ZOMBIE FORUMS

Came to think about a thing:

Human are unaffectedby the gods refuges barriers.

Obviously mage skill, knowlegde and power weren't really a common thing in those old nations otherwise the cult of lumina wouldn't have been so succesfull.

So, how come the lumina's church succeded creating a thing with so much magic concentration and power.

Or may be they had an head-start, something with already huge power,that they couldn't understand, but somehow primitivly manipulate under a very raw form... ...something that they might have found in an abbandon ruin, without any protection or barrier of any sort or so that they known about...

In this strip : http://www.errantstory.com/archive.php?date=2007-01-22

It's said "Susan is like, unable to do magic or something..."
suggesting that this is not common for half-elf.


At the same time it's said "her pop was one of the few mage that the town had"
That could be eared as 'no common magic'
but also as 'one of the few who had took the time to study magic intead of working at something that directly bring food to the familly table'

That this thread title is not "death from above" bothers me.

I was going to let it slide, but...

Assuming each person in Tsuiraku has exactly two biological parents, as did each of their ancestors, the denominator in that fraction is going to have to be an exponent of 2. 1/64-Elven is plausible, for example. (That's one Elven ancestor six generations back.)

(And no, I'm not a math major. I just like exponents of 2.)

What happened to BoOT? I see exiled soul with the same picture and am now worried.

Not really. We know magic ability has some genetic component. This has been mentioned by Anita, that was disgusted at how the church would let them take all the gifted youngsters. If magic was randomly distributed, it wouldn't matter how many they take, they'd keep appearing all over the population.

Given this, it is only to be expected that a city seeded with the best human mages available would then flourish into a magically advanced society. Their magic per capita would necessarily be far above the norm.

Add to it that they were able to carry on their culture from the golden age, while the rest of the humans fell into a dark age when the elves kicked them out (so much so that they forgot everything that happened just 2000 years previous), and the largest world power if magephobic.

What if someone has, randomly choosing, a half-elven great-great -grandparent and a half-elven great-great-great grandparent?

Yeah, if my maths play correctly, 1/54th parentage is technically possible... although it'd require some sexual gymnastics, and not in the pleasant way...

Well, that number was barely a first approximation. The reasoning went thus;

Given: A generation is defined as the time from birth to first offspring. In humans, this could be as short as 13 years and Romans typicaly married off their girls at 12, as did most pre-christians. Ashurists (Followers of Ishtar/Astarte/Ashur) required Temple Service from about then and that dates back to Sumer. However, current humans statistically don't give first birth until their late 20's and human generations are currently assumed to be ~33 years. That's about 3 generations per century. Note that this has nothing to do with lifespan.

From that:

span/generation=number of generations ; 1500/33=~54 generations between the initial disappearance of Tsuiraku and its reappearance.

Strictly a back-of-the-napkin (first order approximation) calculation that takes in no other variables. A second order approximation would take into account:
1) Initial distribution of half-elves in the initial population.
2) number of viable females in initial group (males don't really count).
3) male/female birth proportion average.
4) proportion of recessive re-enforcement per generation
5) proportion of dominant re-enforcement per generation
6) Initial promiscuity data
7) etc.

Some cock-and-bull contrived situation involving Voldemort and Harry sharing souls, and, as an entirely separate issue, duo-component magic wands, at least three major characters in love all their lives with a female so beautiful and virtuous she has to be a stand-in for the author, and further proof that Hermione Granger is the absolute best traveling companion you can ever have on a quest. Also, three magical artifacts that didn't exist when the first five books were written, at least one bone-head mistake and one deux-ex-machina per chapter, a character list reminiscent of <i>The Longest Day</i> and a body count comparable to <i>Saving Private Ryan</i>, and the bad guys going down, for once, because the heroes are flat-out smarter then they are.

Oops, sorry, that wasn't my explanation of what happened to BOoT, it was my pocket review of a novel I just finished. Forgot the title, but it was a ripping good read even though the second and third hundred pages are a little slow.

The situation Killjoy presented would result in someone who is 3/64-Elven. I'm not sure how you could wind up with a denominator that's not an exponent of two, even with a long and complicated family tree, although the numerator can certainly be larger than 1.


Well, the fact that it's an approximation makes me feel better... but isn't 1500/33 ~= 45?

1/54th could be the approximate fraction, e.g. that 3/64ths is approximately 1/21st. 19/1024ths is approximately 1/54th. So if you had an Elf in your family six generations back, and aside from that person's ancestors you also had another Elf in your family eight generations back, and aside from his and the first guy's ancestors you had another Elf in your family ten generations back, you'd be approximately 1/54th Elf. Alternatively, since there probably weren't many if any whole Elves in the population, if 38 of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were half-Elves, you'd be approximately 1/54th Elf.



That, and why does he give a percentage of 1/[# of generations]? I think it'd be something like

[% of half-Elves in original populations]*[# of generations elapsed]^2/[# of generations elapsed]^2*2

to get the percentage of Elf blood in you. For every 2 half-Elves in your family n generations ago, you have 1/(n^2) Elf blood, so you have half as much Elf blood as the number of half-Elves in your ancestry n generations ago divided by the number of ancestors you had n generations ago, which is 2^n. Of course, now that I think about it this simplifies to

[% of half-Elves in original populations]/2

So the average Tsuirakuan has a percent of Elven blood equal to half of the percentage of the original Tsuirakuan population who were half-Elves, which seems pretty straightforward and obvious in hindsight.

So the question is, what percent of the original Tsuirakuan population were half-Elven? Divide that by 2 and you'll have the average amount of Elven blood in today's Tsuirakuan. Of course, this is presuming that all half-Elves were literally *half* Elven, and not just partial-Elves of some degree.

Forrest, that was beautiful.

Arithmaphiliac

EDIT: Wrong thread. Move along.

Ok, sorry for late reply, summer is not conductive for arguing over internet.

Marxism is in its basis a variant of Hegelian philosophy- which is nothing more than christian dogma with filed off serial numbers.

Plus there is a bit more to it, than the theocracy- it is also the large country to east, ruled by idiots, and just generally being totally primitive.

And one final blip on the half-elf genetics: A half-elf generation may be only about as long as a human's, but they stick around to have sex with their great granddaughters... if they don't pay enough attention to bloodlines. And, hell, all you need is one fullblood elf male who came over to the darkside. He would be having sex with a different woman in each generation for the entire history of the city... if not many.

We are used to generations with static expiration dates. Those of even partial elven blood make things interesting. Its like with Zues in greek mythology. After a few dozen generations of rampant mortal molestations, the genepool of the nobles was literally swimming in divine spooge... er, I mean blood.