Fun with maps
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@Bulb said in Fun with maps:
rare half-hour offset.
Not that rare. I was more surprised by the 45min offset in some parts of the world (e.g. Nepal, Australia, New Zealand) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_time_offsets
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@robo2 said in Fun with maps:
@Bulb said in Fun with maps:
rare half-hour offset.
Not that rare. I was more surprised by the 45min offset in some parts of the world (e.g. Nepal, Australia, New Zealand) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_time_offsets
For those nations which hate both their northerly and their southerly neighbours enough to refuse to share a timezone with them.
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@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
For those nations which hate both their northerly and their southerly neighbours enough to refuse to share a timezone with them.
Conclusion: Brexit was the only logical thing
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@kazitor said in Fun with maps:
by just hanging around either place where the borders of Queensland and South Australia meet those of the NT or NSW. Alternatively, hang around WA/NT/SA for a bit more breathing time between.
Yeah, but it's Australia, so there's nothing in any of those places.
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@dkf
Going with the heuristic that urban areas are more brightly lit than rural ones, Tokyo vs. London and their respective surroundings (same scale of course; NOAA imagery):
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@Watson
going by that heuristic Belgium (the bright blob to the right above the Paris blob) wins
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@da-Doctah It seems that Mariana's Trench is in the wrong place.
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@Luhmann said in Fun with maps:
@Watson
going by that heuristic Belgium (the bright blob to the right above the Paris blob) wins@Applied-Mediocrity said in Fun with maps:
@da-Doctah It seems that Mariana's Trench is in the wrong place.
I'd say Belgium wins on both maps.
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@Luhmann said in Fun with maps:
@Watson
going by that heuristic Belgium (the bright blob to the right above the Paris blob) winsThat blob's not just Belgium. If I'm mapping correctly it extends from Lille in the south to Den Helder in the north, and probably to the east as far as Dusseldorf. The map's cut off.
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@PleegWat For once, xkcd got it wrong, it's B*****m taking over, not the Netherlands.
(still very much on topic for this thread!)
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@remi Eh, if it ever gets so far that we have to dam the North Sea, it'll be Dutch engineers doing it. Then we'll drain Doggerland, parcel it up, sell it, and run a profit on the whole endeavour.
Probably not in our lifetime though. Blocking off the warm, salty water flowing into the North Sea won't just cause it to become fresh water. It'll also cool it down significantly, and the warm water will probably be redirected towards Greenland and the Arctic, which cannot possibly be a good idea climatologically.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Fun with maps:
It seems that Mariana's Trench is in the wrong place.
How did you find out her name??
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@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
@remi Eh, if it ever gets so far that we have to dam the North Sea, it'll be Dutch engineers doing it. Then we'll drain Doggerland, parcel it up, sell it, and run a profit on the whole endeavour.
Probably not in our lifetime though. Blocking off the warm, salty water flowing into the North Sea won't just cause it to become fresh water. It'll also cool it down significantly, and the warm water will probably be redirected towards Greenland and the Arctic, which cannot possibly be a good idea climatologically.
Doggerland might be reclaimable, but the whole North Sea isn't; it gets a lot deeper further north, especially as you get towards Norway.
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@kazitor but why is +10 east of +10.5?
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@topspin
+10 is east of +9.5, then +9.5 becomes +10.5 to get a better head-start on the new year over the Europeans and Americans.
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@topspin Because the +10.5 is +9.5+DST while the +10 does not observe DST. Because there is no Summer (nor Autumn, Winter and Spring—there may be dry and wet season) near the equator.
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@dkf said in Fun with maps:
@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
@remi Eh, if it ever gets so far that we have to dam the North Sea, it'll be Dutch engineers doing it. Then we'll drain Doggerland, parcel it up, sell it, and run a profit on the whole endeavour.
Probably not in our lifetime though. Blocking off the warm, salty water flowing into the North Sea won't just cause it to become fresh water. It'll also cool it down significantly, and the warm water will probably be redirected towards Greenland and the Arctic, which cannot possibly be a good idea climatologically.
Doggerland might be reclaimable, but the whole North Sea isn't; it gets a lot deeper further north, especially as you get towards Norway.
You don't want to drain new land bordering old land anyway. It leads to lowering ground water and related troubles in the old land.
Doggerland would have to be diked separately, like was done for Flevoland. But after damming off the North Sea you'd need lower dikes for the Doggerlandpolder.
You also need to keep a certain amount of basin to allow for river flow and shipping.
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@PleegWat You're really not making any sense.
But after damming off the North Sea
"Fuck the North Sea!"
you'd need lower dikes
for the Doggerlandpolder.
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@remi said in Fun with maps:
Imagine how simple this card could be if not for all the rules lawyering. Everything after the first sentence could be replaced with "during your upkeep, you can change which creature Vesuvan Doppelganger copies".
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@Gąska I took the first image from my search result and didn't read the text, but IIRC in earlier editions (the ones I played
), the text wasn't that. Though it still was very convoluted and the card had to be explained in simpler terms to anyone who hadn't seen it before. I also remember long discussions about Clones of a Doppelganger...Basically I agree with you but I'm just saying that I seem to remember another wall of text.
(with the wording here, I'd love to see someone choosing, for a good reason, to not use the very first "may" capability... I can easily imagine several ways to do that, but I'd love to see it played for real)
ETA: I think the wording I was used to was the one of the Alpha edition, though I never played it (who actually did?). Notably it did not include the "may" part, which created its own issues:
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@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
You also need to keep a certain amount of basin to allow for river flow and shipping.
Given that you've got a few rivers with fairly large flows, that's a certainty. I can't remember whether the Rhine would drain north or south.
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@dkf The Rhine and Thames will drain south. I wouldn't be surprised if even the Elbe would drain south. Back in the last ice age the English Channel was a river and the north half of the North Sea was covered in ice.
And at the kinds of sea level rise we'd be talking about (I think you need 2 meters before damming the North Sea becomes an sensible idea) you'd need pumping stations to actually pump the river water out, unlike the Afsluitdijk which relies on opening the sluices during low tide.
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@dkf said in Fun with maps:
@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
You also need to keep a certain amount of basin to allow for river flow and shipping.
Given that you've got a few rivers with fairly large flows, that's a certainty. I can't remember whether the Rhine would drain north or south.
Millions of years ago, the Rhine took the way to the Rhone river in France. I.e. just a little north of Basle, it turned west between the Vosgues and Alsp mountains. You could reconstruct that.
But then, some rivers flowing into the current Rhine remain:
Neckar, Main, Lahn, Mosel, Ruhr, ...
With the former two of them, you could turn them south too, by building a big dam between Rüdesheim and Koblenz. That would flood the whole Frankfurt area south to Basle...Could be the Dutch revenge for Germany's abysmal flooding management.
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@BernieTheBernie We can't antagonize the Germans over this; we probably need them against the Russians who won't be pleased with us sealing off the East Sea.
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@HardwareGeek said in Fun with maps:
@Zecc Foie gras, if you didn't know what it is, sounds like something you might eat. Liver paste, however, belongs in that other thread.
I'm fairly sure it's actually called liver pâté in English. It's not at all horrible, though best combined with cucumber.
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@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
@BernieTheBernie We can't antagonize the Germans over this; we probably need them against the Russians who won't be pleased with us sealing off the East Sea.
For sealing off the East (Baltic) Sea, you need to place a dam from Denmark to either Sweden or Norway - you do not need the Germans, despite they won't like the loss of their holday areas along the coast.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Fun with maps:
@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
@BernieTheBernie We can't antagonize the Germans over this; we probably need them against the Russians who won't be pleased with us sealing off the East Sea.
For sealing off the East (Baltic) Sea, you need to place a dam from Denmark to either Sweden or Norway - you do not need the Germans, despite they won't like the loss of their holday areas along the coast.
The main proposal I've actually seen calls for a dam from Scotland to Norway, in addition to one across the English Channel, and thus would include the Baltic Sea and antagonise Russia. An alternative approach where the northern dam goes from Scotland to Denmark would probably be less complex, cheaper, and not antagonise the Russians. It would still seal off English, Belgian, Dutch, German, and Danish seaports. Scottish ones as well, depending on the starting point. It may additionally amplify tidal forces in the Baltic.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Fun with maps:
@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
@BernieTheBernie We can't antagonize the Germans over this; we probably need them against the Russians who won't be pleased with us sealing off the East Sea.
For sealing off the East (Baltic) Sea, you need to place a dam from Denmark to either Sweden or Norway - you do not need the Germans, despite they won't like the loss of their holday areas along the coast.
Sealing off the Baltic is a megaproject that could actually be done. You'd run the dams across the Bælts in Denmark and the Øresund between Denmark and Sweden, which is fairly narrow and shallow. There's also not that much tidal exchange at the moment. It'd cost a bit, but wouldn't require any novel engineering. and wouldn't change the sea level in the Baltic much (since you'd permit net outflow).
Running any kind of dam across to Norway is vastly more expensive and difficult due to the sea being far deeper there.
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@dkf said in Fun with maps:
Running any kind of dam across to Norway is vastly more expensive and difficult due to the sea being far deeper there.
But the cost is still only a fraction of the economical value of the cities along the edge of the basin which would be threatened by rising sea levels.
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@PleegWat Nonsense. Hardly anything in those cities is old - virtually everything there was built during the last decades. Not only in war-ridden Germany, but also elsewhere.
At a sea level rise of less than 2 meters per century, it is enough time to replace all those items when they are due to be replaced anyway at a higher elevation. With that pace of replacement, there are nearly no additional costs.
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@remi said in Fun with maps:
for the Doggerlandpolder.
I CBA to analyze it perfectly, but ... is that a Monad?
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@Kamil-Podlesak I'm not sure, though I can't see any cricket stump either.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Fun with maps:
is that a Monad?
Doesn't look like a monoid in the category of endofunctors to me.
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@remi They've refactored the text on the card a few times in a few different printings to make it less confusing. The currently authorized rules text, which may or may not exist as an actual card with this text, is
You may have Vesuvan Doppelganger enter the battlefield as a copy of any creature on the battlefield, except it doesn't copy that creature's color and it has "At the beginning of your upkeep, you may have this creature become a copy of target creature, except it doesn't copy that creature's color and it has this ability."
Also, dopey rules lawyering is 100% the point of Magic The Gathering. My favorite thing I've ever done playing Magic was the time my opponent played a card that let him search his deck for a giant scary monster and put it on top of his deck.
So then at the beginning of my turn, I played some spell that gave me some big advantage, except that to weaken that spell from a game design perspective, the game designers made it so it gave my opponent a benefit too: it made him search through his deck for a basic land (an incredibly common resource), put it in his hand, and then shuffle his deck because he just looked through it.
So he looked at the bottom two or three cards of the deck, found the card, and shuffled his deck.
My turn took a little bit of time, so that when my opponent drew a card at the beginning of his next turn, and it wasn't the monster, my opponent was confused and angry because he forgot that he had shuffled.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear I think every game Richard Garfield designs has the exact same problem, they're all rules-lawyerable and then it becomes weaponising rules-lawyering as a strategy.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear was it Assassin's Trophy?
Then your opponent fucked up - as in, they didn't lawyer enough. The card specifically says "may search", specifically to avoid the scenario described.
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@remi That version’s rules are far clearer than the revised one’s posted earlier.
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@Gąska said in Fun with maps:
@GuyWhoKilledBear was it Assassin's Trophy?
Then your opponent fucked up - as in, they didn't lawyer enough. The card specifically says "may search", specifically to avoid the scenario described.
I think the card I played said that they had to search and shuffle. It's a legitimate strategy to force the opponent to draw all the cards in their deck and then lose the game when they can't draw any more.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear Turn and burn strategies were why I never favoured playing blue.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Fun with maps:
lose the game when they can't draw any more.
That’s how I won my very first ever Magic game.
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@Gurth said in Fun with maps:
@remi That version’s rules are far clearer than the revised one’s posted earlier.
That's debatable, but what's sure is that the original wording is full of ambiguities. "Upon summoning" doesn't really precisely indicate the time the effect takes place, and whether there is a time when it's in play without being a copy. A huge ambiguity is that there is no "may", which makes it extremely unclear what happens if no creature is in play when the card is played. Is the effect simply ignored, making the creature a 0/0 one (but it's /, not 0/0, and I'm not sure the original rules stated that =0 by default -- the newer versions make the card explicitly 0/0)? Or is that effect a requirement of playing the card, making it forbidden to play it if no creature is in play? And then there is the "all characteristics" which makes it unclear whether it keeps its special shape-shifting characteristic at all (). Also what's a "normal" characteristic, does it include name? type? casting cost?
(*) combined with the lack of "may", I remember one possible scenario that was argued (it never was convincing, but it still was argued -- remember that the game was played mostly by high-school students or similar, not necessarily the brightest of minds...): that the Doppelganger could copy a creature only once (since it "acquires all characteristics", thus looses its own), unless you summoned it while no other creature was in play -- in which case it was a 0/0 creature (but with other effects e.g. a Castle you could easily keep it alive), and only in that case did it keep its shape-shifting ability until it decided to copy something else. It's a retarded interpretation, but the wording did not close that door as firmly as the new wording does.
The "enchantments" part is useless, they've never been part of a card and I don't think there is anything that copies them. It looks like answering a FAQ more than a rule statement. The same goes for the last part about copying a creature that's gone.
So yeah, maybe more readable, but more Undefined Behaviour.
Though the new wording is to me slightly unclear as to what happens if you do not trigger the "may" ability upon summoning -- the Doppelganger clearly stays a 0/0 creature, but does it still have its shape-shifting ability? The wording makes that ability dependent on copying another creature, so on the face of it I'd say "no" but that's probably not the intended effect.
(also, related, I remember lengthy discussions as to what happens when a Clone copies a Doppelganger -- does it become a Doppelganger, or the creature that's currently copied by the Doppelganger?)
(and yes, @GuyWhoKilledBear is right, MtG is all about rules-lawyering...)
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@remi Upon summoning = immediately after playing the card, after any time has elapsed for an instant/interrupt to be played and thus the card is now actively in play and the “summoned event” has just been fired.
There is AIUI no time when the card is in play when it is not a copy in the original wording - the copy takes effect atomically after instants have been played.
As for what happens upon summoning in the original wording if there are no creatures in play, I believe this can be called a failed casting by the opponent since the lack of “may” means the wording is not optional, but since the effect cannot be carried out, the summoning cannot be cast. I forget whether that means you have to return to your hand or discard, it’s been many years since I played MtG.
“Acquire all characteristics” in the alpha wording I think doesn’t mean “replace” but “add”. But it was alpha, I’d be intrigued to see any variant wording in later editions that differ to the one shown later in thread, which clearly indicates the direction they had in mind for it.
The enchantments wording is interesting, and I think symptomatic of a lack of clarity in alpha as to how firmly attachments enchantments were, though as you say I didn’t think there were later cards that cloned enchantments.
As for the new wording, if you do not play the ability upon the card coming into play, it’s a 0/0 that can do nothing since its ability is only triggered when coming into play. But I suspect this is as intended, blue decks have a lot of interplay strategies around drawing little creatures, sacrificing them and pulling back from the graveyard meaning it’s better than average chance you’ll be seeing it again later…
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@Arantor said in Fun with maps:
@remi Upon summoning = immediately after playing the card, after any time has elapsed for an instant/interrupt to be played and thus the card is now actively in play and the “summoned event” has just been fired.
There is AIUI no time when the card is in play when it is not a copy in the original wording - the copy takes effect atomically after instants have been played.
Well it seems to me that you're contradicting yourself here? If there's time to play instants then it means that the creature has come into play -- IIRC only interrupts can be played in between a card being cast and its effects (e.g. a creature being summoned) applying (though I remember that the exact timing/resolution of interrupts (and instants!) changed with editions, so
).But whatever the actual ruling is, my key point is that the original wording did leave that part uncertain. We'd have to refer to the rules-as-written at the time to see if a more accurate interpretation could be made, but I think there still were parts that were unclear.
(the Doppelganger wasn't the worst one in that regard... the Alpha edition has quite a few wacky cards that had too many ambiguous side effects!)
As for what happens upon summoning in the original wording if there are no creatures in play, I believe [...]
Again, the key part is that the original wording doesn't make this absolutely clear... Though maybe the original rules did contain something about that but I suspect that they probably weren't very clear as to the distinction between what's a prerequisite for casting, and what's a consequence of it. That's another thing that was clarified later.
As for the new wording, if you do not play the ability upon the card coming into play, it’s a 0/0 that can do nothing since its ability is only triggered when coming into play. But I suspect this is as intended, blue decks have a lot of interplay strategies around drawing little creatures, sacrificing them and pulling back from the graveyard meaning it’s better than average chance you’ll be seeing it again later…
It might be intended, yes, but I'm not sure. As I said it's enough to have e.g. a Castle into play so that your "empty" Doppelganger stays into play, and it's then useless if it can't copy anything -- you have to find a way to get rid of it first and play it again! This might be intended, but maybe not. I don't know.
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@remi it’s not really a contradiction. It’s the fact that casting inherently must leave time for a counter, which means “summoning + time for response (plus any counter-counter chain)” is really an atomic action whose end state is “creature is in play”.
Rules lawyering for the win.
In any case, arguing over the imprecision of wording in Alpha is a bit… the whole point of Alpha was to get the system out there and refine it and hammer out some of these things.
To your last point, the later wording seems fine - at upkeep you can change what it’s copying. You can’t have it target Castle as it’s not a creature, only actual creatures. But the revised wording is “copy that creature’s stats (except colour) and effects, add in the Doppleganger ability” so if you or your opponent has a creature in play, it’s fair game.
The only UB is if there are no creatures in play and I think that would result as “since you didn’t use the ability at that point, it’s a 0/0 with an ability you can’t use” since the upkeep ability does not apply to the card at that point.
Intended? Hard to say. The layers of rules make it unclear at this point, but it’s certainly not unheard of to stack blue decks with creatures that are disposable to leverage access to your deck and graveyard in various ways. So maybe it is, but maybe it’s just “insufficient room on the card to explain it fully”.
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@Arantor said in Fun with maps:
@remi it’s not really a contradiction. It’s the fact that casting inherently must leave time for a counter, which means “summoning + time for response (plus any counter-counter chain)” is really an atomic action whose end state is “creature is in play”.
Rules lawyering for the win.
IIRC (and again, that changed across editions, and I think MtG have completely removed interrupts anyway nowadays?), only interrupts could be playedhappen in between paying the mana cost and the card coming into play (typically, a Counterspell is an interrupt, for that very reason). So if, as you initially stated, instants can be played between the cost being paid and the cloning effect taking place, then it means there is a fraction of game-time during which the Doppelganger is a creature in play, but not cloning anything.Now the other thing to check would be how the fact that a creature with 0 in defence dies is applied. There were some subtle rules about stacking of instants/interrupts effects and unstacking them and when effects could be added to effects, that again changed across editions. So it could be that you actually never could play any instant in that time-window, if it ever existed.
Anyway, it's rules lawyering from memory and on rules that have been obsolete for longer than some forum members have been alive, and never were really accurate to begin with, as you mention, so not very interesting (nor funny).
To your last point, the later wording seems fine - at upkeep you can change what it’s copying. You can’t have it target Castle as it’s not a creature, only actual creatures.
Of course you can't copy the Castle -- the point of mentioning it is to say that you could have a 0/0 creature coming into play and not dying immediately, as the Castle (or many other similar effects) can boost its defence.
The only UB is if there are no creatures in play and I think that would result as “since you didn’t use the ability at that point, it’s a 0/0 with an ability you can’t use” since the upkeep ability does not apply to the card at that point.
My reading is that the result is "since you didn’t use the ability at that point, it’s a 0/0 without any ability." For me the ability is only added to the text of whatever you copy, so if you don't copy anything, you're left with the original text of the Doppelganger itself, which is just an "when entering play" effect.
(note also that the current "may" wording means that you can get this result even if there are creatures in play, you can just elect to not copy any -- it's probably stupid in 99% of cases, but there are probably some tiny edge cases where it would be the smart thing to do, and even some cases where it might even be intended (and not just damage-limitation) by the player!)
(ETA: reading the actual card page (
), there are amusing rulings that I hadn't thought about, but more importantly for the discussion here, this very question is at the end of the "discussion" section, and someone confirms that the copying effect is gone -- it's not an official rule interpretation, but probably as close as we'll get to at this point)Intended? Hard to say. The layers of rules make it unclear at this point, but it’s certainly not unheard of to stack blue decks with creatures that are disposable to leverage access to your deck and graveyard in various ways. So maybe it is, but maybe it’s just “insufficient room on the card to explain it fully”.
Yeah, that's a thing that I disliked later on, that some cards needed rules add-ons that couldn't fit on the card itself. The early game, for all its imprecision, was intended to be 100% workable from generic rules + text on cards. I think that's no longer the case, but that probably wasn't avoidable with so many new rules added again and again...
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Since this sounds like a discussion that has the potential to go on for days... maybe it could be Jeffed into a "Fun with cards" thread?
Northern European Enclosure Dam - Wikipedia
