaluation of the tenor of responses across several threads gave a misleading
impression, clearly.
> ....
> > > In any event, I do not see how my POV, which is simply an application of the
> > > skeptical and scientific principle that extraordinary claims require
> > > extraordinary proof, could in any way be characterized as "faith-based"
> >
> > "....extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"
> > Skeptical, yes. Metaphysical, yes. Historical, yes. Science, totally
> > irrelevant. (The auxilliary belief "I may be completely wrong about this --
> > let's check again", which is very helpful in science, does develop
> > skepticism.)
>
> I don't get you. Are you saying that the principle that
> "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is irrelevant to
> science? I'm not sure how many scientists would agree with that.
I'm trained as a mathematician -- not as a scientist. This changes my standard
of both deductive and inductive proof. You might say that I don't have good
background for the notion of 'extraordinary' proof, and that a lot of what
passes for 'proof' in the scientific papers I have inspected is *very*
unconvincing to me. Electron neutrino decay is one recent example of a
completely unconvincing discovery that is reasonably well-accepted. The very
recent dispute over whether a Jupiter-quasar conjunction can be used to test
General Relativity is another example...as far as I'm concerned, the Asahi
paper claiming the impossibility of measuring the speed of gravity is simply a
paperweight filled with unclear thinking.
> It is a well known phenomenon in the field of science that, if a
> scientist makes an extraordinary claim, or announces an extraordinary
> discovery or breakthrough, then 19 times out of 20, he turns out to be
> wrong, and he simply screwed up his data, or is lying, or is gone
> bonkers. Yet for some mysterious reason, scientists who report boring
To make progress in science, you must take the risk of being completely wrong
when you publish. While that ratio is a good eyeball guess, I'm willing to
guess (from my mathematical experience) that the real "disastrous cluelessness
rate" is a lot higher. You simply have a very high mistake rate out on the
edge.
> results of their experiments, are far less likely to be mistaken,
> lying, or bonkers.
They are doing re-verification work. Even more important, but far lower risk.
> > I would take your argument as giving credence to 'there have been no humans
> > within the past several centuries who has lived to 120.'
>
> Bzzzt. Wrong. I never said such. I have merely pointed out that
> there is not, under the circumstances, adequate evidence that this has
> ever happened (which at most suggests, but does not prove, that it may
> be beyond what is presently humanly possible, given the enormously
> large pool of humans from whom data is drawn).
For a historical argument (which you conducted), thoroughly inadequate evidence
that "this has ever happened" is quite conclusive. I restricted to the past
several centuries because I'm familiar with the extreme difficulties of pushing
genealogical data past the 1700's even in ideal circumstances.
John B. Whelan
Well, that is certainly an impressive sounding pile of gobbledygook,
but how does it relate to me? I have already answered, fairly and
adequately I think, the question as to what evidence might be
sufficient to satisfy me that people have actually survived to 120.
Do you consider my "falsifiability criteria" to be somehow inadequate?
In any event, to suggest that I am philosophically unsound because I
accept include in my calculations the undeniable reality of innacurate
birth records seems very odd.
Peter J King
> On 2003-02-03 11:17:08, Peter J King <shil...@ermine.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > The claim about Einstein's reasons for setting up the paradox is somewhat
> > odd. He was actually concerned to refute the Copenhagen interpretation of
> > quantum mechanics.
>
> Einstein was out to illustrate why quantum mechanics is philosophically
> bankrupt, without regard to interpretation. This is commonly thought to imply
> an advocation of "hidden variables" alternatives to the standard model.
That doesn't make any sense, I'm afraid; even aside from the fact that
Einstein had no problem with quantum mechanics in itself, hidden variables
approaches are merely alternative interpretations to the Copenhagen
interpretation (which Einstein once called "the Heisenberg-Bohr
tranqilising philosophy -- or religion?"). EPR doesn't challenge quantum
theory, just the claim that it's impossible in principle, not merely in
practice, to determine both a particle's position and spin (for example;
actually EPR used position and momentum). If one measures the spin of one
singlet-state particle and the position of the other, one can infer (so
goes the objection) the position and spin of their partners, showing that
both spin and position are determinate independently of our measurement of
them.
The Aspect experiment (first performed by Alain Aspect, in 1979, I think)
is generally regarded to have shown that Bell's inequality is
violated, and have confirmed predictions of quantum theory that
EPR wouldn't work, and that measuring the spin of one particle changes not
only its position but that of its partner (and the same for position
regarding spin). For an on-line sketch of the experiment, see
<url:http://roxanne.roxanne.org/epr/qmS.html>.
For those who might be following this discussion (if there is anyone)
and who'd like to look at an introduction to the philosophical questions,
Lawrence Sklar's "Philosophy of Physics" (OUP, 1992) is a good place to
start (though oddly he doesn't mention Aspect).
Peter J. King
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote in message news:...
> > On 2003-02-03 06:51:03, nys...@cs.com (Nystulc) wrote:
> >
> > > Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
> > >
> > > >Nystulc, the above is an excellent piece of religious reasoning.
> > > >Qualitatively,
> > > >it is on the order of the faith-based explanation of why Bell's theorem does
> > > >not permit FTL communication -- that I once read in Scientific American.
> > > >[Fortunately, I managed to get a competent explanation of the test that
> > > >actually was done -- on a special case.] It has nothing to do with science.
> >
> > > ....
> >
> > > In any event, I do not see how my POV, which is simply an application of the
> > > skeptical and scientific principle that extraordinary claims require
> > > extraordinary proof, could in any way be characterized as "faith-based"
> >
> > Skepticism, as a dominant philosophy (rather than an auxilliary trait) is
> > fundamentally incompatible with the falsifiability criterion I use as the
> > fundamental trait of science: true application of skepticism will blind the
> > devout skeptic to contrary evidence. Along the way to that extreme, it becomes
> > an operational religion.
>
> Well, that is certainly an impressive sounding pile of gobbledygook,
> but how does it relate to me? I have already answered, fairly and
> adequately I think, the question as to what evidence might be
> sufficient to satisfy me that people have actually survived to 120.
> Do you consider my "falsifiability criteria" to be somehow inadequate?
Much of that answer (as to what evidence would be convincing) was *much* clearer
after 2AM CST (February 3, 2003), and substantially clearer after circa 9AM CST
(February 3, 2003). I'm tracking four or five different threads when making my
snap guesses as to where you're coming from on this.
You have indeed done much to reduce the applicability of the above (which was an
addendum (circa 9AM CST) to the primary post which was *before* 2AM CST).
> ....
Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
> On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
>
> > On 2003-02-03 11:17:08, Peter J King wrote:
> >
> > > The claim about Einstein's reasons for setting up the paradox is somewhat
> > > odd. He was actually concerned to refute the Copenhagen interpretation of
> > > quantum mechanics.
> >
> > Einstein was out to illustrate why quantum mechanics is philosophically
> > bankrupt, without regard to interpretation. This is commonly thought to imply
> > an advocation of "hidden variables" alternatives to the standard model.
>
> That doesn't make any sense, I'm afraid; even aside from the fact that
> Einstein had no problem with quantum mechanics in itself, hidden variables
Einstein considered quantum mechanics definitively wrong, even though it made
correct predictions. "The Lord is subtle, but he does not play dice with the
universe." He had a *lot* of problems with it. That's why he spent three
decades trying to find a Grand Unified Theory.
> approaches are merely alternative interpretations to the Copenhagen
> interpretation (which Einstein once called "the Heisenberg-Bohr
> tranqilising philosophy -- or religion?"). EPR doesn't challenge quantum
AFAIK, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't care about hidden variables or lack
thereof, any more than many-worlds does.
> theory, just the claim that it's impossible in principle, not merely in
> practice, to determine both a particle's position and spin (for example;
> actually EPR used position and momentum). If one measures the spin of one
The Bell Inequalities are intended to apply to Bohm's restatement of the EPR
paradox. The above increases my suspicions that testing the Bohm setup doesn't
test EPR.
> singlet-state particle and the position of the other, one can infer (so
> goes the objection) the position and spin of their partners, showing that
> both spin and position are determinate independently of our measurement of
> them.
>
> The Aspect experiment (first performed by Alain Aspect, in 1979, I think)
> is generally regarded to have shown that Bell's inequality is
> violated, and have confirmed predictions of quantum theory that
Recall: violation of Bell's Inequality invalidates the standard model, and is
support for hidden variables theories. That's probably why the Aspect
experiment is equivocally "Weird science". Also, it is reputedly difficult to
conduct the Bohm setup, and even more difficut to conduct the EPR setup. Both
tests require a very high efficiency of detection.
> EPR wouldn't work, and that measuring the spin of one particle changes not
> only its position but that of its partner (and the same for position
> regarding spin). For an on-line sketch of the experiment, see
I *did* find out how to buy copies of the relevant articles, so I should
(eventually) be in a position to judge whether the Aspect experiment even
attempts to replicate the setup required to test Bell's Inequalities.
> ....
Kieron Dunbar
(in reply to me)
> Correct. I was merely stating that she is one in 8 billion people on earth,
> which, in turn implies she is also one in a very great, great many really old
> people, the precise numbers which I do not know. This is adequate to support
> my position..
That only demonstrates that picking someone from that group at random would be
unlikely to come up with the oldest person alive (not her, obviously, as she's
dead).
You need a device such as your "99.99%" figure (which I assume is plucked out of
thin air) before you can support a claim that a person who is believed to be the
oldest of that group isn't as old as they are believed to be.
> live expectancy at birth). When a person gets past a certain age, it gets
> really hard to distinguish the 90 year olds from the 110 year olds. All 110
Except that no 90 year old will have 80 year old children. The most useful role
the current medical condition of such a person plays is to demonstrate that the
person has all the distinguishing characteristics her previous medical record
would lead people to expect.
>>Then again, neither is anything which doesn't address the body of evidence
>>used to back a particular claim up.
> You seem to believe that the nature of the claim is not relevant. By this
Whereas you seem to believe that the nature of the claim is all that matters.
I don't believe that living to 122 is impossible for a human to do, so I need
to know more than that a claim that someone has done so has been made before I
can say that that claim is false. You don't appear to.
> standard, I should as readily accept a news story about a child kidnapped by
> Martians, as I would one about a child kidnapped by parents in a custody
> dispute.
It's your straw man, you do whatever you want with it.
--
kwaheri, Kieron (reverse username to reply)
R Dan Henry
<cara...@my-deja.com> declared:
>nys...@cs.com (Nystulc) wrote in
>news:20030203011734...@mb-mg.news.cs.com:
>
>>>Then again, neither is anything which doesn't address the body of
>>>evidence used to back a particular claim up.
>
>> You seem to believe that the nature of the claim is not relevant. By
>> this standard, I should as readily accept a news story about a child
>> kidnapped by Martians, as I would one about a child kidnapped by
>> parents in a custody dispute.
>
> Read the text you quoted again. Your example ignores the
>(fundamental) concept of addressing the evidence backing a claim.
The nature of the evidence is: a document that, even if it is
authentic and applies to the person claiming it, requires only a
single digit error to inflate the age of the person. Single digit
errors in documents are not uncommon.
>Your
>use of this example implies that you would reject, a priori, a story
>about Martians abducting a child before even examining the evidence in
>favour of it.
No, that's not what he said. He said the evidence for the Martian case
would have to be stronger to reach an acceptable level, as compared to
the custody dispute case.
>Unless the claim is logically contradictory or impossible,
>you must examine the evidence behind it before making a judgement.
So, you'd not believe anything without examining the evidence
yourself? Because a newspaper article is usually taken as sufficient
cause to believe that, say, the United States has started an invasion
of Iraq. Do you mean that I should refuse to believe this unless I
have original spy satellite photos which I can demonstrate were
undoctored and which show the events? Or do you mean to say that a
newspaper article is sufficient reason to believe in a tale of alien
abduction?
>(Perhaps you believe that the concept of Martians existing is totally
>impossbile--but the concept of a human being living to 120 years old is
>far from impossible.)
He has never claimed it was impossible, only improbable.
An eyewitness claims that the rabbit removed from the hutch was white.
It has been shown that a witness will make an error in rabbit color
only one time in a hundred. Do you believe the witness?
You learn that there were three hundred rabbits in the hutch, half of
whom were dark gray, 149 of which were brown, and only one of which
was white. Furthermore, it is agreed that the rabbit was removed by
reaching in and selecting at random. Do you still believe the witness?
R Dan Henry
B. Whelan) declared:
>These modest changes would add a small amount of flavor without
>changing the nature of the game. This flavor value would consist of
>seeing ones age numbers go up a small handful of times, so that one is
>perhaps no longer a teen by the time one faces Morgoth.
A simpler solution would be to eliminate the Age listing and let the
player imagine his character to be whatever age he wishes.
R Dan Henry
B. Whelan) declared:
>Furthermore, not all "Half-Elves" were granted this choice.
>Certainly, it was not granted to the children of Arwen and Aragorn.
Their children were Men from birth, as their parents were Men (i.e.
both counted among the Secondborn, not both male). The oddity is
Elrond's children being given a choice. I don't know of any
explanation as to why they got one, but the descendants of Elros never
did. Perhaps if Tolkien had finished his revisions, Elrond would have
fathered his children before his choice and thus they would have been
born of indeterminate parentage. But this would have been difficult as
the existing chronology leaves the length of the Second Age (plus
change) between the events. But it is consistent that the Gift of Men
can never be revoked, although it is odd that the choice of Elrond
doesn't also pass on to his children.
>I'm not sure I get what you are saying. Orcs were designed to be fast
>breeders, so Morgoth would have little need for physical longevity in
>individual specimens. They slaughter eachother at an alarming rate in
>any event, and are used as cannon-fodder in wars, so longevity would
>not do them much good. The Orc's spirit would remain Immortal and
>enslaved to Morgoth, and he can probably reincarnate slain orcs every
>time a Orc-lady gets pregnant.
I don't think Morgoth can do this. At least, not unless the Orc
*wants* to go back. Otherwise, the Orc can heed the call to Mandos and
stay in the Halls of Mandos where he is not likely to ever be let out
(at least not until the end of time). This assumes that Orcs are still
persons and not automata or soulless beasts, which were among the
possibilities Tolkien considered. (I vote for persons, myself.)
Neodymium
<timo.p...@helsinki.fi> wrote in rec.games.roguelike.angband...
> Are half-orcs mortal like man or do they choose like half-elves which
> one they take, immortality or mortality? We do not know. Orcs are
> (depending of source) corrupted elves so they are immortal.
Corrupting them might change that, you know. According to the
Judeochristian garden of eden myth, corruption of the human race made it
mortal, so there's support in mythological belief for such a
transformation to occur.
--
Quicquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Replace nospam.invalid with Microsoft's shoddy free email
provider domain to reply.
Nystulc
>On 3 Feb 2003 15:16:38 -0800, in a fit of madness nys...@cs.com (John
>B. Whelan) declared:
>
>>Furthermore, not all "Half-Elves" were granted this choice.
>>Certainly, it was not granted to the children of Arwen and Aragorn.
>
>Their children were Men from birth, as their parents were Men (i.e.
>both counted among the Secondborn, not both male).
I don't, of course, argue with this. But whether they are considered
"Half-Elves" still depends very much on what you mean by "Half-Elf".
Certainly, they are Mortals with a very significant portion of Elf Heritage.
They could easily qualify as "Half-Elves" in the Angband-sense, since Angband
Half-Elves are never precisely defined, and were probably intended to represent
Mortals with significant Elven heritage, and not Immortals like Elrond, who
have significant Human heritage.
>The oddity is
>Elrond's children being given a choice. I don't know of any
>explanation as to why they got one, but the descendants of Elros never
>did. Perhaps if Tolkien had finished his revisions, Elrond would have
>fathered his children before his choice and thus they would have been
>born of indeterminate parentage. But this would have been difficult as
>the existing chronology leaves the length of the Second Age (plus
>change) between the events. But it is consistent that the Gift of Men
>can never be revoked, although it is odd that the choice of Elrond
>doesn't also pass on to his children.
>
>>I'm not sure I get what you are saying. Orcs were designed to be fast
>>breeders, so Morgoth would have little need for physical longevity in
>>individual specimens. They slaughter eachother at an alarming rate in
>>any event, and are used as cannon-fodder in wars, so longevity would
>>not do them much good. The Orc's spirit would remain Immortal and
>>enslaved to Morgoth, and he can probably reincarnate slain orcs every
>>time a Orc-lady gets pregnant.
>
>I don't think Morgoth can do this. At least, not unless the Orc
>*wants* to go back. Otherwise, the Orc can heed the call to Mandos and
>stay in the Halls of Mandos where he is not likely to ever be let out
>(at least not until the end of time). This assumes that Orcs are still
>persons and not automata or soulless beasts, which were among the
>possibilities Tolkien considered. (I vote for persons, myself.)
While an Orc *can* perhaps heed the call of Mandos, it is doubtful that one
*would* heed the call of Mandos. If an Orc spirit were to do this, it would
probably be something equivalent of a form of repentance. At that point he
would, for most practical purposes, cease to be an Orc. he would once again be
considered an Elf, doomed, no doubt, to spend vast amounts of time in the Rehab
Wards of Mandos.
One possible way of looking at it is, that if his Spirit had heeded the call
of Mandos after the death of his Elven body, he never would have fallen under
Morgoth's power, and been reborn as an Orc.
Morgoth and Sauron also, in theory, have the power to go to Valinor and subject
themselves to the authority of the Valar. They choose not to do so, and remain
in rebellion. Similar rules probably apply to other evil Immortal spirits,
such as those that inhabit Orcs and Trolls. They may have the power to subject
themselves to the authority of Mandos, but they choose not to, and that choice
is part of what makes them Evil. They have chosen sides, against the Valar.
They have succumbed to the lies and temptations of Morgoth.
I cannot prove this, and I know of no place where Tolkien articulates it as
such. It is merely a pet theory of mine. It helps explain alot - like how
Orcs can be automatically Evil since birth, and why none choose to be Good.
The explanation is that they have already made their Choice, and if they were
not already entirely corrupt, they never would be reborn as Orcs in the first
place.
Tolkien does comment somewhere that, if an Orc were to plea for mercy and
forgiveness, it would be the moral duty of humans to grant it. However, he
remarks that it is almost inconceivable that an Orc should do this, since they
have become so corrupt that Mercy to them is a totally alien concept. It
therefore stands to reason that an Orc would never consider the possibility of
subjecting himself to the authority and mercy of Mandos.
Of course, there is also the possibility that some souls or spirits can become
enslaved to Evil without having made a free choice in the matter. This
happened to the Ringwraiths, for instance, whose souls are held captive for
millenia through preventing their actual death (hence, they are "undead"). To
a lesser extent, this also happened to Gollum, and even to Frodo, who was
entirely morally blameless.