The theory behind the Toba event is really interesting, and the wikipedia article does mention that a number of other species are implicated with similar apparent bottlenecks, but it seems curious that this event wouldn't have affected all living creatures universally.
Based on the description of the event, a 5-10 year volcanic winter, I'm trying to imagine how such a disaster might compare to the dinosaur's extinction scenario. Why would only some creatures suffer more devastating effects than others? Does this point to additional complexities in the chain of subsequent events in the post-eruption environment, such as species-specific plagues, and partitioned food-web collapses due to the loss of a keystone species?
Would plants and aquatic species expess such a bottleneck differently, when compared to primates and other apex predators?
The Five Eyes rationalize that it's perfectly normal to spy on enemies together, and share information, given that the Five Eyes nations all speak English.
A named query, or any other form of named SQL statement.
It could be a view (a select query, stored as a database object) or a procedure (a grouped set of sql statements that might involve changes that are written to the database, possibly a simple insert, or simple update, or simple delete, but potentially much more complex).
DML is one class of SQL statements, and DDL is another. The two together encompass most of your common, practical database operations.
I think reactive armor might be an interesting strategy. But, then again, it was traveling at 40,000 MPH, which, I think, places it at about twice the velocity of high explosive plastique... So, would blasting it, before it blasts you, actually work?
I think there would need to be a complex early detection and warning system, capable of intercepting high speed objects, well beyond what we consider normal terrestrial speeds. Being lazy, I'm tempted to just say "why not some lasers, maybe?" and shrug, but maybe there are some cooler options possible?
Seems like a pretty unexplored deficiency of moon habitation.
The most irritating part about Jaynes' concept is the premise of alienation foisted upon ancient people, as if they were all dimwitted, half insane, immature fools, each with barely the intellect of a second grader.
I honestly don't buy that for half a second. I think there were a great many very shrewd charlatans, who knew damn well they were telling ghost stories and bluffing each other into superstition, wherever they could fit in a con game that played to their advantage.
Sure, there's always lively mataphysical debate in every culture. Fine, ancient people lacked a precise understanding of the subtleties of things like microbial life. But the rest of the macroscopic world was rational enough to keep most people grounded, in my opinion.
Different people have different takes on what a "god" is. Hallucinations and dreams are powerful psychological cues, but I don't think they represent the common perception for the origin of either polytheistic or monotheistic gods.
For most cultures, I think it's pretty obvious that "The Gods" simply represent a conversational placeholder for forces of nature with origins that are not well understood. In monotheistic religions, I think we see a shift in the broader social understanding that large groups of humanity represent an untamable force unto itself (mob rule), which must also be respected as an emergent hazard in addition to The Weather, The Sea, Disease and other such forces of nature.
In most sane scenarios, I think people are quick to understand that talking to a toy soldier carved from a block of wood will only serve so much purpose. I don't think people bought into such practices as deeply as we like to sometimes think. I think ancient people merely keyed into the premise of rubber ducky programming, when they needed to talk things out.
When Socrates was ostracized for lack of piety (in The Apology), I think it was quite obvious to everyone, that he was getting the shaft because he was a busy body, and not because he failed to worship stone temples properly. Most executions related to religion are highlighted for their obvious social implications, in that the religion is a whitewash, and the reality is that the motives were political at their core.
Yeah, cults happen with relative frequency, and the shifting sands of the social order can present a murky atmosphere of moral relativism, but ultimately I lend myself to the opinion that evolution favors those with good survival instincts and a balanced mind.
I sincerely doubt that the vast majority of the ancient world was universally suffering from mass hallucinations, to the point where they all agreed to blow the same mental gasket, drink the kool-aid, and buy into the spaghetti monster.
So, yeah, but, like UPDATE can employ a WHERE clause, to apply conditional logic, whereas INSERT, not so much. You insert one record to a table. As long as you know the table? Boom. Done. Oh, but now you'd like to change some records in the table? Well, that's great, but which ones? Tell me where?
I think the whole readable natural language premise is a neat idea, but much in the same way that natural language can be easily complicated, so too, with SQL. Heap abstractions of logic and arithmetic on top, and it gets even worse. But it's still a cool idea. If it works out in your favor, you'll get self documenting code. But alas, there is no floor or cieling to the complexity one can introduce, be it deliberately or accidentally. And not only is it the query itself (or the author) that might over complicate matters. The data schema, defined by the DDL, can easily induce unwanted complexity in subtle ways, and this might be a problem deliberately placed beyond the reach of the person attempting to read or change the data locked within.
As for complaints about parsers, that's not a deficiency of the language. It's a deficiency of the tools used. If the development environment isn't presenting problems to the developer in a convenient manner, then the utility sucks. Get a new one. Don't blame the text-mode clients though. They are just as bare-bones as a command line, and deliberately so. At a certain level, SQL can be regarded the same way a shell script might be regarded, in terms of possessing the convenience of (or lack thereof) a basic TTY command interpretter. But there's no real reason why it should be impossible to create a SQL script authoring tool, which provides syntax validation as convenient as any compiled language might employ, when communicating compilation errors to the developer.
What's the core mechanism that permits node's implicit concurrency?