They do.
It's just not the big issue he thinks it is. Again, we've survived dozens of them since we started walking, and at least two since we started farming.
Look, I grew up around actual amish. A "disaster" that merely destroys electrical technology is NOT an apocalyptical event. An increase in ambient solar radiation is not catastrophic. Another ICE AGE will not wipe out humanity (although the war it provokes might).
You could be here screeching "billions will die" and I'd still say "but millions will live", and I will calmly take my chances with such odds. Because I've seen what pre-modern life looks like. It's not the end of the fucking world.
I'm already familiar with the solar clock cycle hypothesis.
It's just not supported in the geological records as an event of the magnitude they pitch it as. Even by their reckoning, homo erectus has already survived it dozens of times and agrarian civilization has survived at least two.
Simply put, it doesn't make a compelling argument as a civilization ending event. It's not even as convincing as a continental scale event compared to Yellowstone (which probably would kill tens of millions), or a technology focused event like a geomagnetic reversal (which would almost certainly wipe out most if not all of our LEO satellites).
Yellowstone WILL happen sometime in the next 50 thousand years or so. The geological record on that is very clear, happens like clockwork. When it does it will wipe out most life east of Chicago in the immediate ash event, followed by a mass famine caused by the collapse of northern hemisphere agriculture, and the ensuing war that will prevoke. Assuming we're still around to fight over it to begin with.
Mayan doom calendar didn't pan out.
Hale-Bopp and Heaven's Gate didn't pan out.
Y2K didn't pan out (and I even had to fix some of that shit).
The 2038 problem... probably will break some stuff but not be more than a minor irritant because Time32 is a pernicious little shit.
I'm at the point of put up or shut up when it comes to armageddons.
Deferring hard choices and labor price discovery is what got us here to begin with.
I don't care if early starting zeds displace x'ers from the job market.
At some point reality is going to come crashing back in like the red sea on pharaoh's dumb army, and the whole world will know that the true value of labor was realized in Dickensian England. Life is cheap.
Because it's cleanly divisible by almost all the numbers smaller than its half.
Twelve divides by 1,2,3,4 and 6, only 5 is the oldball out. The practical applications of this is why bakers deal in dozens and the imperial foot had twelve inches, it's just really useful as a base because it's so divisible.
You can see vestiges of its influence in construction even today in dimensional lumber sizing combined with drywall. A standard studwall with sheetrock will come out as four inches thick.
Suppose that you live in 17th century England. You don't have a tape measure. Instead, what you might have is a piece of twine with knots tied into it that you sized up by holding it up to the Imperial foot standard (posted on the wall of Greenwich Observatory today although there used to be many of them scattered around the country). Because the foot is so divisible, you can arrive at 2,3,4, and 6" by simply folding the string. It won't be perfect, but it'll work good enough for the time for rough work like sewing or construction where the tolerances are less critical.
Yes.
You don't need any concept of negative to use Achimedes inscribed polygon method.
I think, you think, that when we say they had no concept of zero, that we mean the digit. No. We mean the point on the line, zero, where the continuum of numbers continues infinitely in the opposite direction. Without zero, numbers are a "ray", not a "line".
The DIGIT zero is just an artifact of our using the same glyph to indicate null in a place. You perceive 10 as two glyphs (one, zero) but this is just how our written language depicts them. The zero in ten and zero as a number are not the same.
If it sounds dumb, it's simply because it IS dumb. The persians didn't really strike on something revolutionary, you can get by perfectly fine without it in practical engineering applications provided you adjust things accordingly. It was much more of a "if we write it like this, then it works like this" "OH, yeah that is a bit more useful."
If they'd ACTUALLY been smart they would have also pushed base 12 instead of base 10.
When we say the Romans didn't have zero what we mean is that in the Roman conception of math, the set of integers and the set of natural numbers are equal. They did not recognize the set as a line that was infinite in both directions.
Y'know there's a baseball stadium in Japan where every sponsor with a sign on the fence has to put up a prize, and any batter that hits their sign wins the prize.
I dunno where I was going with that, I just thought it was a really cool idea to get batters to crank it for the fence more often.
wE mUSt Go tO spACe
We must build Stanford toruses.
With the budget the DoD gets, NASA...
Well, no, NASA would piss it away on the SLS. But SpaceX with that kind of money could build a ship with gravity blocks like the Argama.
the truth
Says a person who doesn't understand the role of the continental shelf in generating waves.
I want to emphasize, I didn't initially go there. I could have, but didn't. But you didn't play ball.
In my first post I was willing to let you have your opinion of how waves work, as long as you would entertain the question of why someone would care if the coastal cities are destroyed. But YOU rejected the olive branch.
Collapse yes.
It's just that you and I have very different perceptions on what constitutes something worth panicking about.
I'll reiterate. I am from rural Iowa. I grew up quaker, surrounded by actual "life on hard mode" amish. I've seen what the 19th century looked like in practice.
It does not scare me.
I do not doubt for a second that conflict is coming. Cities will burn, millions will die, starvation and war will wage.
But when you already live in the proverbial scrapyard, you don't care what happens to the Tipharians (as long as you aren't straight under the damn thing when it falls).