The Pub Discussion Board

true but communications are :>

private, "Hey sarge any word from baker platoon?"
Sargent, "Do i look like a radio?"
Private, "No Sarge, but was hoping you would have heard something"
Sargent, "No i havent and you just voluntiered to fill in the slit trench so get going."
Private looks out at the woods, "Out there?"
Sargent "Move it private the captain wants to be on the road in an hour and we have a long ass march ahead of us."


twenty minutes later a loud scream is heard.
Mon

Last edited by monbade (2007-12-06 04:42:09)

not always, all you hear is thud thud thud thud and your looking around trying to figure it out and a stampeade of dinos come out of the trees followed by a pair of T-Rexes, first you have to evade the stampede and then the crunch and munch.

also i was saying right at the begining, ya eventually we would be used to them but at first? I put my money on the big guys
:>

You know, this reminds me of a really horrible movie I saw part of once.  It was called "Raptor Island".  The premise, if I recall correctly, was that an elite anti-terrorist unit was pursuing a group of terrorists.  Through some unlikely and convoluted series of events, the transportation for both groups is destroyed and they are forced to head for an "uncharted" island. 

Now, once the Delta Force ripoffs are ashore, they set off in search of the terrorists, who of course got to shore ahead of them.  They split up like standard movie idiots and soon, one of their number encounters a pair of "Raptors".  These, of course look a lot like Speilbergoraptors, native to fictional islands from a different movie. 

Now, comes the part I'm wondering about.  The DFR loser screams in panic as the "raptors" just stand there and squawk a few times.  He empties his rifle in the general direction of one of the creatures.  While I strongly doubt an actual Delta Force unit would ever split up like a gang of horror movie morons, and I am certain that an M-16 could kill an actual raptor, especially if even a quarter of those bullets hit, is there really any realistic chance that seeing dinosaurs could panic elite troops?  Regular army?  National guard?  I don't doubt that they would be surprised, but panic?  Any thoughts?  Input from folks with military experience would be especially welcome. 

Thank you

Oh?  I thought that military training would help overcome that natural panic reaction.  Well, any day one learns something is a good day .  Do you think part of the reason for the panic would be the surprise and shock of meeting dinosaurs for the first time?  Would the tendency to panic go down as the surprise wore off and they had additional encounters with the scary beasties?  Assuming that the dinos don't quickly learn to run for the proverbial hills after a few samples of modern military firepower?

Ah.  Well, I reckon I'd rather stand and shoot at the dinosaurs then face an angry sergeant

1)  Dromaeosaurs ("raptors") were, in fact, some of the smartest dinosaurs.  Intelligence can be estimated based on brain size versus body size,  BUT it has to be taken into account that, unlike modern birds (and mammals), dinosaur brains were not folded upon themselves, reducing the surface area of the brain significantly, and thus reducing the possibility of high intelligence.

2) The "Humans use 10% of their brains" is a myth.  In fact, almost all of our brain is "accounted for" in its function.

3) T. rex was a hunter, and Jack Horner is a moron.  The ONLY WAY to make T. rex a scavenger is if he had the same metabolic rate as a crocodile.  Mind you, crocs are cold-blooded, and T. rex wasn't, and given that T. rex was more birdlike than croc-like, I would expect him to have more of a birdlike metabolism than a croc metabolism.  An animal of 3 - 5 tons with that metabolic rate could not live on carrion alone.  As to its front arms... the secretary bird doesn't use ITS arms, either.  Nor do any of the other predatory birds.

4) There is actually quite a lot you can learn through what I guess you would call "forensic" paleontology... really researching the animal remains and doing correlations.  Unless you assume that they were radically different from both their ancestors AND their descendants, correlation is possible.

I'm not sure I agree that panic (not fear) cannot be trained out of a person, but I won't argue the point since I have unfortunately never served in the military.

Net Wolf

Possible.  But since I don't believe in the Big Rock Candy Mountain Fell On Them theory, I don't believe they had any chance of survival to the present.

Net Wolf

Corvis wrote:

Hello, all

snipped...

Example One. 

A farm family stops answering the phone and fails to send their children to school one day.  Eventually, a concerned family friend or perhaps a school administrator asks the police to check on the family.  One patrol car is dispatched. 

The officer finds obvious signs of carnage around the farmhouse when he or she arrives.  The family cow is dead and much of its flesh appears to be missing, the chicken coop is busted in and there is no sign of the birds, what appears to be the remains of a human body is lying near the smashed in door of the farmhouse and there are odd, three toed footprints visible from the patrol car window.

Greetings

Saw an interesting article that might (sorta kinda) apply to this story idea:

Camera spots wolverine in Sierra Nevada

"...A graduate student at Oregon State University, Katie Moriarty, got a picture of a wolverine recently on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera set up between Truckee and Sierraville, in the northern part of the mountain range...."

The story was interesting for a couple reasons:

The picture was snapped by an 'unmanned' automatic IR camera that was hidden in the woods along a game trail and the picture showed an animal previously thought to be extinct in that locality.

Much like the cougar pic snapped by same sort of camera in Northern MN...

No telling whats out there in the deep woods!

Enjoy the journey

WarLord

No, it's not.  The statement has always been made to imply that 90% of our brain had a use that we had "no idea" about, or that it was just waiting around until we evolved a use for it.  This claim has been made to support the notions of ESP, psionic powers, and other supernormal mental powers.  In other words, they are saying, "Since we have no clue what 90% of our brain does, it COULD allow us to do <insert supernormal power claim here>".  The fact is, the numbers are much closer to being the opposite: we are quite clear on what almost 100% of the brain does.

And I'd like a source for the "we only use 10% at a time" theory, too.  Given that I am, at any given time, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, remembering, AND oh yeah, still breathing and living... I'm doing all the time most of the things that my brain does...  Maybe not at peak effort, but I'd think 10% was kind of a lowball figure...

Eric

There's no scientific basis even for the "10% at a time" theory.  The problem is that there's no real understanding of "100%" of the brain's ability.

CAT scans are no real help, either, because they color their image based on a "baseline" result.  That is, how active is your brain while you're not doing anything at all?  But here's the problem with THAT thinking: You're NEVER not doing ANYTHING at all!  So taking any real measure of the brain's percentage of activity is... just a guess.

I find it almost impossible to believe that the brain would be so inefficient as to have 90% of itself completely dormant at one time.  I just can't think that that is evolutionarily effective.

Just my $1.50.  (Inflation...)

Except that under THOSE circumstances are when your brain is at its most active.  Senses are heightened, alert for the sound of your prey (or a predator stalking YOU...), mind alert, evaluating everything around you...

I just don't buy it.