(1) epidemic diseases almost always emerge from an animal vector which requires close and lengthy contact with human beings. That had occurred in Europe (and especially Asia, where a great many diseases originate)

(2) they flourish when the human population is of a certain density (which was achieved in many parts of Europe and especially Asia)

(3) over time, with repeated epidemics and repeated exposure, the population becomes more resistant to them (selection). In addition, for diseases that are endemic in those populations, such as measles for example, most of the adults have already had them and survived, it’s the children that get hit. This means that there is less disruption to society, because much of the die-off is of children rather than adults—plus, certain diseases are milder in children. The Native American population was hit at the adult and child level at the same time, since exposure happened all at once, and no one had acquired immunity (although probably some of the survivors had natural immunity).

It has little to do with any innate differences between racial/ethnic populations. It’s mostly about demographics and the way diseases work.

Syphilis may have been an exception to the direction of the diseases, since some think it came from New World to Old. However, that’s a highly complex and very controversial theory that many people think is incorrect.

“the light interferes with itself”

I have to say that your eructation on the uncertainty principle leaves me highly uncertain about just what you are trying to say, but as you said “the light interferes with itself.”

I take that as metaphoric unless you mean that we all have to go back and stand over those water filled shadow trays in high-school physics just to make sure that “the light interferes [still] with itself.”

Could it be that that too is still uncertain? And will it help increase certainty and not entropy if we drown Schrodinger’s cat in one of the water trays?

Battle of Chosin Reservoir
“The Chosin Few”

Wiki lowers the numbers…
just as it does for other things (like gulag deaths)

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
SUN TZU (500 B.C.)

Be ready for what the enemy is capable of doing, not what you think he will do.

[has anyone bothered with that tactical missive when debating our leader and the progressives? nope… i debate that they should not be allowed the power to do X and most argue that they wouldn’t do X (implying that it doesn’t matter they have the power its not going to be used – and their only real point to their point, as with hux, its not what they think they will do)]

It was bitter cold. The temperature was below zero. The wind howled. Snow fell-a snow so dry that dust from the road mixed with it in yellowish clouds that swirled about the column of trucks. Tundra-like, bleak, and without vegetation in most places, the land was depressing

Armies & Commanders:
United Nations
* General Douglas MacArthur
* Major General Oliver P. Smith

approx. 20,000 men

Chinese
* General Song Shi-Lun
* 200,000 men

while your assertion or desire is to know if 180 men can take over so many.. well, 200,000 men with guns and such, and supplies, couldn’t stop 20k..

Were surrounded men! we have them right were we want them, any direction we shoot we kill enemy

Colonel “Chesty” Puller… was made famous that day

you see.. it depends on a lot.
and rather than desease, i would say that the fear of a weapon which can be pointed and a hole appears and strikes ones enemies down… is big scary

its LATER, when they are normalized to the gun that they would be willing, as in the civil war, to charge.

but a small group, with good arms, high ground, bottleneck approach and the fact the native best warriors would be up front leading the charge.

would make it easy to cut down the head…
which is why our military goes butt end first.

Over 40,000 strong, well motivated and supremely confident, the Zulu were a formidable force on their home ground, despite the almost total lack of modern weaponry. Their greatest assets were their morale, unit leadership, mobility and numbers. Tactically the Zulu acquitted themselves well in at least 3 encounters: Isandhlwana, Hlobane and the smaller Intombi action. Their stealthy approach march, camouflage and noise discipline at Isandhlwana, while not perfect, put them within striking distance of their opponents, where they were able to exploit weaknesses in the camp layout.

what your wanting to know is ASYMETRIC WARFARE… as in vietnam…

Below is a representative list of interstate asymmetric wars fought between 1816 and 1991:[citation needed]

Franco-Spanish War, First Anglo-Burmese War, Second Russo-Persian War, War of the Cakes, First Anglo-Afghan War, Uruguayan Dispute, Austro-Sardinian War, First Schleswig-Holstein War, Second Anglo-Burmese War, Anglo-Persian War, Italo-Roman War, Two Sicilies, Franco-Mexican War, Second Schleswig-Holstein War, Anglo-Abyssinian War, Anglo-Egyptian War, Tonkin War, Franco-Siamese War, Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Second Boer War, Sino-Russian War, Tripolitanian War, Franco-Turkish War, Polish Revolution, Italo-Ethiopian War, some Israeli-Arab conflicts: the First and Second Intifada, and various conflicts with the Hezbollah,[9] Sino-Japanese War, German-Polish Confrontation of World War II, German-Danish Confrontation of World War II, German-Norwegian Confrontation of World War II, German-Belgian Confrontation of World War II, German-Dutch Confrontation of World War II, Italo-Greek Confrontation of World War II, German-Yugoslav Confrontation of World War II, Korean War, Himalayan War, Vietnam War, Second Sino-Vietnamese War, Nagorno-Karabakh War, Soviet War in Afghanistan, Gulf War, War in Afghanistan, Iraq War, 2006 Lebanon War 2011-Libya Civil War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare

you did a very good job in your explanation…
and in the interest of Feyman and his wise truth that if you understand it, you can explain it in regular terms and abstractions. (ie, those wierd stories that the left likes to claim are stories are how a symbolic mind transfers information in which the key is principals that cant be elucidated. in fact, thats the point, the discovery of principals then elucidating them. in a way, we need to be able to discuss them before we know them!)

I will now try to unravel the confusion i caused with mixing Schrodinger (missing the umlauts. don’t you know umlauts cost a whole lot extra? Frusen Glé¤djé got you by adding more than umlauts beating out the others.. just trying to be economical in bad times. 🙂 )

ok, the laymans explanation of heisenberg

the only problem in your explanation Occam is that you were trying to use macro objects to explain a quantum truth… but it was a good one!!

the key to understanding it in its simplest is that at the subatomic level, you cant measure anything without affecting it in some way.

to know where something is you have to affect it. there is no way to see it as its below the size of light itself. it doesn’t radiate energy. in fact, its existence and substance is all that it is, and if not for something else striking it, or its mass having affectation over a long distance, its existence wouldn’t exist. ie, a something that has no affect on anything doesn’t exist and so is a nothing.

another term for it is the “principle of indeterminacy”

put most succinctly by Werner Heisenberg himself, an we can do no better

The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.
–Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927

well, down below it gets even WEIRDER…

the mind would say, thats fine… i understand that it being too small you have to affect it and so change it. but one can infer from this, and assume that if you know enough of something you can say it took this path and not that one.

well, through a whole lot of experimentation, we found that, that macro intuition, does not apply.

everything exists as a particle and a wave (which i think was where occam wanted to go). that is its existence is in a supposition of states its there and not there.

when your at the beach, you can be knocked over and dragged out to sea by a wave. its there, and not there, you cant pick it up, you cant remove it from the medium it exists in. you can add energy to it, or remove it, or guide it, but the thing is a thing and not a thing

particles exist in our universe (in the classical interpretation, not string theory), as such energy bundles. in one way you can think of the fermions (hard matter like electrons) as standing waves that reject more energy and accept no more energy, and bosons (force carriers like light) as traveling waves…

to make matters more complex, any object that is made of an even number of fermions, becomes a boson… so only odd numbers of fermions remain fermions.

ack…

the knowledge in symbolize and understanding is dotted all over the human landscape..

“Watch the ripples change in size but never leave the stream” David Bowie, Changes…

this opens the door to what is called the classical slit experiment… and the revealing of such things as Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” we now refer to commonly as entanglement. (without getting into it, entanglement allows two particles to share some informational connection instantaneously outside of time at any distance. spooky… so once two things are entangled, the changing of a state of one, will instantly cause a change in state of the other, distance is irrelevant and therefor so is time)

in the slit experiment, and its variations trying to tease more out of it. a light source in which the photons are aligned, as in a laser beam, is spread out and allowed to hit a wall with two slits in it a certain distance apart (in relation to the wavelength).

on the other side of the slits you have a wall or screen… when set up right what happens boggles the senses whose mind models modeling is confounded.

if you let the light go through both slits and hit the wall, you will get what is called an interference pattern not a wall lit up smoothly with the light

that is, the light after passing through the slits and spreading out, interferes with itself. and what is seen on the wall is a standing wave pattern showing where the waves cancel each other out, and double up on each other in the form of bands.

if you cover one slit… you get a screen lit with light like normal. if you uncover it, and cover the other, you get a screen lit with light like normal.

the photons are entangled, and so we decide to see whether they are particles or waves… so we put a beam splitter in the path so that we can peel off some photons and check them out.

we leave our detector off, and we turn on our laser, both slits are uncovered… and voila we see the pattern. great… everything is working. we turn on our detector, and wham… the pattern on the screen disappears depending on what kind of detector you have! if your detector detects waves, the pattern will remain… if it detects the strike of a photon as a particle, the pattern disappears.

ok… now.. you say its cause everything is so close together… if we separate things farther, we can then spread out the distance light has to travel and we can do better.

much like Occam description of a baseball!!!!

great.. no matter how far you go.. the wave form on the screen is measured to change instantaneously. faster than material light can travel.

[i worked out a great explanation of how this can be having to do with cavitation of space time, but hey, who wants to listen to what i say?]

the experment even works for light from a star light years away… where the photons had to know their later state 300 million years ago… (we will get to this in a second, and THATs scrodinger with the umlauts)

the experiment even works when you send photons out one at a time! ie.. your source now only sends out one photon at a time at the slits… and your screen can detect where they land.. just as your eyes can detect where they go when they bounce off when looking at the pattern made by many photons.

so it measures this one, then that one, etc.

you add up all those measurements to see the pattern that is constructed by smearing out the spray of photons over time… and its a wave pattern of dark and light.

this last part is very important to get to be able to step to the next step.

the light interferes with itself

and so, the only way that can happen, is that the photon doesn’t choose a side or path to the wall or sensor screen…

it takes ALL PATHS at one time.

it goes through BOTH slits at the same time, and so interferes with itself. (and yet the geneticist i work with who is a friend don’t get how far removed he is from how things “work”)

the photon is self entangled so to speak. it does not follow a path from source to end.. it follows ALL paths from source to end…

and if you try to measure it as you go, you are causing a determination. your affecting it in some way to make that determination. the universe then has to resolve the path and so the waveforms path and everything collapses and it has a definite location.

but if you haven’t measured it, the particle takes all paths to the detector which is the screen and your eyes.

so its more than just juggling two variables which work in opposition.

its juggling all variables and potentials up until the moment of detection when the whole of those variables relationships collapse and the particle then has a definite path. but if you dont detect it as a particle, the time before that it was traveling, it has no actual path… it is all paths.

this is why quantum physics is statistical at its bottom. not because of the same reasons at the macro level, but because this indeterminacy has no other way to work with it.

at the macro level, its as Sergey alludes to when mentioning Kolmogorov.

kolmogorove and smirnov worked out some wonderful math to analyse value series to determine whether they are random or not. this is not the same as claude shannons entropy. this is way too far off course to discuss here.

i will leave this teaser though that the geneticist biologist friend cant get his mind around. that for the class of problems he is looking at, and doesnt know he is lookign at, statistics breaks down and bercomes useless. and to tip a hat to sergey, the more the kolomogorov test declares randomness, the less able statistics become. and so statistics cant be used to make a determination of whether a series of values is created by true random processes as plucked from the universe… OR its made by a series of tick tock determinant formuleas whose informational entropy makes them random (for a time beyond which can be measured or determined for other fundemental mathematical reasons)

everything snowballs out for me…

anyway… so the reason you cant measure something and know this stuff, is that your measuring is what makes the whole collapse into a path and make a determination.

it was Schrodinger and his dead cat that elucidated this effect to a layman’s sensibilities (and other physicists).

The origins of uncertainty entail almost as much personality as they do physics. Heisenberg’s route to uncertainty lies in a debate that began in early 1926 between Heisenberg and his closest colleagues on the one hand, who espoused the “matrix” form of quantum mechanics, and Erwin Schré¶dinger and his colleagues on the other, who espoused the new “wave mechanics.”

in much of my explanations of math, i try to show that in truth, given valid math, Copernicus and ptolemy as a problem is only an argument as to which input value is correct. ie, which perspective is correct. when to my math, and the kind of math of Heisenberg, debroglie, and Schrodinger, and others. every location input as a vector would solve the problem if you had a GENERAL solution not a specific one who makes the location source a constant rather than a variable. (so doc dont see that i know becuase i solved for ALL values in the mathematical solution space… not one and said thats it)

why do i bring this up, because it was Claude shannon that proved in his paper that algebra with boolean functions and iteration was mathematically equivalent to other systems, and so was mathematically equivalent with reality so far as the machine can execute in limits what the math can do unlimited.

why do i bring this much later information theory position in? easy… it was schrodinger that was saying… wave mechanics wave mechanics… and it was heisenberg crying for the matrix 🙂

but in truth, they were both complete mathematical descriptions from complete mathematical systems, and so, like algebra with booleans, were equivalent.

ie.. a set problem can be casted to algebra that can be casted to waves, etc.. (which would lead us to Kurt Godel and his “Incompleteness Theorem” which sounds like dick cheney giving a speech. 🙂 )

this is why we can use computers to solve or simulate! and why you can cast wave mechanics into iterative logic algebra and get wave mechanics answers… or matrix answers.

In May 1926 Schré¶dinger published a proof that matrix and wave mechanics gave equivalent results: mathematically they were the same theory. He also argued for the superiority of wave mechanics over matrix mechanics. This provoked an angry reaction, especially from Heisenberg, who insisted on the existence of discontinuous quantum jumps rather than a theory based on continuous waves.

having determined equivalence, the geniuses argued who was right like gallileo… if they were equivalent, then both and neither… just like their theories, their answers and an infinity of them, exist in supposition

anyway..
schrodingers cat was the gedanken (thought experiment) that made conceptualizing what was going on easier.

i have spent years trying to reveal how this ties into genetics and biology… to confused ears mostly.

from wiki

Schré¶dinger’s Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.

at the quantum level, the cat is neither alive nor dead and all that would entail the outcome to be either or, is resolved once you open the box, not before.

ie. outside the perception of a conscious mind there is no reality (technically).

what schrodinger was doing, and before they did the slit experiment revealing the qualities of entanglement, was poking fun at it.

problem was, he was right in his joke. the cat is not alive or dead till you open the box…

Schré¶dinger and Einstein had exchanged letters about Einstein’s EPR article, in the course of which Einstein had pointed out that the state of an unstable keg of gunpowder will, after a while, contain a superposition of both exploded and unexploded states.

To further illustrate the putative incompleteness of quantum mechanics, Schré¶dinger describes how one could, in principle, transpose the superposition of an atom to large-scale systems of a live and dead cat by coupling cat and atom with the help of a “diabolical mechanism”. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat’s life or death was dependent on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schré¶dinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead (to the universe outside the box) until the box is opened.

Schré¶dinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; quite the reverse, the paradox is a classic reductio ad absurdum.[2] The thought experiment serves to illustrate the bizarreness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. Intended as a critique of just the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935), the Schré¶dinger cat thought experiment remains a typical touchstone for all interpretations of quantum mechanics. How each interpretation deals with Schré¶dinger’s cat is often used as a way of illustrating and comparing the particular features, strengths and weaknesses of each interpretation.

now… my explanation, to be honest, is actually one of several competing explanations, some of which can never be determined.

the form that i explained is “objective collapse theory”

According to objective collapse theories, superpositions are destroyed spontaneously (irrespective of external observation) when some objective physical threshold (of time, mass, temperature, irreversibility, etc.) is reached. Thus, the cat would be expected to have settled into a definite state long before the box is opened. This could loosely be phrased as “the cat observes itself”, or “the environment observes the cat”.

Objective collapse theories require a modification of standard quantum mechanics to allow superpositions to be destroyed by the process of time evolution.

really… is it any wonder that by nto being allowed to take college and finish degrees, that no one will have lunch with me and discuss what i am interested in? or how contemporaries who like American idol thing i am just making stuff up.

i might as well dig a hole, clime into it, and set up a small device to detect the decay of a particle.. then close my eyes and wink out of existence 🙂

in truth i actually tend to lean towards the relational interpretation

The relational interpretation makes no fundamental distinction between the human experimenter, the cat, or the apparatus, or between animate and inanimate systems; all are quantum systems governed by the same rules of wavefunction evolution, and all may be considered “observers.” But the relational interpretation allows that different observers can give different accounts of the same series of events, depending on the information they have about the system

that like Rashomon, the whole Grok truth of it is ALL the valid perspectives and relations at all scales of time and space… since we were not made to percieve this way, we see slices in bands of time scale and physical scale, etc… if we want to we can conceive of the higher level assemblage, but i have been VERY unsuccessful in getting Phds to see it, so i am not hopeful most of the time.

there are other explanations too. including the many worlds theory.. in which, for every choice and every action that there is a choice, every causational branch is taken. the universe splits into an infinity of suppositional universes. (we play with such ideas in our movies of parallel universes and such)

however in this model, there is no movemetn, or causation, or anything. there is just this one big static thing, of which our minds follow a singular path trhough the tree structure over and over and over… that is, a plank instant behind you is you… your whole life is a kind of solid thing with no time, and your passage through the tree is what you percieve.

in this model, everyone lives to old age if they follow the longest tree path… what they see as far as others, are the others tree branches that connect to their longest branch. and in other realities where someone else lives longest, their tree seems to be clipped.

so thats it..
there is ALWAYS more..
but thats the core, and the ideas, and the funkines, and even a bit of where it connects to our perceptions like in movies, without ever realizing it.

i hope i did ok..

i am now returning to my prison cell a 47×57 inch 82 degree coffin this degreed professional with 30 years experience now has as the culmination of his lifes effort..

good day all… 🙂

The only difference between humans and every other species alive today because it mercilessly beat out its competition, is we humans fret and cry injustice about it all. Which is looking more everyday like the achilees heel of our species. We’ve become hyper emotional creatures and want to flat out reject how the world actually is.

I know one of the key factors considered relevant in the development of civ is the availability of domesticable animals. The Americas have very few, compared to the Afro-Eurasian land mass. While there were some likely variants of the AEA land mass’s species who had gotten across one or more land bridges in the past, the substantial die-off that occurred in the last influx of proto-civman in about 10k BC appears to have killed off a lot of them. What remained did not lend itself to domestication, as the AEA species did. You can tame oxen far more readily than you can buffalo. You can tame horses and camels and sheep far more readily than you can alpaca and llamas. That made a huge difference in the development of fixed-place groupings of humans, which made a huge difference in the speed and level of development of civs. When you don’t have to move around as much to sustain your population, your ability to build on previous human efforts is magnified substantially… and when the animals help to relieve the burden of work (as oxen, and then horses, did) that, too, makes a huge difference.

“We are the legitimate children of Gaia; we need not be ashamed that we are altering the landscapes and the ecosystems of Earth. But we do owe our mother careful attention to our handiwork and to our treatment of Gaia’s other species of life.”
– J. P. Valk(in ‘Doomsday Has Been Cancelled’) –