EVE General Discussion

And what happened to those Great Centers for learning (and Great they were) in the 600 years since the dawn of the Renaissance? Now, Baghdad has the excuse of the Mongol's coming in to accidentally the civilization, but the rest, not so much.

Now, Lin-Young's analysis of the "Dark Ages," the amount of scientific study during them, and the causes for the period's decline are, well, wrong. The Early Middle Ages was Europe rebuilding civilization as they knew it after the Roman Empire (who had only been in control of Europe for half a millenia) shattered. It takes time to figure out how to run a continent after the guys who ran it for 500 years get ousted. The Renaissance came about after everybody had finally figured out how to make the wagons run on time, and could thus finally produce enough surplus to allow for a growing body of people who weren't working in the fields to feed themselves, and thus had time to do Science.*


Organized Religions all over the world have skeletons in their closets. Big, walk-in closets full of Skeletons. But the lack of Scientific achievement in Europe's so-called "Dark Ages" isn't one of them.


*This is grossly oversimplified (as any 4 sentence analysis of 1000 years of Human history must necessarily be), but it's a good bit closer than saying "The Butler Church Did It."

Scientific discoveries during the dark ages haven't slowed down, as public perception would have it - in fact, it could be argued that they sped up, as society built upon roman advances, particularly in farming and smithing (for instance, roman gladius evolved into spatha which was refined by vikings and later transformed into arming sword, which in turn can be seen as the predecessor of the longsword). However, the collapse of Rome led to loss of much of greek knowledge, which took time to recover, while the fragmentation and deurbanization shifted public interests into new areas.

Ironically, it is thanks to monks of the Catholic church that much of the ancient knowledge was preserved, so that it could later have been used, when the public renewed interest in it. It's also somewhat ironic that the second great source of knowledge for the european reinvigoration came from "barbaric arabs", who likewise preserved and studied greek texts.

What would have happened if Rome survived and there was no christianity? It's hard to say - for the later part of its existence, Rome was plagued by civil wars and stagnation. It's unlikely that it would be any different from Byzantium - in other words, Europe may well be speaking arabic today, America might be discovered later or perhaps even by Chinese (who technically had better ships in 14th century and led many of the more important advances throughout the middle ages), etc. We'll never know.

Studies have shown that tanning beds, the sun, car exhaust, and according to California the brown stuff on slightly burnt fast food all cause cancer. If I avoided everything on earth that causes cancer I would never leave my house and play video games on my PC all day...

Catching lung cancer?


Jump clone hooo!

Wait, I don't get it ... how does having a problem with people exercising their basic liberties make someone liberal?

Really, if you take a stance one way or the other (for or against public smoking,) you're not being liberal in the sense that you're attempting to prevent someone from having a liberty. To me, the word liberal suggests a quality of or predisposition towards allowing people to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Telling people they can't do something (anything, really) is the opposite of what the word liberal suggests to me.

Of course, nobody uses the word that way. Silly people.

op is a ***** lol

The bigger problem is that I can't use boosters or other drugs in the CQ.
CCP could turn tripping into a minigame or something...like the next ship spinning :O