unreality

Haha, cool site I was occupied for a few minutes... Not an hour, but hey ;D

np You'll soon understand it once we start playing, I have no doubt ;D Anyway, if anyone wants to edit their stats a bit, please PM me right now as you are reading this edit: remember, for each of the three stat pairs, you can shift 1 point from one ability to the other, OR 2 points, but no more.

Health care in America is fine for the richest among us, but we have one of the worst current systems in the entire world http://www.aflcio.org/issues/healthcare/whatswrong/

You've got to be joking!!! lmao

The Teams: Corsican Fever 1) Janesia 2) Cherry Lane 3) GC 4) Frost 5) Ben_Law Children of Rage 1) NM 2) Taliesin 3) Wally West 4) Crazypainter 5) Frozen Team 1) Brandonb 2) Itachi 3) Sinistral 4) Mekal 5) Phazon Hopper With Stats: #) Name - Strength/Toughness - Swimming/Accuracy - Provider/Firemaster Corsican Fever 1) Janesia - 5/7 - 8/4 - 6/6 2) Cherry Lane - 4/8 - 8/4 - 6/6 3) GC - 8/4 - 5/7 - 8/4 4) Frost - 4/8 - 2/10 - 3/9 5) Ben_Law - 8/4 - 4/8 - 6/6 Children of Rage 1) NM - 6/6 - 3/9 - 8/4 2) Taliesin - 6/6 - 6/6 - 6/6 3) Wally West - 6/6 - 6/6 - 6/6 4) Crazypainter - 2/10 - 3/9 - 4/8 5) Frozen - 8/4 - 9/3 - 9/3 Team 1) Brandonb - 1/11 - 11/1 - 1/11 2) Itachi - 4/8 - 1/11 - 11/1 3) Sinistral - 8/4 - 3/9 - 8/4 4) Mekal - 6/6 - 8/4 - 5/7 5) Phazon Hopper - 5/7 - 4/8 - 6/6 HEALTH SYSTEM Each player has a stat called H%, which is abbreviated for Health percentage - a value from 0% to 100% which represents your character's physical well-being. All players start at 100%, and decreased Health can affect your gameplay. Highly related to Health is the third stat group, Provider (Pr) and Firemaster (Fm). Each day, you get x/x points of each. For example, if you have 7/5 for Pr/Fm, you get 7/7 points Pr and 5/5 points Fm each day to utilize. Provider points are used to obtain food via foraging/hunting/fishing (we'll call it "providing", in a general sense). You can use as many points as you want to provide - for example, if you had a Pr score of 12 (9 natural and 3 from a fishing spear, which would be written 9 + 3fs), you may decide to use 10 of the 12 points to provide. However, if your Health is only 70%, you only get 7 points of food for the 10 points you spent, and your Provider is now at 2/12, and you have 7 more food. You can do this by yourself without me needing to be involved in the process, as long as you do the numbers right. Always truncate down to the tenth place. For example, if you have a Pr of 11 and use 11/11 of your points with 80% health and you would be down to 0/11 Pr while getting 8.8 food. The game goes in cycles of 'days'. All food must be eaten the day it was provided, or it goes to waste. You can eat food uncooked, but this is dangerous, as it has the possibility of disease: 1/20 chance rolled per point of uncooked food eaten, decimals not counted. For example, if you eat 5.2 points of uncooked food, I roll a 20-sided die 5 times, and you get as many diseases as I roll 1's. Each disease roll that gets the 1/20 chance results in a subtraction of 15% from your Health. Note that if you reach the Critical Point (0% or lower), you are in critical condition on the verge of death, and need to be airlifted off the island. Also, eating food if it's uncooked gives less than the normal amount of Health given for eating food. Normally, you get percentiles equal to double the food points, but if it's uncooked, you get an equal amount. For example, you are at 80% Health and eat 4.8 pts of uncooked food. You are now at 84.8% ... if that food had been cooked, you would've gained 9.6% rather than 4.8%. So how do you cook food? Well that requires a fire, which requires the Firemaster (Fm) skill. Equal skill to the food points is needed to cook it. For example, you get 10 points of food with a Pr score of 7 + 3fs, at 100% health. This means you have 5 Fm, so you could only cook 5 of your food! Well you could do this then eat the uncooked 5 also, or round up your buddy, who has 11 Fm. You use 5/5 of your Fm (leaving yourself with 0/5), and he uses 5/11, leaving himself with 6/11 Fm left, and together all 10 food is cooked. The food is still yours though, and you could be greedy and eat all 10, though it might be wise to split it 50-50 and lend 5 food to your buddy. So how does Health decrement, other than disease? Each new day, I reset your Pr and Fm scores to full (7/7, 10/10, etc), and each player's Health drops by 4% plus the roll of a 6-sided die, in percent. For example, if I roll a 5 for Bob, Bob loses 4% + 5%, for a grand loss of 9%. I roll separately for each player. I will announce each new day in the 'morning post', resetting Pr/Fm, reducing Health, as well as removing any food your character may have had in his or her possession the previous day. Also, immunity challenges and reward challenges drop your Health, depending on the challenge. However, reward challenges give exactly that to the winning team: a reward. Rewards include: - Health boost to the winners via food, rest, whatever - Fishing spear (fs), +3 Pr to all team members - Flint rock (fr), +3 Fm to all team members - etc Note that your Health affects your Provider amount, but NOT your Firemaster skill. For example, with a Pr of 8 and Fm of 4, if you are at 20% Health (ouch), you only get 1.6 food using all 8 Pr points, but you still have a Firemaster of 4. Your Health also affects your performance in challenges, in strength, toughness, swimming and accuracy all together, though it depends on the challenge, and some challenges will have less to do with statistics than others. The Teams: Corsican Fever 1) Janesia - 100%, 0 food, 6/6 Pr, 6/6 Fm 2) Cherry Lane - 100%, 0 food, 6/6 Pr, 6/6 Fm 3) GC - 100%, 0 food, 8/8 Pr, 4/4 Fm 4) Frost - 100%, 0 food, 3/3 Pr, 9/9 Fm 5) Ben_Law - 100%, 0 food, 6/6 Pr, 6/6 Fm Children of Rage 1) NM - 100%, 0 food, 8/8 Pr, 4/4 Fm 2) Taliesin - 100%, 0 food, 6/6 Pr, 6/6 Fm 3) Wally West - 100%, 0 food, 6/6 Pr, 6/6 Fm 4) Crazypainter - 100%, 0 food, 4/4 Pr, 8/8 Fm 5) Frozen - 100%, 0 food, 9/9 Pr, 3/3 Fm Team 1) Brandonb - 100%, 0 food, 1/1 Pr, 11/11 Fm 2) Itachi - 100%, 0 food, 11/11 Pr, 1/1 Fm 3) Sinistral - 100%, 0 food, 8/8 Pr, 4/4 Fm 4) Mekal - 100%, 0 food, 5/5 Pr, 7/7 Fm 5) Phazon Hopper - 100%, 0 food, 6/6 Pr, 6/6 Fm If you want any stat changes (for each pair, you can shift up to 2 stat points around if you want), you have to PM them to me soon... very soon

They don't just whine on about being black or a POW lol, there are issues involved, and so far I think that Obama is the way to go, definitely. McCain would probably be a better president than Bush (anyone would ), but McCain is also very similar, and I don't agree with a lot of the Republican policies. I hope Obama wins, I want to see the nation move forward Though my opinion doesn't really matter, since I won't be able to vote for about 2 years, so that's why I'm interested in what other, more politically experienced, people think about the election. I do think that the 2008 election will be one of the most important of our time, as some people are saying

do "I'm not American"... only check "I'm too young" if you are American

np *hopes it wasn't a horrible idea, lol*

It's fast approaching! Discuss, vote, etc

We're just waiting on Ben Law now

I know that Kat wanted to play this...

I know

http://brainden.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=130

(1) I thought the atmospheric noise one was random.org, though I could be wrong (2) Nah, I'll have enough hosting Astray ;D Sorry

Here's a cool question I just thought of, aimed at people who believe in a god: If someone is truly random, does God know the outcome?

hmm, but does true randomness exist? ;D lol jk. It's good enough... all it has to be is be unpredictable for mere humans, eh?

I'm getting really impatient now, lol. When I said the game would be slower-moving, I meant that in comparison to Mafia or something, not just babbling along at a molasses-like pace ;D

Exactly It's just so hard to fathom, so it's a great intellectually challenge to imagine yourself not imagining ;D I'm not "worrying", I just plan on enjoying life One topic that I actually DON'T like to think about too much is free will. If you think about it, the undeniable conclusion is that we have no free will, at least in the sense that it's commonly used. HOWEVER, I would like to make the argument that it's not either "free will" (impossible) or "determinism" (confusing and possibly paradoxical due to our apparent consciousness)... or "randomism" (I just made that up ) which is basically "determinism" but based on random events, not determined from the beginning - ie, acknowledging that there is in fact probabilistic randomness in the universe (a lot of it)... or maybe pseudo-randomness, I'm not sure if true randomness can exist at all. But randomness doesn't allow free will any more than determinism I think it's sort of in the middle. On the particle level, it's essentially randomism/determinism, but emergent patterns build on simple rulesets (I love saying that ), and on a higher level we do have free will, even though we don't. The concept is just sort of floating in my mind, I can't really explain it. We have evolved with such complicated brains that I think the distinction is blurred anyway, and it's kind of like how an incredibly complex, exabyte-long randomizing algorithm can blur the line between pseudo-random and the impossible idea known as random. I guess what I'm saying is that we've evolved to experience our own free will, built upon our lower levels of consciousness, and to sort of be a spectator to ourselves... it's like we ARE the computer chip of a computer (I know that made no sense lol), so it must be beneficial in an evolutionary sense to be more self-conscious and more self-aware, which helps basic survival. So, my conclusion is basically that even though we may not actually have any control, within our own system we do have control since we ARE control (okay, again, that made no sense lol), and it's best to live life to the fullest either way... so don't be testing out any Lazy-Bones Paradoxes, because you can essentially say that we DO have free will, even though we actually don't, because of the level of complexity, and that you can't go back and see what would've happened - for example, whatever choice the Lazy Bones makes, that's what was made. Furthermore, going back to the emergent system thing, things can have intentions and choices on a higher level, even though they're just made up of atoms and molecules and compounds.

FIF was totally tricked, he PMed me asking whether it was true or not Hehe, no offense taken I hope, Frozen ;D funny idea GC, but from now on I decide the rules and challenges, okay? Hehe anyway, still waiting on Ben Law and Janesia

A technicality, but "seeing" is essentially "measuring" via rods and cones sending electrical and chemical signals to various parts of the brain. It's just another form of "measuring", or, in broader terms, gaining information about the world around you. It does not take faith to "believe" in covalent bonding, since not only can we measure but we can also see patterns and diagrams of it in textbooks, electron microscopes, whatever. Faith has nothing to do with measuring or seeing... it has to do with evidence. I would agree with you NM, that ADP's definition was too harsh, so I would word faith this way (the kind of faith I'm talking about is faith in a higher power, or unicorns, or fairies, or whatever)... Faith - (n) The personal belief in an object, thing, being, idea or concept without any empirical evidence, logical proof or scientific acceptance That definition rings true - accept it. You don't believe in Goddess because of the overwhelming scientific evidence of Her existence, you believe in Her because of one or more of a variety of possible reasons: (a) you were brought up believing in Her (b) you just know that She exists © you want Her to exist, or have convinced yourself that She does Hopefully that's a good definition of faith because that's all the opinion I've got on the matter Sometimes faith is good, other times it's not. I just hope that the faithful know when to reel in their faith and think rationally

Yes, whenever I try to think about after my death, I eventually come to the conclusion that since my conscious mind won't even exist at all, everything will exist, in a way. Kind of hard to fathom

So Benford's Law does fit for this? Cool

Why not talk to him, and ask him what he meant? I know that most guys (I don't want to generalize) would be pretty flattered at this glimpse into the female mind, and he would probably clarify what he meant for you, after he realizing he may have made a blunder. Just ask him what he meant by what he said - but don't ask in an accusing manner, have like a curious manner. Not an over-questioning tone, but a tone that suggests that it does in fact mean something to you, and it's not just a flippant question, so that he considers his response carefully