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POLITICS: A Creation of the System
Left-wing historian and Hillary supporter Sean Wilentz has been going on about this for some time, but his latest in The New Republic does make a significant point:
Obama's advantage hinges on a system that, whatever the actual intentions behind it, seems custom-made to hobble Democratic chances in the fall. It depends on ignoring one of the central principles of American electoral politics, one that will be operative on a state-by-state basis this November, which is that the winner takes all. If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.
Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in primary states choose their nominee on the basis of a convoluted system of proportional distribution of delegates that varies from state to state and that obtains in neither congressional nor presidential elections. It is this eccentric system that has given Obama his lead in the delegate count. If the Democrats heeded the "winner takes all" democracy that prevails in American politics, and that determines the president, Clinton would be comfortably in front. In a popular-vote winner-take-all system, Clinton would now have 1,743 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,257. If she splits the 10 remaining contests with Obama, as seems plausible, with Clinton taking Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Puerto Rico, and Obama winning North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Guam, she'd pick up another 364 pledged delegates. She'd have 2,107 before a single superdelegate was wooed. You'd need 2,208 to be the Democratic nominee. That would leave her barely a hundred votes shy, and well ahead of Obama. It is almost inconceivable that she would fail to gain the required number of superdelegates easily.
Now consider the delegate count and its connection to the popular vote. In Nevada, Clinton also won a popular majority, despite pressure from union officials on the rank and file attending the caucuses to vote for Obama. Yet Obama claims, on the primary electoral map posted on his official Web site, that he actually won Nevada -- presumably because rules that gave greater weight to rural than urban votes mean he won a marginal edge in the Byzantine allotment of the state's delegates. Why, in deference to the clear-cut Nevada popular majority, doesn't Obama cede the majority of the state's delegates to Clinton? Because, according to the rules, he's entitled to those delegates. But why are the rules suddenly sacrosanct and the popular vote irrelevant? Might it be because the rules, and not the popular vote, now benefit Obama? And what about Texas, another state where Clinton won the popular vote but has not been awarded the majority of pledged delegates? Once again, for Obama, the rules are suddenly all-important -- because the rules, and not the popular majority, now favor him.
Obama's totals thus far have come in great part from state caucuses nearly as much as from actual primaries. (Eleven out of the 30 states and other entities he has won held caucuses, not primaries. Washington held both, as did Texas, where Obama won the caucuses and lost the popular vote.) Of the two systems, caucuses are by far the less democratic -- which may be why there will be exactly zero caucuses in this fall's general election. By excluding voters who cannot attend during the limited times available, the caucuses skew participation toward affluent activists and students, and against working people, mothers and caregivers, and the military. Clinton's victories, by contrast, have come overwhelmingly in states with primaries, not caucuses. Obama is certainly entitled to the delegates he won in the caucuses. But he can hardly, on that account, claim that he is clearly the popular favorite.
Now, the rules are the rules, and I'm a firm believer that there's no changing them in the middle of the game; the Democrats are stuck with the system they chose. But much as I concluded at the end of the GOP race, the best possible primary system, like the best spring training baseball games, is one that replicates as closely as possible the conditions of the fall election - no caucuses, no proportional delegates. It's no accident that the caucuses disproportionately favored Obama and Romney, two candidates with tons of money and organization and a hard core of committed followers, over the kinds of candidates who have broader appeal of the type that generally prospers in November (this is a general point - I've long since given up trying to figure whether Obama or Hillary is the stronger general election candidate, other than that a Hillary victory under present circumstances would probably be the best outcome for Republicans for the demoralizing effect it would have on several key voting blocs). And that's before we get to the insanity of the superdelegate system, which exists mainly in the Democratic system because the Democrats don't trust their own voters not to get carried away with left-wing nonsense. And have you tried to get an accurate delegate count lately for the Democratic race? It's impossible due to the bizarre opacity of their rules.
There are fair arguments to be made about open vs. closed primaries and the schedule, but it's long past time to bury the caucuses, kill off proportional voting, and otherwise eliminate any obstacle to having the state-by-state winners take an ascertainable, transparent number of delegates at every stage of the game.
Posted by Baseball Crank at 12:39 PM | Politics 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
I agree with 90% of this. However, especially in early primaries when there are several candidates, I can see value in having proportional delegates awarded. Lets say a party has five candidates who all compete in the first four primaries. Four different candidates come in first place (by popular vote), but one candidate comes in second place in all four primaries. Doesn't that candidate show broader appeal then the others? But if all were winner take all, the constant #2 choice would have zero delegates.
This happened to some extent in the Rep. primaries. And, I think it may have been Florida as a winner take all state, where the winner only won the popular vote by 2-3%, and had well below a majority of the vote. Seems a bit unfair to award all the delegates to a candidate who only garners 25-30% of the vote.
Its difficult to devise a system to choose a party's best candidate, when the voters are only that party's members, that perfectly translates to a general election, when, yes, ability to win a state is the only important factor.
Posted by: CT Dad at April 11, 2008 1:13 PM
You defeat your own point of agreement with the article when you concede that you dont know which one is more electable. Obama has slaughtered her in the caucus format, yet the primary format, the argument goes, is a greater predictor of general election success. Then why isnt she clearly the better general election candidate? The polls suggest that Obama is, which most prediction markets , including Republican surveys, agree with. The inherent fallacy in TNR's article is the assumption that he can't win over enough of her big blue state voters in the general to carry the states. Who cares that a majority of them prefer her, as long as they vote for him. That's the question begged.
Posted by: seth soothsayer at April 11, 2008 3:54 PM
Democrats want the USA to be more like Europe, and lead by example w/ this embrace of parliamentary proportional representation.
Posted by: seamus at April 14, 2008 11:07 AM


I started this comic last year around the time when the Dungeon Girls anime was televised. I got the idea from the hot springs scene when Bell accidentally fell into the hot springs and saw all the ladies naked.
What if the ladies saw a naked Bell instead? How would they react? I played around with the scenario and decided that the ladies would react by having big nose bleeds and fainting upon the sight of Bell naked. Haha.
After a while I stopped drawing this comic as I started to run out of steam and wanted to focus on other projects.
I spent much longer on the drawing than I did on the dialogue. In fact, I came up with the dialogue in five minutes when I've completed the whole thing. Haha.
If there's one thing that I'm unhappy about in this comic, it would be the inconsistency of the art style. I stopped and started this comic in-between other projects. and my style became more distinctive along the way. However, instead of drawing everything from scratch to fit my current style, I decided to just finish it.
Dressing up as the Shockmaster!
For Halloween I went to my brother's Halloween party dressed as the Shockmaster.
October had arrived and my brother did indeed arrange a Halloween party for us all. But, I was then under the impression that my Brother decided not to hold a party this year so I decided not to pursue with the Shockmaster costume. It turns out that that I misunderstood, so, my costume idea was back on!
The Shockmaster had a huge Stormtrooper Helmet which was covered in silver paint and sprayed with a lot of glitter. He also had a huge black fluffy coat and denim jeans.
Desperate times called for desperate measures… we had to make a Stormtrooper Helmet ourselves!
I refer to 'ourselves' since my Mum kindly gave me a helping hand with the helmet.
First off, we measured my head with a bucket. Then, we used lots of newspaper and glued it onto the bucket. We had to keep leaving the layers to dry overnight, so, we'd often put them in an airing cupboard to leave them to dry. We decided that my face required room so we then added a fruit bowl underneath the top of the bucket. Plus, it adds stability.
After all this we covered the newspaper with a layer of brown paper. We then shaped the front bit of the helmet using cardboard tubes, covering them first in silver foil. Our next step was to spray paint the whole thing silver. When this was dry we painted the helmet with silver glitter glue to get that sparkly effect. Thus, on the morning of the Halloween party, it was officially complete!
I sort of had my doubts to be honest, I won't lie. Whilst we all did the best we could the helmet did not look anything like a Stormtrooper Helmet nor did it look like the Shockmaster. Haha! We all had a good laugh at it though.
I think as long as it had the comical effect and it makes people laugh, it's all good. It was why I decided to dress up as him in the first place, to make everyone laugh. =) Still, I must say though, people would probably mistake me for a darlik rather than some wrestler from the 90's. Haha!
It was a good evening. I spoke to a couple of new people and we have similar interests in common. I was happy to speak to these new people and I felt like I instigated the conversation at times. Good for me. =D I was a little bit under the weather and felt slightly nervous at knowing or not knowing who may or who may not be there. I did ok though.
I had utmost fun doing the Shockmaster costume. In truth though if I had more time then I reckon I could have done a better job and come better prepared. I felt a little disheartened from time to time and took jokes from my parents perhaps a little too seriously. I did ok under the circumstances. In all honestly I would have been more anxious about the Halloween party had it not been for the more upcoming London trip the following day.


I like your comment about how this blog is an act whose superstitious nature you are quite aware of. It hints at the complexities and cross-currents of self-knowledge (such as it is).
So it's late Thursday; I'm hoping the Chemo went well and you're not too exhausted.
This one hit me harder. I feel unsteady and mildly ill. I slept for an hour or so and then had some soup and that helped some.
I'm with you, sister, on this one hitting harder. I'm only 3 in now, but each has been tougher. Great post though.
I too will be posting a "real" entry tomorrow.
I seem to have appeared as Anonymous, which I do not quite get. I'm sorry you're feeling crappy. I suppose the cumulative effect of chemo must be pretty toxic. Sleep and soup and cossetting, that's the ticket.
Hi, I was just blog surfing and found you! If you are interested, go see my fashion show mall las vegas related site. It pretty much covers fashion show mall las vegas stuff. I guess you may find something of interest.


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Role of Title IX Officer
Reporting Obligations for Faculty
Reporting Obligations of Supervisory Staff
Steps To Take Following A Sexual Assault
Prohibited Conduct Definitions
Disability & Accessibility Policy and Procedures
Non-Discrimination Policy and Procedures
Title IX Non-Discrimination Notice
Pregnant and Parenting Students
On-Campus Confidential Resources
Off-Campus Confidential Resources
Resources for Specific Populations
Accessibility & Disability Services
The Current Page is Prohibited Conduct Definitions
This Policy prohibits Sexual Harassment, Other Sexual Misconduct, and Retaliation as set forth below. Prohibited Conduct can occur between strangers or acquaintances, including people involved in an intimate or sexual relationship. Prohibited Conduct can be committed by any person, regardless of gender identity, and can occur between people of the same or different sex, sexual orientation, or gender expression. For more information, view University of Maryland Policy and Procedures on Sexual Harassment and Other Sexual Misconduct.
Sexual Harassment Definitions / Other Sexual Misconduct Definitions / Retaliation Definition
A. Sexual Harassment means conduct on the basis of sex that satisfies one or more of the following:
1. Quid Pro Quo: An employee of the University conditioning the provision of an aid, benefit, or service of the University on an individual's participation in unwelcome sexual conduct.
2. Hostile Environment: Unwelcome conduct determined by a reasonable person to be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the University's Education Program or Activity.
3. Sexual Assault: An offense classified as a sex offense under the uniform crime reporting system of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sex offenses are any sexual acts directed against another person, without the Consent of the victim, including instances where the victim is incapable of giving Consent (Non-Consensual Sexual Penetration or Fondling); also, unlawful sexual intercourse (Incest or Statutory Rape).
a. Non-Consensual Sexual Penetration: Penetration, no matter how slight, of the genital or anal opening of the body of another person with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the Consent of the victim, including instances where the victim is incapable of giving Consent because of their age or because of their temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity.[1]
b. Fondling: The touching of the private body parts of another person for the purpose of sexual gratification without the Consent of the victim, including instances where the victim is incapable of giving Consent because of their age or because of their temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity.
c. Incest: Nonforcible sexual intercourse between persons who are related to each other within the degrees wherein marriage is prohibited by law.
d. Statutory Rape: Nonforcible sexual intercourse with a person who is under the statutory age of consent.[2]
4. Dating Violence: Violence committed by a person who is or has been in a social relationship of a romantic or intimate nature with the Complainant. The existence of such a relationship shall be determined based on a consideration of the following factors:
a. The length of the relationship;
b. The type of relationship; and
c. The frequency of interaction between the persons involved in the relationship.
5. Domestic Violence: Felony or misdemeanor crimes of violence committed by a current or former spouse or intimate partner of the Complainant, by a person with whom the Complainant shares a child in common, by a person who is cohabitating with or has cohabitated with the Complainant as a spouse or intimate partner, by a person similarly situated to a spouse of the Complainant under the domestic or family violence laws of Maryland, or by any other person against an adult or youth Complainant protected from that person's acts under the domestic or family violence laws of Maryland.
6. Stalking: Engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to:
a. Fear for their own safety or the safety of others; or
b. Suffer substantial emotional distress.
B. Other Sexual Misconduct means the following conduct:
1. Sexual Harassment that occurred against a person outside of the United States or not within an Education Program or Activity, or otherwise does not fall under Title IX.
2. Sexual Coercion: The use of unreasonable pressure in an effort to compel another individual to initiate or continue sexual activity against the individual's will. A person's words or conduct are sufficient to constitute Sexual Coercion if they wrongfully impair another individual's freedom of will and ability to choose whether or not to engage in sexual activity. Sexual Coercion includes but is not limited to intimidation, manipulation, express or implied threats of emotional or physical harm, and/or blackmail. Examples of Sexual Coercion include but are not limited to causing the deliberate Incapacitation of another person; conditioning an academic benefit or employment advantage on submission to the sexual contact; threatening to harm oneself if the other party does not engage in sexual contact; or threatening to disclose an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or other personal sensitive information if the other party does not engage in the sexual contact.
3. Sexual Exploitation: Taking non-consensual or abusive sexual advantage of another person for one's own advantage or benefit or for the advantage or benefit of anyone other than the person being exploited.
4. Sexual Intimidation: Threatening behavior of a sexual nature directed at another person, such as threatening to sexually assault another person or engaging in indecent exposure.
5. Attempted Sexual Assault: An attempt to commit Sexual Assault.
6. Other Sex-Based Offenses: Unwelcome sexual advances, unwelcome requests for sexual favors, or other behavior of a sexual or gender-based nature where:
a. Submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment, evaluation of academic work, or participation in a University-sponsored educational program or activity;
b. Submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for an academic, employment, or activity or program participation decision affecting that individual; or
c. Such conduct has the effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's academic or work performance, i.e., it is sufficiently severe or pervasive to create an intimidating, hostile, humiliating, demeaning, or sexually offensive working, academic, residential, or social environment.
C. Retaliation means intimidating, threatening, coercing, or discriminating against, or otherwise taking an adverse action against an individual for the purpose of interfering with any right or privilege secured by law or University policy relating to Prohibited Conduct, or because an individual has made a report, filed a complaint, testified, assisted, participated or refused to participate in any manner in an investigation, proceeding, or hearing related to Prohibited Conduct. Adverse actions include but are not limited to impeding an individual's academic advancement; terminating, refusing to hire, or refusing to promote an individual; or transferring or assigning an individual to a lesser position in terms of wages, hours, job classification, or job security. Retaliation includes retaliatory harassment. Adverse actions, including charges against an individual for violations of other University policies that do not involve sex discrimination or Prohibited Conduct, but arise out of the same facts or circumstances as a report or complaint of sex discrimination, or a report or complaint of Prohibited Conduct, for the purpose of interfering with any right or privilege secured by law, constitutes Retaliation. However, charging an individual with a violation of other University policies for making a materially false statement in bad faith in the course of a proceeding does not constitute Retaliation, provided that a determination regarding responsibility, alone, is not sufficient to conclude that any Party made a materially false statement in bad faith. The exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment does not constitute Retaliation. The University will keep confidential, to the extent permitted by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the identity of any individual who has made a report of Prohibited Conduct.
[1] This definition encompasses the FBI uniform crime reporting system offenses required by Title IX.
[2] The statutory age of consent in Maryland is 16. See Md. Code Ann., Crim. Law §§ 3-301 to -307.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I'm interested in joining. What do you need from me?
what kind of character are you hoping to play?
Currently we have a half-merrow fighter/Champion of gwynharwyf, a tiefling rogue/swashbuckler, a half-drow spellthief/sorceror/daggerspell mage, and an elf druid/wizard/Arcane Hierophant. technically we have a human (olman) cleric, but the player left.
If you were wanting to play a cleric that would be great, but not necessary for inclusion into the game.
This game is pretty much open to any race, but you would be meeting up with the rest of the party in the underdark, so that might tip your decision.
I think that a drow would be the logical choice then. Probably some sort of fighter, as I'm not really familar with the later rules could you recommend a specific class?
Maybe a ranger? TG will probably have some good thoughts on party balance. A drow is okay. I'm assuming your character will be an exile.
We are using the 3.5 rules specifically, open to pretty much any 3.5 supplement.
Well, if Grove leaves then I'd definitely recommend a Paladin over a straight fighter, plus explaining why a drow could be a paladin would be a hell of a backstory. But based on the party's current make-up and the sudden and continuing rise of enemies with damage reduction, it might be more useful to have a character with access to non-physical attacks. Hexblades and Duskblades, for example. A straight wizard specializing in support and crowd control abilities, like an Enchanter, would also be a great addition.
You guys are definately ahead of me edition wise. I'm applying my scores thus. Str 13, Dex 12(14), Con 13(11), Int 12(14), Wis 11, Cha 16(18).
The scores in brackets are mods with the Drow racial bonuses which I got from the D&D Wiki. I'm going with the Hexblade class. I will definately need help with skills and feats. I also don't know about the level 4 and level 8 ability score bonus. Also I don't don't what spells a Hexblade can cast, or how many.
No problem. in 3.5 edition, characters receive a +1 bonus to any abilitys core at every 4th level, starting with level 4.
Charisma is the most important stat for hexblade as it controls their special powers and spell casting.
proficient with all simple and martial weapons and with light armor but not shields. hexblades do not incur the normal arcane spell failure chance while wearing light armor.
Hexblade's Curse: Once per day, as a free action, a hexblade can unleash a curse upon a foe. The target must be visible to the hexblade and within 60 feet. The target of a hexblade's curse takes a -2 penalty on attacks, saves, ability checks and weapon damage rolls for 1 hour after. A successful will save (DC 10 + 1/2 hexblade's class level + cha modifier) negates the effect. 1/day at first level, plus 1 additional time per 4 levels after (5th, 9th, 13th, 17th).
Arcane Resistance: At 2nd Level, a hexblade gains a bonus equal to his Charisma bonus (minimum +1 on saving throws against spells and spell-like effects.
Mettle: At 3rd level and higher, a hexblade who makes a successful Will or Fortitude save against an attack that would normally have a lesser effect on a successful save, instead negates the effect. A sleeping or unconsious hexblade does not gain the benefit.
Familiar: gain a familiar at 4th level, treat as sorceror of three levels lower than hexblade level for determining abilities.
Greater Hexblade's Curse: penalty increases to -4 at 7th level.
Okay then. Feat wise I'll take Combat Casting and spell penetration.
Equipment, could I have the best light armour you'll allow me, plus a 2 handed sword? Please. a Drow hand crossbow would be nice as well lol.
I read the wiki and it mentioned levels for skills, so still not sure on how to allocate points.
As regards magic, is that the maximun I can cast, or the max I know?
Oh a snake familar would be nice as well please.
If you took all 11 levels of hexblade you would have a total of 56 skill points to spend. Skills in the list I provided cost one point per rank, others cost 2 points per rank. You can have upto your level + 3 skill ranks in a particular class skill and half that in non-class skills.
I need to look up the amount of money you would have to spend on equipment, we'll get to that in a bit. You would also have 4 other general feats to choose.
The first spell list was the max cast per day, the second was the max known. Your max cast per day is affected by your cha bonus. A level 11 hexblade with your cha score would have 2 1st level spells per day, 2 second level spells per day, and 1 3rd level spell per day. He would know 4 1st level spells, 3 second level spells, and 2 3rd level spells.
1st level: Alarm, Arcane Mark, Augment Familiar, Cause Fear, Charm Person, Detect Magic, Disguise Self, Entropic Shield, Expeditious Retreat, Identify, Light, Magic Weapon, Mount, Nystul's Magic Aura, Phantom Threat, Prestidigitation, Protection From Chaos/Evil/Good/Law, read Magic, Sleep, tasha's Hideous Laughter, Undetectable Alignment, Unseen Servant.
I'll try to make a skeleton of your character sheet this weekend, if you need me to.
Acathala: I didn't get a chance to sketch out that skeleton character sheet for you. If you have something together already, feel free to post and we can help you fill in the blanks. Your starting gold is 66,000. No one item can have a value of more than 1/4 of that (or 16,500gp).
Practised Spellcaster, Dreadful Wrath, Power Attack, Improved Familar.
The only feats that I've not been able to check are Dreadful Wrath and Practised Spellcaster, but they were recommended to me by a thread called Hexblade Handbook. So if they have requirements, let me know.
Bluff 5, Concentration 10, Craft (Weaponsmithing) 10, Diplomancy 10, Intimidate 10, I'll wait before assigning my remaining points (11) in case my feats require them in a particular skill.
A character sheet would be nice thanks. I need my hit points rolled and money to go shopping lol. Remember my Con goes up at 4th level due to that bonus. Minor questions how many bonus languages do I get? Can a Drow wield a large weapon? Can I learn new languages?
Practiced Spellcaster requires 4 ranks in Spellcraft.
Dreadful Wrath prereqs are Human, kuo-toa or planetouched, so I think that one is out (unless there is a one separate from Player's Guide to Faerun, I'll keep looking).
Your starting gold is 66,000. No one item can have a value of more than 1/4 of that (or 16,500gp). If you have access to Drow of the Underdark, you might find some interesting weapon choices in there.
and what type of improved familiar were you thinking about? The Fiendish tiny viper snake, or something else?
Here is the skeleton of the sheet. You asked earlier about two handed weapons. The Hexblade is proficient with all simple and martial weapons, so any two handed weapons in those lists you can use.
-Initiative: +2 (Dex) Move: 30 ft.
throws against spells and spell-like effects.
unconsious hexblade does not gain the benefit.
Familiars are a pain to keep track of and we already have one. I say drop it for a good combat alternative class feature. Probably somewhere in Unearthed Arcana.
"At 4th level, you can create an illusory companion resembling a panther, spun from the darkness of the night. Doing so takes 24 hours and uses up magic materials that cost 100gp. Once created your dark companion stands with you in battle hindering your enemies defenses.
Any enemy adjacent to your dark companion takes a -2 penalty on its saves and to its AC. Your companion's speed is equal to yours and it acts during your turn each round. It follows your mental commands perfectly- in effect it is merely an extension of your will."
Dark Companions cannot attack, can't directly effect other creatures or objects, occupies a 5 foot space but others can move into it. Immune to damage but can be dispelled or suppressed just like a spell of 1/4 your hexblade level, if it is, it reforms 24 hours later. Cannot flank or proke attacks of opportunity from movement. If it is more than 120 feet from you, or you lose line of sight to it, it automatically reappears adjacent to you.
Alas I don't have access to Drow of Underdark lol. I'm presuming that you don't want me picking magic items. I'll tske the Dark companion route. In which case I'll swap Improved familar for Minor Shaposhift and Augment familar for Disgiuse self, as there is no point in me taking Familar feats and spells.
What I meant about the languages was could my Drow learn new ones, rather than the normal and bonus he starts out eith? Say by finding a teacher and expending skill points? I would also appreciate thoughts on equipment from anyone.
Bomus languages - Drow Sign and Gnome.
I'll post a background tomorrow, and hopefully allocate all that needs to be allocated as well.
Magic items are fine, as long as you don't go over that gold piece limit per item.
You should definitely pick up some magic items. As our most recent encounter proved, basic equipment just isn't good enough anymore.
By weapon size I actually meant could a Drow wield a large weapon without penalties?
Nope. Try the Monkey Grip Feat (-2 atk. penatly but can wield large weapons) if your heart is set on it, but as far as damage is concerned, our group has more than enough. You're free try other options besides the basic tank/melee damage set-up since we've already got that and more.
What I meant about the languages was could my Drow learn new ones, rather than the normal and bonus he starts out eith?
Yep. 2 Skill points to learn new languages.
I would also appreciate thoughts on equipment from anyone.
You can't use shields and you're restricted to light armor, so keep that in mind, although you might be able to get away with mythril medium armor. That might negate any penalties you'd take. You could also get away with using a buckler for the extra AC and enchantment slot if you wish. The penalties are so minor you could ignore them. Damage Reduction and Reach has been a pain of late, so make sure your favoured weapons are at least +1. Also consider having a spear handy. Need to find a way to address your lower AC, unless you become an archer; otherwise, look at enchantments that force enemies to roll through a miss chance like Blur or Blink effects.
Anything else...well, I'll need to see the rest of your ref. sheet, but I can say you should consider moving your highest stat. out of CHA and putting it in STR,DEX, or CON. I know a Hexblade feels like a spellcaster, but it isn't. It's a warrior class first.
As long as you have a fire spell of 2nd level or higher prepared, you can create a 5ft burst of fire at a range of 30 feet. Does 1d6 damage per level of the highest fire spell held in reserve.
Lia now set on "Auto-Kill" mode .
Who needs a magical fire rod now?
Armour - Mithral shirt +3, I also believe this gives a max dex bonus of 6. 10,000 gold.
Remaining skill points = spellcraft 4 Goblin 2. I'll keep the rest in reserve.
Sarajahn D'acathala was given birth by a Drow Matron. Upon seeing she had a baby boy instead of the hoped for girl, she gave Sarajahn to a servant to be disposed of. However the servant saw an opportunity to make some coin, and instead sold Sarajahn to a drow mercenary band, led by two brothers. One was a Hexblade and the other was a Duskblade.
As he grew up, he showed more of an affinity to the Hexblade class and was trained accordingly. Sarajahn became quite successful. He however was beginning to desire independence from the mercenary band. The final straw came when he learned of his true lineage, because before he had been told he was the son of the Hexblade leader. He quietly planned his escape. Finally he acted, persuading the Duskblade leader that the Hexblade leader was moving against him. Enraged he attacked his brother, dying in the attempt but severely wounding him. Sarajahn then finished off the last brother. With their deaths the mercenaries disbanded.
First, bonuses from bracers of armor do not stack with armor.
Second, you need to go ahead and spend those last few skill points.
Other than that, looks great. We'll introduce you shortly.


I see the Hornet has jumped the que. Looking good and waiting to see them both side by side.
Aircraft > A06018 Mitchell which paint for neutral grey?
One thing I do with every new paint colour is, I've made my own colour chart with the paint manufacture, their printed colour, Cat No & Name, then I paint a small swatch of the new paint. This is done on photo printer paper as that's the closest I can get to a non-absorbent surface, & you'd be surprised at the differences in the colour. Maybe a bit of work to start, but once it's started it really makes a difference.
Thanks for the above site I've now down loaded the 4 free digital issues. Certainly seems to be an interessting magazine.
Welcome to the forum and would love to see the tristar made up, as you say it's a very rear bird indeed.. If I remember correctly Airfix issued this kit just as the aircraft went into service and the moulds were possibly made from prototype drawing before the deccision to use RR motors was taken, therefore the American engines.
I know I've already welcomed you in your previous post, but welcome again.
Welcome to the forum. I can't believe you've made 16 of one kit, you must be able to make them blindfolded by now. Would love to see some photos of the P 40's, and looking forward to hearing and seeing more of you adventures in Airfix modelling.
Yes some of the new Airfix tooling or possibly some of the best in the world, the Dornier Do 17Z, Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and the Nakajima Kate's spring to mind. Personally I don't build bigger scales limiting myself to the "true scale" 1/72, an I see on this forum the new modern jets are also very impresive models. My one complaint with many new tooling is that crew members seem to be absent, and the aircrew sets are almost none exsistent.
I see the Bulldog is being re-released this year, this is a loverly little gem of a kit and still stands up well even against modern toolings. I seem to developing an interest for tween war aircraft and would love to see the 1930's Hawker Fury new tooling, make a good companion to the Gladiator and Bulldog.
Aircraft > New here, I love the new airfix kits !!
Welcome to the forum I can't believe you've actually built 16 of one kit, you must be ableto do them bindfolded by now. Would love to see some pictures and looking forward to hear and seeing more of your adventures with Aitfix kits.
I agree this new Aitfix moulding are some of the best anywhere in the world, the Dornier 17Z, Junkers JU 87 Stuka and the Nakajima Kates probaly some ofthe best on offer anywhere, I'm sure others have their favourites, and judging from build comments on this forum the new modern jets are also superb. I don't make the bigger scale kits only sticking to 1/72..
I see the old Bulldog kit is being re-released this year and this is a loverly little gem of a kit and still stands up well to any modern tooling, also I seem to be developing an interest in the tween war period and would also love to see the 1930's Hawker Fury to be retooled make a nice companion to the Gladiator and Bulldog.
Wow! That looks a super Lancaster and an unusual one at that. Well done, It look great,, maybe Airfix will release this version in due course, I'm sure by the looks of yours it should sell in bucket loads. That livery really looks great on sch a large aircraft. Thanks a million fpr showing and keep them coming.
Visit to local model shop today just to check out if anthing new's arrived. Almost at the end of my perusing when i saw this. I have the old Airfix one in the stash, but somehow missed the first release of this several years ago, and been looking for it ever since.. Then watching some videos of Telford I saw the box on the Revell stand but no information about a release. So image my surprise on seeing this; It JUST had to come home with me irrespective of the cost. Pity it wasn't the A-7 version used for maritime patrol but we can't have everything. A quick check in the box and all I can say is Wow!
Any Airfix boxing. Just scan it into a JPG file at the highest ressolution you can, enlarge it to your size and get it printed out, either onto paper or some printers will print it onto self adhesive plastic.


text:
Q: Getting current title of page and updating from nested component and updating in Vuejs 2 I have a component called Notificiations.vue that is imported and used in the same parent component where my router-view is also being used.
Very basic example - my App.vue is something like:
<Template>
<Notifications></Notifications>
<router-view></router-view>
</Template>

Most of the individual pages that can be accessed with the router have a component that sets the page title like below:
metaInfo: function () {
            return {
                title: 'Leads - ' + this.view
            }
        }

What I'm wanting to do with Notifications.vue is whenever a new notification comes in, get the current title of the browser tab and just add in a (1) (or whatever number) to the front of it. I tried using regular Document.title to get the current title, but that is always returning undefined. What is another way I could do this?

A: I am assuming you have a data object in your notifications component.
A simplified version of Notification.vue
new Vue({
  data: {
    notifications: []
  },
  watch: {
    notifications (current, previous) {
      document.title = '(' + current.length + ')' + document.title.replace(/ *\([^)]*\) */g, "");
    }
  }
})

What we are doing here is watching the notifications object for changes. If it changes we are prepending the number of notification to the title of the document.
document.title.replace(/ *\([^)]*\) */g, "") this part is removing the current count of notifications prior to being updated with the new count.
Limitations to this approach:
If there are other (words) in parentheses in the title they will get stripped.
If the count of notifications is ZERO it will display (0) Title if the count is 1234 it will show (1234) Title. You may want to put some more checks in place to not show ZERO and perhaps do 9+ if length is > 9

A: An alternative approach would be to use Vuex to manage state.
const store = new Vuex.Store({
  state: {
    notifications: []
  },
  mutations: {
    load (state, notifications) {
      state.notifications = notifications
    }
  },
  actions: {
    load (context) {
      Vue.$http.get('/notifications').then(response = {
        context.commit('load', response.data);
      })
    }
  }
});

// Notifications.vue
new Vue({
  mounted () {
    // you will want to add more than just an interval. You will want to keep track of this and perhaps stop it if, for example, the user logs out.
    setInterval(function () {
      store.dispatch('load');
    }.bind(this), 1000)
  }
});

// Add to your router
metaInfo: function () {
  return {
    title: '(' + store.state.notifications + ')' + 'Leads - ' + this.view
  }
}

This was a quick example of how using Vuex would solve this problem. This is not tested and is for educational purposes only. Read more at https://vuex.vuejs.org/guide/

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
FIFA 21 recognition for trio of players
Ivan Toney, Ellery Balcombe, and Sergi Canos included in Team of the Week
FIFA players around the globe will be able to pick up special Ivan Toney and Ellery Balcombe FIFA 21 Ultimate Team Cards after the pair were included in the latest Team of the Week.
The FIFA Ultimate Team is drawn from the best performances of the week across more than 30 domestic leagues around the globe, including the Premier League, EFL, La Liga, and Bundesliga.
Ivan earned a place for his hat-trick against Wycombe Wanderers last Saturday, during our 7-2 win at the Brentford Community Stadium. The Sky Bet Championship's top scorer slammed home our second just before half-time before going on to grab two more after the break, as well as registering an assist for Tariqe Fosu, in the process going past 20 goals for the campaign.
On loan Doncaster Rovers stopper Ellery Balcombe was included after saving not one but two penalties as Rovers won 1-0 away at league leaders Lincoln City on the same day. The 21-year-old guessed right from the spot twice to keep his third clean sheet in four League One outings since joining Darren Moore's side.
Both players are now live in-game for gamers to pick up and add to their FIFA Ultimate Team until 6pm on Wednesday.
Ivan and Ellery are not the only Brentford players to earn this recognition in recent weeks. For his Boxing Day hat-trick at Cardiff City, Sergi Canos was named in the FIFA Team of the Week 14 early in the new year and also got an in-game stats boost.
Ellery Balcombe
Sergi Canós


I have sold a property at 80 WINDMILL CREST in WILLIAMS LAKE.
Great layout, great exposure, great neighbourhood... very private fenced backyard, garden spots, awesome covered patio, 2 storage sheds. Nice open plan main level- Kitchen, Dining, Living room w/vaulted ceilings -nice, airy & bright! - 3 beds, 1 bath on upper floor, - Rec Rm, Laundry & bathroom on lower level. All this onthe sunny side of town, close to trails, a minute from downtown, in a desirable, quite neighbourhood! movefast on this before its sold!


Taking an underused space...turning it into something magical..like a coffee bar, a butler's pantry or a staging area for a company dinner. Start with a little paint, a plan, nice art and a brand new coffee maker...that's it. Sit back and enjoy!
An interesting reading and after reading and finish i realize the moral of story which is very realistic and informative.pakistan news live for the lovers of urdu news readers.
An empty area in your house can be turned into a beautiful, functional space with a little design inspiration. When I first moved into my house, there was a tiny space between my kitchen/dining area and the living room that has always looked sad because there was nothing in there. At the time, I was starting to work from home at least two times each week. I got the idea to turn that tiny space into a mini-office/workspace. That weekend, I went to a flea market and was lucky to buy an old table. A little polishing and a little paint was all it took to breath new life into that table. With my laptop and a few decorative items, that empty space has been serving as my office for years now.


text:
GITC Artist / Advocate - Mark Kroos
Winner of Guitar Player Magazine's 2011 Guitar Superstar Competition
Mark Kroos
Mark Kroos plays 2 guitar necks at the same time. Currently based in Williamsburg, VA he is one of the only people in the world touring his trade. His primarily instrumental style is characterized by open harmonies, polyphonic textures, incredible tapping technique, and is as entertaining to watch as it is to listen to. Live performances burst with energy and magnetism not typical of solo guitar music. Drawing influence from folk, Celtic, indie, and even punk rock artists as well as other great guitarists such as Michael Hedges, Phil Keaggy, Tommy Emmanuel and Leo Kottke, Mark Kroos has developed his own edge to the acoustic guitar.
In July of 2011 Mark competed in Guitar Player Magazine's 2011 Guitar Superstar Competition in Nashville for host Larry Carlton and renowned judges Muriel Anderson, Reeves Gabrels and Carl Verheyen, taking 1st place out for 5 invited competitors and thousands of other who had submitted online. Mark also picked up sponsorships from Ovation Guitars, D'Addario Strings, Planet Waves Cables and Kyser Capos.
"Mark Kroos plays with a sensitivity to the music and positive energy that is truly refreshing."
-Muriel Anderson
Mark's debut solo album, And Grace Will Lead Me Home was released in January, 2010 to rave reviews. The album features Mark on both double and single neck guitars with no overdubbing and also employs his own innovative studio technique of separating the two signals from the double neck for stereo purposes. Tracks from the album have been licensed for multiple productions on CNN.
"I love this record. Mark's combination of impressive technique and memorable melodies create an absorbing listening experience" -Jeff Danna, Film Composer, Guitarist
In May of 2010, Mark embarked a sparsely-booked road trip, giving up his apartment in Williamsburg to play coffee shops and bars, relying on donations, human kindness and the grace of God. This road trip blossomed into a year-long concert tour filled with performances, clinics, and a multitude of new friends.
While on tour Mark wrote and recorded 4 track vocal EP titled The Sound of Snow, released in January, 2011. Themes from the album include traveling, homelessness, and most importantly, hope. The EP is intended as a thank you to all of Mark's supporters and is available only for free online download at markkroos.bandcamp.com
Mark Kroos attended Bowling Green State University's school of music from 2004-2006, majoring in Jazz studies and guitar performance where he studied under Chris Buzzelli and Matthew Ardizzone. He developed a greater understanding of the instrument and improved his technique immensely but also found that his ability was lacking in the jazz idiom and left the music school to tour with his ska/punk band, The Argonauts. When the band stopped playing regularly in 2009, Mark began teaching and picked up the acoustic guitar. A whole lot of writing, practicing and 2 guitar necks later there was the musical madness that is Mark Kroos.
Learn More about Mark
MarkKroos.com


text:
filter your search All ContentAll JournalsDaedalus
What is Ancient History?
Ian Morris,
Ian Morris
IAN MORRIS is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University and a Fellow of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He has excavated in Britain, Greece, and Italy, and published fourteen books, including Foragers, Famers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (2015) and Why the West Rules–For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (2010).
Walter Scheidel
WALTER SCHEIDEL is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. He is also a Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology. He is the author of Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001) and editor of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (with Andrew Monson, 2015), State Power in Ancient China and Rome (2015), and The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (with Peter Bang, 2013).
© 2016 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.
Daedalus (2016) 145 (2): 113–121.
https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00381
Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel; What is Ancient History?. Daedalus 2016; 145 (2): 113–121. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00381
Every society has told stories about ancient times, but contemporary ancient history was the product of two main developments. The first was the invention of writing, which made scholarly study of the past possible, and the second was the explosion of knowledge about the world from the eighteenth century onward. Europeans responded to this explosion by inventing two main versions of antiquity: the first, an evolutionary model, was global and went back to the origins of humanity; and the second, a classical model, treated Greece and Rome as turning points in world history. These two views of antiquity have competed for two hundred and fifty years, but in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available to ancient historians are changing faster than at any other time since the debate began. We should therefore expect the balance between the two theories to shift dramatically. We close by considering some possible areas of engagement.
Ancient history is the study of beginnings, and is thus organized around two central questions: 1) how to define the subject matter whose beginning is being studied; and 2) what that beginning means for the world that the studiers live in. Across the centuries, the answers ancient historians have offered to these questions have changed significantly, largely in response to new evidence and new methods. But now, in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available are changing faster than at any time since the eighteenth century, and we should expect the answers ancient historians offer to do the same.
Ancient history has always been with us because, so far as we know, every society has had stories about its beginning. In the absence of writing, however, ancient history could never be much more than myth-making. Such stories usually describe the world's creation and peopling, as well as the origins of the particular group telling the myth. Since most adults in the world were still illiterate as recently as 1960, for most of our time on earth, these hazy, once-upon-a-time worlds–worlds which Aboriginal Australians describe with the wonderfully evocative term "the dreamtime"–were the only ancient history possible.
Writing introduced vastly superior evidence for antiquity, and every literate civilization has produced its caste of ancient historians. Remarkably, though, almost all of these groups did much the same as their predecessors with the available data, choosing a particular piece of their own ancient history and pronouncing it exemplary. The best example of this is probably the case of China, where, by the first century bce, scholars had already nominated the sage Confucius, who lived in the fifth century bce, as an ancient paragon of virtue. This anointing took place even though–or perhaps because–Confucius himself claimed merely to be reviving the virtues of a still earlier paragon, the Duke of Zhou, of the eleventh century bce: "I transmit but do not create," Confucius wrote, "I am an admirer of antiquity."1 Confucius's popularity went up and down, but until well into the twentieth century, the texts attributed to him remained at the center of elite education in China.
In this way, each civilization produced its own version of exemplary ancient history, and until the eighteenth century, no serious challenge to this way of thinking about the distant past appeared. Only then, and only in Western Europe, did new facts make such stories of beginnings seem inadequate, and thinkers responded by coming up with two new ideas that have dominated ancient history ever since. The basic problem–and opportunity–was that ever since Marco Polo came back from Cathay in 1295, evidence had accumulated that there were things in heaven and earth that just did not fit into Europe's exemplary history; and by the 1720s, groups of radicals, especially in France and Scotland, were responding to the anomalies by proposing a new paradigm.
What if, they asked, the hunter-gatherers and herders that missionaries, traders, and conquerors had met in other continents were actually survivals of how everyone had once lived? What if, rather than representing the beginning, Jesus and the other moral exemplars of antiquity were really just actors within one stage of history? And what if history had really begun with a worldwide state of nature and had then improved, until humanity reached the heights of enlightened Paris and Edinburgh?
This wild new theory, which its champions called philosophical history, shook up salons all over Europe. But by the 1750s, it was already generating a backlash. Philosophical history, its many critics (particularly in Germany and England) observed, had not actually proven that humanity had climbed from foraging, through herding and farming, on to the current age of commerce. To them, the whole endeavor should really be called conjectural history, not philosophical history.
What was needed, these critics argued, was not just-so stories about civilization's emergence from so-called "savagery," but serious scholarship–like that being done at the time on the literature and sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome. Faced with the mass of new facts being generated by philologists and connoisseurs, conjectures about hunter-gatherers were revealed as not just unprovable, but also unimportant. What really mattered to these reformers was that two-and-a-half-millennia earlier, the Greeks had invented a unique civilization based on the principles of reason, freedom, and beauty. The towering intellects of ancient Greece–Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides–had wrenched humanity out of its long slumber. This, and not conjectures about Amazonian hunters, was the beginning we should be studying.
In one sense, classicists of the eighteenth century could legitimately be accused of trying to go back to an exemplary model of antiquity, but in another sense, they were moving far beyond it. They accepted the emphasis of conjectural historians on comparison with the new data coming in from other continents, but insisted that what that comparison actually showed was that the Greeks and Romans were incomparable. When Johann Joachim Winckelmann in 1755 contrasted the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the Greeks with the decadence of Etruscan and Egyptian art, he saw it as evidence for the complete superiority of the Greeks; and by 1808, Wilhelm von Humboldt was ready to go much further.2 "Our study of Greek history," he wrote, is "a matter quite different from our other historical studies. For us, the Greeks step outside the circle of history…. We fail entirely to recognize our relationship to them if we dare to apply the standards to them which we apply to the rest of world history…. [F]rom the Greeks we take something more than earthly–something godlike."3
Unable to compete with classicists' methodological sophistication and weight of data, conjectural history collapsed in the early nineteenth century. However, it is hard to keep a good theory down, and as information from other fields of scholarship continued to accumulate, it soon came back revived and revised. In the 1850s, Herbert Spencer, the first theorist to use the word "evolution" in something like its modern sense, argued that every field, from geology and biology to history and metaphysics, could be tied together in a single story of "the advance from the simple to the complex."4 Classical civilization was just one stage in a larger story, Spencer asserted, and "had Greece and Rome never existed, human life, and the right conduct of it, would have been in their essentials exactly what they are now."5
Many evolutionists, including Marx and Weber, granted Greece and Rome a bigger place in the story than this. However, by 1900, it was clear that cultural evolution, as the theory came to be known, was not going to collapse like conjectural history; it was able to organize far too many facts, and its theoretical frameworks were far too robust for that. The invention of radiocarbon dating in the 1940s and the calibration revolution of the 1970s provided a global framework for comparisons, and fossil and dna data pushed the story of mankind's beginnings back millions of years.
Despite the high quality of much of the scholarship being done on Greece and Rome, the twentieth century was one long retreat for the classical vision of ancient history, in part because evolutionism proved vastly more exportable on the world stage. Herbert Spencer was one of the first English-language nonfiction writers to be translated into Chinese and Japanese, and his work quickly spawned Asian imitators. European classical scholarship did have a significant impact on the methods of Asian ancient historians (China's "Doubting Antiquity" movement and Japan's Tokyo and Kyoto Schools all drew inspiration from European Quellenforschung, the philological analysis of sources) but its core claims about Greco-Roman exceptionalism were largely ignored.
Within Western education, evolutionary and classical approaches to beginnings coexisted, the former mostly colonizing the new social science disciplines, and the latter dominating the older humanities fields. But even within the humanities, the classical vision steadily lost ground. The University of Chicago, where both the authors of this article once taught, is a good example. The university is probably best known for its commitment to the social sciences, but it has also been a staunch defender of the classical heritage. When the university was founded in 1892, it organized separate departments of Greek and Latin, because classics was too important a field to confine within a single unit; the Classics Building, which opened its doors in 1915, is still one of the finest structures on campus. However, by the time we arrived in Chicago (Morris in 1987, Scheidel in 2000), Greek and Latin had been condensed into a single classics department, and its denizens had been penned into one corner of the second floor. There were rearguard actions, to be sure: In 1948, the history department began offering a wildly popular course on the history of Western civilization (which both of us once taught). This year-long sequence, running–as student wisdom put it–from Plato to nato, was required for all undergraduates for decades. Even in the 1980s, by which time the course was optional, most students took it anyway, and some still camped out overnight to get into their preferred sections. In 2003, however, the university closed it down.
In the mid-2010s, the sheer bulk of archaeological evidence organized by evolutionary models, the elegance of evolutionary theory, and the rhetorical power of narratives like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) or Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens (2011) seem to have won over educated opinion.6 Now, the origin story that seems to matter most began not in first-millennium-bce Greece and Rome, but with the invention of agriculture in the Middle East more than ten thousand years ago, or the evolution in Africa of modern humans more than one hundred thousand years ago, or of the genus Homo nearly three million years ago.
Given this view of history, Greece and Rome might be interesting topics, but they just are not very important ones. In Morton Fried's anthropological classic The Evolution of Political Society (1967), read by tens of thousands of college students, Greece and Rome each show up on just three of the 270 pages. They fare better in David Christian's hugely influential world history Maps of Time (2004), each cropping up sixteen times–but that book has 642 pages.7
And yet at Stanford, where both of us now teach, nineteen of the twenty-seven professors whose research focuses on any aspect of humanity before ad 600 work chiefly on Greece and Rome. Our casual survey of websites suggests that Stanford is in no way unusual; many American universities devote twice as many faculty to Greece and Rome as they do to the rest of the ancient world combined. Even if the lopsided distribution of resources is, in large part, a matter of institutional inertia, the battle over beginnings that opened in eighteenth-century Europe is clearly far from over.
That said, it might be time to take the battle in a new direction.
One of the most remarkable things about the 250-year-long back and forth between evolutionary and classical models of ancient history is how little each side has engaged with the other's arguments. This is most obvious in the classical model, which willfully ignores millions of years of history along with most societies that have ever existed. A century ago, classical historians regularly claimed that Greece and Rome were the beginning of the history that mattered, but nowadays the very few who do so tend to be dismissed as reactionaries or racists. Most classicists seem to be getting on with careful research, without worrying too much about the wider significance of their work, even though this seems likely to ensure the classical model's continued retreat.
However, a similar dynamic is at play within the evolutionary model. No one familiar with conventional history could fail to be struck by the way that evolutionary histories tend to have a lot to say about the agricultural revolution and the origins of states, and about the integration of the world in the early-modern period and the subsequent industrial revolution, but very little about anything that transpired in between. The geographer Alfred Crosby apparently speaks for many when he says, in his wonderful book Ecological Imperialism, that "between [2500 bce] and [the] time of development of the societies that sent Columbus and other voyagers across the oceans, roughly four thousand years passed, during which little of importance happened."8
This flyover zone, of course, includes almost all of recorded history. It saw the world's population increase one hundredfold, the largest cities grow twentyfold, and writing, markets, money, wealth, inequality, empires, war, institutional capacity, and the stock of knowledge each transform the human experience. A version of history with a blind spot that obscures all of these changes is arguably little better than a version that cannot see anything outside the history of Greece and Rome.
It seems to us that this peculiarity of evolutionary history confronts classical historians–whichever part of the world they may work on–with both an opportunity and an obligation to respond. Evolutionary historians often seem to imply (or, in Crosby's case, state explicitly) that once agriculture began in the Near East after 9600 bce, everything else followed automatically, with cultural differences counting for little. This is a huge claim to make, with enormous implications for where the world might go in the centuries to come; and no one is better placed than classical historians and archaeologists to find out whether it is true.
Rising to the challenge and obligation, however, will necessarily take classical historians far beyond the field's established comfort zone. Deep knowledge of particular cultures and mastery of their languages will remain important, but perhaps no more so than broad knowledge of world archaeology, quantitative methods, the social sciences, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. Conventional boundaries between prehistory and ancient history, ancient and medieval history, and cultural traditions will lose much of their meaning.
Equally important, engaging with the evolutionary vision will have consequences for how ancient historians are taught. Currently, in most institutions of higher learning, ancient history is part of a humanistic curriculum, emphasizing languages and the details of a specific literary, historical, artistic, and philosophical tradition. Simply adding more requirements to graduate programs that are already too long does not seem like a very good solution, but neither does turning training on its head, and abandoning the knowledge of primary sources and particulars that has always been classical history's strength in favor of the training that comparativists receive in the social sciences.
Possibly the least poor compromise would be to approach ancient history in a manner similar to how anthropology used to be taught. A graduate student interested in, say, how politics functioned in prestate societies was not expected to learn everything that could be known about every acephalous group on earth. He or she might, instead, combine a broad cross cultural survey with immersion in one specific group, learning its languages, living among its people, eating its food, and catching its diseases. Insights, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz once suggested, are not made by "regarding a remote locality as the world in a teacup or as the sociological equivalent of a cloud chamber," but by recognizing that "small facts speak to large issues … because they are made to."9 Studies of the size of ancient Greek houses or Athenian worker's wages or the cost of raising foundlings as slaves in Roman Egypt do not have to speak to broader theories of how premodern economies work–but they can be made to.10
So far, the topic that has attracted most attention of this kind is probably the "Axial Age," which lends itself to a variety of approaches that could potentially combine classical and evolutionary thinking about ancient history. Struggling in the 1940s to come to terms with the moral crisis of his own day, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the phrase to describe the middle of the first millennium bce because, he said, this had been the axis around which the world's history had turned. From China to the Mediterranean, the centuries on either side of 500 bce saw an explosion of moral thinking, producing Confucianism and Daoism in China, Buddhism and Jainism in India, and Greek philosophy and the Hebrew Bible in the Mediterranean region and Near East. This really was the beginning of the history that counted, Jaspers asserted, because this was when "man, as we know him today, came into being."11 Jaspers did not gloss over the deep differences between Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Israelite, and Greek thought; after all, no one could possibly mistake Plato's Apology for Confucius's Analects. He observed, however, that all the way from Greece to the Yellow River, intellectuals began debating similar questions at roughly the same time. The new thinkers tended to be similar kinds of people, usually coming from the lower ranks of the elite and from small, marginal states rather than from great empires. They also tended to reach the conclusion that while the nature of goodness was indefinable, people could still transcend the evils of this world. Attaining ren (Confucius's "humaneness"), nirvana (the Buddha's "snuffing out" of consciousness), dao (Zhuangzi's "way"), or to kalon (Plato's "good") was a matter of self-fashioning, looking for the answers within rather than waiting for kings or priests to provide them. The secret, however, always involved compassion. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the Axial Age founders said, and you will change the world.
For some decades, social scientists seemed to find the Axial Age more interesting than humanists did, perhaps because the roughly simultaneous appearance of similar intellectual systems in such distinct cultures, without much evidence of diffusion, was easier to analyze in evolutionary terms than within the culturespecific frameworks that classical historians favored.12 There were exceptions, but in the last few years classical scholars have begun claiming the topic as their own.13 Few scholars have the talents to master the relevant skills thoroughly enough to become experts on the primary sources from multiple Axial Age civilizations (the eminent historian of ancient science Geoffrey Lloyd is the obvious exception), but there are other ways to approach the problem.14 For instance, scholars might set focused studies of the Presocratics, Upanishads, or Mencius against the larger Axial background, or, more broadly, ask why there was no Axial Age in the second millennium bce, or the New World.15
In their teaching and research, ancient historians deal with one of the most consequential phases of human cultural evolution, a time when modestly sized local groups of people–villages, towns, chiefdoms, and the like–were increasingly absorbed into ever-larger networks of cooperation and, more often than not, control. Models of social organization differed considerably, from small but cohesive independent communities to large but heterogeneous and highly hierarchical empires. The ancient Mediterranean produced both of these outcomes in paradigmatic form: the Greek city-state culture, the largest of its kind in all of history, and the Roman Empire, the biggest empire ever to exist in that region, which, in an added twist, had grown out of a small city-state.
For several reasons, these developments are best studied from a comparative perspective. Since empires tended to appear wherever ecological conditions allowed, the driving forces behind the rise and fall of any one of them cannot properly be assessed in isolation. That modern scholars have managed to propose more than two hundred different reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire strongly suggests that conventional academic focus on just a single case is simply a dead end, and that comparative analysis of a process that occurred so many times in history promises far more compelling results.16
Moreover, the tension between city-state and empire as competing and complementary forms of sociopolitical organization throws light on a very big problem of history more generally: the relationship between state formation and human welfare. Our colleague Josiah Ober has powerfully argued that the pluralism of the Greek city-state culture delivered important benefits, especially when it sustained participatory democracy, as it did in classical Athens.17 At the same time, one of us has found that human social development peaked whenever some of the largest premodern empires were at the height of their power.18
Understanding the costs and gains associated with different forms of macrosocial cooperation has been a major challenge across academic disciplines, and ancient history has much to contribute. After all, the modern West grew out of a highly competitive state system that had gradually emerged from the wreckage of the Roman Empire. Unlike in other parts of the globe, where failed empires were often replaced within a few centuries by new empires, no comparable behemoth ever again took over all of temperate Europe. The Roman state and the Chinese Qin and Han Dynasties had built huge empires that became more similar as they matured, and yet Europe and China embarked on very different trajectories once these early superstates had failed.19 The subsequent divergence between the periodic restoration and abatement of universal empire in East Asia (and elsewhere) and enduring polycentrism in Europe requires explanation, a task only made possible by systematic comparison.
Global contextualization of this kind forces ancient historians to reformulate their own questions: If the Roman Empire was unique, why did it appear in the first place? By privileging its decline and fall over its rise, have we trained our sights on the lesser challenge? Are there specific environmental obstacles to empire that the Romans somehow overcame–and how could we possibly hope to know them unless we also look at other parts of the world? Most importantly, does the lasting disappearance of the Roman Empire help explain one of the most momentous historical transformations, the Industrial Revolution, and the resultant "Great Divergence" between the West and the rest of the world? The reasons for this breakthrough remain contested, with some scholars favoring relatively recent or contingent factors and others arguing for the relevance of more deeply entrenched, long-term causes.20 By fostering competition and preserving alternative pathways of development, did the absence of anything like the Roman Empire in the West prepare the ground for modernity?21
However one chooses to approach these big questions, both the Axial Age and the successive political and economic divergences between Europe and the rest of the world strike us as areas where twenty-first-century classical historians have important things to say about the beginnings of the world we occupy and where it might be going next, as classical and philosophical historians alike tried to do in the eighteenth century. But just as both these groups of scholars did a quarter of a millennium ago, if today's classical historians want to make contributions to explaining beginnings, we will need to raise our game, master new evidence, methods, and questions, and recognize that the ancient world was much bigger–and ancient history much longer–than our predecessors made them seem.
Confucius Analects 7.1, 12.1.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987), 33.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Greek Republics" (1808), sec. 1, as cited in Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 79.
Herbert Spencer, "Progress: Its Law and Cause," Westminster Review 67 (1857): 465.
Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, vol. 2 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 43.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); and Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).
Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); and David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 23.
We have immodestly chosen examples from our own work and that of Richard Saller, our colleague and collaborator, formerly at Chicago and currently at Stanford. See Ian Morris, "Economic Growth in Ancient Greece," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 160 (4) (2004): 709–742; Walter Scheidel, "Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for Living Standards from 1800 bce to 1300 ce," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (3) (2010): 425–462; and Richard Saller, "Human Capital and Economic Growth," in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 73, 85.
Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 1.
See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011); and Robert Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2012).
See especially Dædalus 104 (2) (Spring 1975), "Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C."
Geoffrey Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Geoffrey Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Geoffrey Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).
For the thoughts of one of us on the latter questions, see Ian Morris, Why the West Rules–For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 254–263; and Nicolas Baumard, Alexandre Hyafil, Ian Morris, and Pascal Boyer, "Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions," Current Biology 25 (1) (2015): 10–15.
See the 210 factors identified in Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms: Die Auflösung des Römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1984), 695; and Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 4–6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). Toynbee's work embraced a global vision of the fall of civilizations, but we have since come a long way in terms of both methodology and factual knowledge.
See, most recently, Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Morris, Why the West Rules–For Now, especially pages 281, 332, and 385 for notes on the period up to 1500 ce.
Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Walter Scheidel, ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Peer Vries, Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth (Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2013). Vries offers the most comprehensive survey of the debate.
One of us very much thinks so. See Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Death of an Empire and the Birth of the Modern West (forthcoming Princeton University Press).
Trust in Elections
Networked Trust & the Future of Media
Fifty Years of Declining Confidence & Increasing Polarization in Trust in American Institutions
Specific Sources of Trust in Generals: Individual-Level Trust in the U.S. Military
Reception Studies: The Cultural Mobility of Classics
Daedalus (April,2016)
Memory, Commemoration & Identity in an Ancient City: The Case of Aphrodisias
Finding the Time for Ancient Novels
Daedalus (January,2021)
Comparing Modern and Classical Perspectives on Spider Silks and Webs
Perspectives on Science (April,2021)
Ancients and Moderns
Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method
Love in the Ancient World
The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther
Description of Some Ancient Greek Sites
Architectural Space in Ancient Greece
The Discovery of the Ancient Greek System of Architectural Spacing


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Patrick Weihrauch (ur. 3 marca 1994 w Gräfelfing) – niemiecki piłkarz występujący na pozycji pomocnika w niemieckim klubie Dynamo Drezno. W swojej karierze grał także w takich zespołach jak Bayernie Monachium II, Würzburger Kickers oraz Arminia Bielefeld. Były młodzieżowy reprezentant Niemiec. W 2011 roku wraz z kadrą do lat 17 zdobył młodzieżowe wicemistrzostwo Europy.

Sukcesy

Niemcy
 Wicemistrzostwo Europy: 2011

Linki zewnętrzne
 Patrick Weihrauch na oficjalnej stronie Deutscher Fußball-Bund

 Patrick Weihrauch w bazie Fussballdaten.de

Niemieccy piłkarze
Piłkarze Bayernu Monachium
Piłkarze Arminii Bielefeld
Piłkarze Dynama Drezno
Urodzeni w 1994

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The Emerging 5 Renewable Energy industry profile provides top-line qualitative and quantitative summary information including: market size (value and volume 2012-16, and forecast to 2021). The profile also contains descriptions of the leading players including key financial metrics and analysis of competitive pressures within the market.
Essential resource for top-line data and analysis covering the emerging five renewable energy market. Includes market size and segmentation data, textual and graphical analysis of market growth trends and leading companies.
- These countries contributed $236.8 billion to the global renewable energy industry in 2016, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.2% between 2007 and 2011. The top 5 emerging countries are expected to reach a value of $450.1 billion in 2021, with a CAGR of 13.7% over the 2016-21 period.
- Within the renewable energy industry, China is the leading country among the top 5 emerging nations, with market revenues of $181.2 billion in 2016. This was followed by Brazil and India with a value of $35.6 and $15.1 billion, respectively.
- China is expected to lead the renewable energy industry in the top five emerging nations, with a value of $370.6 billion in 2021, followed by Brazil and India with expected values of $46.4 and $22.5 billion, respectively.
- What was the size of the emerging five renewable energy market by value in 2016?
- What will be the size of the emerging five renewable energy market in 2021?
- What factors are affecting the strength of competition in the emerging five renewable energy market?
- What are the main segments that make up the emerging five renewable energy market?


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website@fourtownfarm.com
90 George St., Seekonk, MA 02771
Four Town Farm History
5 Generations Strong
Around the 1900's, David Solomen Peck bought a great deal of land in the Seekonk area. It was passed on to his four children, who all attempted to farm the land, but with little success. Three of them gradually sold most of their property and lived off the profits. Isabel Peck was one of the children. She married Frank J. Clegg, and they were more successful farmers than her siblings. The Cleggs managed to keep and even acquire some land. They had two children, named Elizabeth and Frank Jr. (Jack). After high school, Jack attended the University of Rhode Island, which was then called Rhode Island State College; he studied plant industry. After graduation, he immediately returned to Seekonk and took over the farm work from his father.
When Jack assumed the responsibilities of running the farm in 1941, he was 22 years old, and was working about twenty acres of land. He married Eleanor Burnley in 1943, and shortly afterwards bought thirty acres of land. Jack was the only year round worker, had one tractor and one horse, and only some irrigated farm land.
When the farm grew and became more productive, Jack needed additional help during the spring, summer and autumn. The government had a program whereby labor could be brought in seasonally to help out. About 15 men were brought in to help with the farm chores and seasonal work. The men returned every year for the next 15 years until Jack's own boys, Stephen, Tom, and Peter were old enough to take over the help's responsibilities. Any additional help was hired locally to fill the void left by the migrant workers.
In the early days of Four Town Farm the majority of our produce was sold to wholesale customers who would then in turn sell it to grocery stores. There were many challenges and difficulties that came with distributing through these outlets. It was decided that we needed to change the way we sell our vegetables. "The stand" began as a roadside cart where Eleanore Clegg (Jack's wife) sold melons. After that, she began to sell other vegetable and fruits at a roadside stand. It was a very small business; she and Jack picked everything for the day in the morning, before she opened the stand. Eleanore ran the stand until 1982, when she passed away. Around that time Jean returned to the farm, and began to run the stand. Over the next 30 years the stand continued to grow and support more families until we outgrew it in 2015. We built a new farm stand in 2015 to take us into the future and provide additional local products to meet our customer's needs.
In the early 1970's we began a greenhouse business that was run by Stephen (Jack's oldest son) and Lynne Clegg. It too grew like the farm stand from small beginnings to the 23 greenhouses we have today. All of Jack's grandchildren have worked on the farm at some point in their lives helping the farm achieve the success it has today. The fifth generation working the farm today includes Chris, Brad, and Waylin Clegg.
"You're always learning. There's a routine to the year, but everyday is different and every year is different. I have generations that I can fall back on if I have a question." - Chris Clegg
Four Town Farm believes in the grow local movement. You really can't beat a locally grown vegetable or fruit.
Stand Hours
For Pick Your Own or pumpkin ride hours please call us at 508-336-5587 for availability and start times.
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Maxi cardigan with an open front and wide neck trim. A relaxed classic. High center back slit. Works over sophisticated underpinnings too. Made of a fine linen blend with a matte finish.
Material: 71% linen, 27% polyamide, 1% spandex. Dry clean. Imported.


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Q: HLSL error X3082 I have the following pixel shader function in HLSL:
float GammaCorrectA(float3 color, float alpha) {
    float a = 1 - sqrt(1 - alpha);
    float b = sqrt(alpha);
    float t = (color.x + color.y + color.z) / 3;
    return a * (1 - t) + b^t;
}

This is being called thusly:
float screen = GammaCorrectA(strokeColor, alpha);

strokeColor and alpha are both floats.
This is resulting in the following error on the 'return' line:

error X3082: int or unsigned int type required.

I am compiling with Shader Model 4 Level 9_3, with optimizations disabled and debugging information enabled.
I can't seem to find this error documented on MSDN, or anywhere.
Broadly, can anybody point me to where this error is documented? I would like to understand what's going on here. More specifically, can anybody spot my error?

A: Instead of b^t use the HLSL pow function:
return a * (1 - t) + pow(b, t);