infoscott

It's hard to be creative with a flat map. Get a map with plenty of terrain features. Build lots of scattered villages linked together by farms. Have the roads follow the contour features, but later allow interstates to cut through features even if you have to tunnel or flatten terrain. Farms like big expanses of flat lands. Villages, towns, and cities like to be at transportation junctions. You can ship ten times more freight for the cost via ships, so your largest population centers should be adjacent to navigable rivers or seas. Larger urban areas should also be close to large supplies of fresh water, so that usually means rivers and lakes. Taking this approach, you don't have to be very clever, and certainly not well planned out. Just study the terrain, lay down transportation while you still can, and then let development happen. Once you're ready to go from the rural to urban stage, you can grab the graph paper and bulldozer, but by them the simulator should have already provided suggestions to act upon.

High tech starts to just spring up where it finds a nurturing environment. You can get even a little high tech with sub 80 education level, but you won't usually see it in high pollution, low property value areas. Thus designing a high tech industrial park becomes something of a tricky issue. It's usually a lot easier to to build just an industrial park in an optimal location, suffer with suboptimal industries there over a period of time, and then let evolution do its business. You might think about designating your target neighborhood with industrial zones, but scatter them about sparsely and fill the gaps with trees and parks. This will raise desirability and reduce pollution; a high tech incubator. When you feel your education is high enough, i-HT demand strong, transportation is good, and pollution is not an issue, you can start digging up the greenery and replace with more industrial zones. Don't be afraid to put these zones close to or even adjacent to residential areas. If you grow it slowly enough you won't kill off residential with pollution. I've done it on small islands, and I've seen it done for real in Orange County California (city of Irvine - the Spectrum industrial park and the Irvine Business Complex, both R-$$/$$$ and I-HT).

On the monorail issue, you should check to see which wealth classes are using it. R$ tends to choose bus or passenger rail over other options, I can't find a particular preference for R$$, and R$$$ seems to prefer monorail or cars. However, I've built a rural to rural monorail system and seen R$ take it when the corresponding bus route was far less efficient, and surface roads weren't even an option. It seems highway trumps everything far too often. It's one of the better saboteurs of a well layed out mass transit system, toll booths notwithstanding. Monorail stations are tricky to place to get the desired effect. The destination should be near very high densities, and better if it's adjacent to a subway system. The source destination needs to be near higher density, higher wealth residential, although in theory a Park-n-Ride configuration should also work. I haven't seen many suburbs built with high wealth city centers surrounded by medium and low wealth suburbs, often it's just the other way around. So the Catch-22 seems to be funneling enough candidates to the source destination to make it effective. I'm still working on that problem.

By air, 27 hours from Columbia Missouri USA to Buenos Aires, Argentina (about 7,000 miles). We had plane changes in Atlanta and Miamia and relatively short stopovers in Saint Louis, Atlanta, Guayaquil Ecuador, Lima Peru, Santiago Chile, and Montevideo Uruguay. By sea, 17 hours from Esbjerg Denmark to Harwich England (somewhere over 700 miles). Fortunately I got a bunk and slept most of the way. By land, about 16 hours from Saint Louis Missouri to Boston Massachusetts (1200 miles) via Amtrak. In 1985 I wanted to try Amtrak out before Congress finally pulled the plug on the subsidies.

That's good to know. I use NAM but without any commute optimizers.

I get them to work, but the path through the rails have to be shorter than the path over the roads. I run my rails very straight, first piece of transportation infrastructure that gets laid.

1x1 residential is really hard to turn into anything. I have only seen 1x1 middle class low density and some medium density row houses without a back yard. 1x2 is pretty standard low/medium wealth low density and medium density apartment buildings. 2x2 gets larger apartment buildings. I find that 1x2 apartments give a lot of flexibility in road layout. You may have to use high density zones adjacent to medium density trick in order to prevent 1x2 lots merging into 2x2 lots. It may seem counterintuitive, but for low density residential I'd zone 2x2 and closer to the the urban center I'd zone 1x2 for low-medium wealth and 3x3 for high wealth. Land is much cheaper in the country than in the city, so if the game engine recognizes this you'll get lots that are proportional to land cost. I guess you could justify it by saying that rural people tend to live more extended family while city dwellers tend to live more nuclear family.

Thanks! Yeah, I don't replace electric plants until between 60% and 50% of capacity. You need the operating cost savings in the early days of the plant to pay off the capital cost of building the plant. For the commercial buildings, there are two considerations; traffic and concentration. Both Co and Cs like to be high traffic areas. It's usually better to not concentrate Cs, but to scatter it about in your residential areas. At most you'd concentrate some Cs into strip malls or shoping centers. Co likes to be clumped around other Co buildings. Although you can't zone specifically for Co versus Cs, your placement and desirability factors will influence which get built, so knowing this will give you some control over which is chosen. While you're population is still small, you'll need more industrial than commercial. You'll find it favorable to put Co zones in the transit path between residential and industrial, but don't expect to see a lot of them pop up, you'll probably see more Cs. When the populations get much larger and Co is more in demand than I, you can support a commercial center with a lot of C zones feeding off the traffic patterns of each other. So if you don't want to do a lot of rezoning, you kind of have to slowly fill in a hole where your commercial center is going to be. Alternatively you could fill that with low density residential and a good street grid, knowing that when your population rises it won't be to expensive to tear it out and make it a commercial center. Glad to hear your back in the black without making the city look like "War of the Worlds".

Keep education in your Ag towns, but be REALLY stingy about it. In any one village you can have an elementary school or a high school, but not both. You're going to set the busing radius to zero, and what few apartment buildings you have will be within the school's radius. You can also have one community college and one library (think "bookmobile" for the rest of the inhabitants). That's about all the education you can afford. You'll see a slow creeping rise in your EQ, enough to allow you access to C-$$ and I-M jobs. Your Ag town can have one or two clinics and one medical center, again in the area of population concentration. Ag towns generally don't need water in areas that are all low density. You won't have enough business to support much R-$$$. By my experiments you can support the following without water: R-$/$$, Cs-$/$$, Co-$$, I-Ag, I-D, and I-M; at least at the lower stages. The feeder towns won't need any police, and at most one small fire station. The big town should handle all the garbage. It terms of profit and loss, your farm taxes will pay for its share of the electric and some of the roads, the residential taxes for farm workers will pay for the rest of civic services on a small budget. If you're really frugal on the other expenses that boost desirability, you can turn a tidy profit on R-$$, Cs, Co, and I-D/M. The Ag towns are actually a great exercises in squeezing your budget to produce the most beauty and desirability from your designs. It's also a good test of milking civic jobs. Your medical center and city college will be your larger job providers, many of them high wealth. You can use either as the anchor structure for an Ag city, wereas in larger urban areas they are just though of as another civic service.

You'll find that your rural areas make excellent bedroom communities until your population stabilizes in the large city. In some ways they will be more stable than relying on row houses and large apartment towers in the large city. I would suggest actually building out your small and medium farm communities with more R-$ apartments and more dirty industry. Agribusiness manufacturing works better when it's close to the raw materials, this being the produce and livestock. If you have a good rail system there, then you can put up some dirty industry close to the rails and/or road junctions. If you keep the density medium and stagger around the zones you won't have any meaningful air pollution. In these "company town" villages, you'll probably have one or maybe two larger manufacturers, like canneries or meat packing plants, and then a few or several 1x2 tile small manufacturers, like foundries and automobile part remanufacturers (you would have to rename something like "Farley's Foundry"). If you keep the medium R lots small, namely 1x2 or even 1x1, you'll get appropriate structures like walk-ups and row houses, and meaningful population densities that boost your regional population considerably. Also, you wouldn't necessarily have to run out something like a monorail across the entire region. The bedroom communities could be linked by commuter rail or bus, and have a transit plaza on the edge of your map where the commuters switch to monorail or EL that takes them through the large city.

Regarding freight stimulating commerce; it's an observation, but I don't have proof from some insight into the game mechanics. Working rural areas, though, freight traffic is probably one of the largest sources of traffic on the side streets. I'm pretty sure freight trucks count against congestion, because most of my paved areas are streets, and I'll get yellow and red status around feeder streets that bring produce trucks out to the main road. In many cases the freight counts as 40-60% of the total traffic, partly because the farm residences don't have to commute more than 20 - 30 tiles to their jobs.

It's also worth pointing out that "off map" can mean an adjacent city within your region that either is or is not developed yet, and into adjacent regions. If you don't have enough connections for your freight, you'll get a message about the industrial goods piling up. Off map freight simulates the macro economy, while regional and inter-city transport is the micro economy. It appears the sims prefer to ship industrial good on rail instead of truck, but it won't go out of it's way to find a freight station. Medium/heavy industry and the parts of farms with buildings, if they are adjacent to a rail tile will load their freight directly onto the tracks without need of a station. If this looks too goofy you can plop rail spurs next to your industry tiles. With farms, you're sort of stuck as to where the main tile gets placed, so often you'll need a local freight station if you want to take the load off your streets. If you're playing a rural area, don't be too quick to place a freight station. You may want the traffic from the freight trucks to help stimulate demand for commercial zones. Early on the freight traffic may be two or three times the residential commuter traffic. Once you're traffic volume is up and you wish to take a load off your streets rather than upgrade them to roads, then go ahead and plop a freight station. Freight stations also make a great justification for laying out a small village at the street/rail transit junction.

Ditto. There are quite a few threads that leave the topic hanging without resolution.

<> Totally! I play mostly rural cities, so the proportion of wealth is usually R-$ 80%, R-$$ 15%, and R-$$$ 5%. In larger cities the ratio is more like 25/50/25. Around farms it's all about the little guy; they are the backbone of your economy. Even when you get to larger urban areas, quite often R-$ are your best bargain. Of course the R-$ tax base per capita is less than the other wealth levels, but their civic and beautification support costs are less, too. If you also take into account that mass transit can be made self supporting but roads (without toll booths) cannot, R-$ can be a real bargain. The one factor that I think gets overlooked is their contribution to higher wealth C&I taxes. Unless I'm mistaken and it's scaled, the share of high tech taxes from the R-$ workers is just as important as the contribution from R-$$/$$$. And I believe every city should have a little dirty industry for realism purposes, and this along with Cs-$ is the exclusive workplace of low wealth people. Rich people can't eat grapes without somebody picking the grapes. If you want to really appreciate this, go to the maximum zoom level on one of your farms. From time to time you'll see a couple of sims working the fields. If you're clever and put some woods right up to the border of the farm, you may also see some wildlife ambling around while the ag workers harvest away. It's really quite inspiring!

Ah, the Trinity. Commentaries associating a triune nature of God, apart from implicit passages in the Gospels, started showing up in the late second, early third century ("A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs"). Gender (which is how this ties back to DVC) wasn't really an issue then, more the bishops were trying to deduce the exact relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and/or whether they were different aspects of a single entity. As it turned out, by focusing exclusively on these three aspects, two being male and one being neuter, it excluded the feminine from worship. Adopting the Nicean creed in the fourth century would enforce the belief in the Trinity. Extra-biblical references to God's aspect included the feminine, but they were not to be even considered at Nicea, because Constantine's purpose of this council was to unite Christianity under a common belief system and to shut the door on heresies. If a bishop would not sign the new profession of faith, he was banished, and in AD 380 Emperor Theodosius passed a law making it illegal to disagree with the church on the position of the Trinity ("The Dark Side of Christian History"). Bishop Ephiphanius expressed the sentiments of the orthodoxy, saying "Let the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be worshipped, but let no one worship Mary." (ibid.) Basically, within the jurisdiction of the Roman Empire, the sacred feminine was legislated out of existence and any scripture with even a taint of heresy was not to be even considered for inclusion in the Bible. DVC portrays events, sources, and movements of the fringe, non-orthodox elements of Christianity that wholeheartedly believed in the sacred feminine as an integral part of following Jesus. koffee: Thanks, {blush}, I still learned computer science stuff in order to make a living. Linguists are slightly more employable than poets. Let's see if we can yawn together in two part harmony. ;^)

< I'll jump in since it hasn't been answered yet. The original demerara sugar is a product of Guyana, but now other sugars are going by that name. It is an unrefined yellowish to brown sugar, comparable with turbinado sugar in the US. Since it hasn't gone through all the refining stages, it still retains a lot of the minerals found in the sugar cane juice, and so is considered a healthier alternative to white sugar. Demerara sugar is found in Europe, but only rarely in the US. Turbinado is now showing up frequently in coffee shop chain stores.

Ack, somebody, lay down in the path of that bulldozer! You don't have to take such drastic actions to put your city back in the black. Remember, just about everything that has a support cost also has a budget slider where you can set the funding. Buildings that are not immediately critical you can set their funding to zero. The college, library, and museum budget you can directly by clicking on the building and adjust their funding. It takes a loooonnggg time before a drop in funding here shows up in your education stats, so it will give you a few years of rebuilding without a lot of pain. For the mayor's house you can set it in the Government Budget, and the parks you can set via City Beautification. If you want to be more drastic, you can also reduce your elementary and high school busing to zero and then in a few updates reduce the teacher funding for just the kids who walk to school (not that you could get away with that in the real world). This will all buy you time until you can restore your slum...er...R-$ population. If your mass transit is good, or even if it isn't, I would start a housing projects area of medium density residential in the outskirts of town and make sure it is well covered with a bus system. You might even get away with putting these new R-$ sims in the adjacent city of your region and let them commute in (also taking some strain off your budget). You may have deleted their homes, but the R-$ job demand is probably still there, much of it tucked away in some of the higher wealth commercial and industrial buildings. Once your population stabilizes, your budget will improve, and when that happens, you can restore civic funding. I like the suburbs as the target because when things stabilize, you can improve the desirability of these 'burbs and eventually convert them over to middle class. This will allow you to keep that city center area that you bulldozed vacant until you decide exactly how you want to regentrify it.

I'm a theoretical linguist who also pursues the sub-topic of historical linguistics. Scriptural origins is a particularly interesting facet of historical linguistics. Some of the Biblical idiom and stories can be traced as far back as the Sumerians. Sorry about the randomness. If I elaborated any more about scriptural and church history it would probably not be that interesting to the general audience. Just trying to point out facts that directly relate to the Da Vinci Code. Here is a definition of "historical fiction" - Works in which the characters are fictional, but the setting and other details are rooted in actual history. My favorite historical fiction of all time is "The Name of the Rose", written by linguist Umberto Eco. The movie included Sean Connery, who did an excellent job in the leading role.

Well wishes from an old 98-er myself. I went 98G (SIGINT/Voice Intercept), with Russian language training at the Presidio of Monterey. Our analyst support guys back then were 98C, traffic analysts, and 98B, order of battle analysts (these were the guys with grease pencils briefing the commanders). I don't think the 98Y MOS existed back then. Job training for all the services was at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, near San Angelo. You'll have fun. As long as you're not doing tactical collection, direction finding, or jamming, you won't be on the front line. But I guess these days there really isn't such a thing as the front line. :^P

thesonofgray: The original passage "be fruitful and multiply" is taken out of context. It goes on to say "...[and] fill (replenish) the earth...". It was said to Adam and Eve and again to Noah, both times when the earth had almost no humans. Today we have about 6 billion people.Mission accomplished, to the point that we're failing in our responsibilities of exercising dominion [i interpret stewardship] over the earth. On the other general note: The Da Vinci Code is full of facts, even while it is joining them together in a fictional narrative. Some of these facts are without dispute; Constantine did preside over an ecumenical council in Nicea in 325 AD, and King Philip IV indeed arrested the Templars on October 13, 1307. Some of these facts are very debatable; Nicea was convened ostensibly to discuss heresy, not to sort through scriptures, and Philip's motive for arresting Templars may have been that he owed them money, not because he was bothered by their heresy. And the Church has a dark side to its history, whether or not it feels comfortable about that. The conclusions of the book and the movie are a consequence of its fiction, but it comes to some conclusions that have close parallels in non-fiction works such as "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", "Bloodline of the Holy Grail", and others. Not characters, but the real contemporary people Brown, Gardner, Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln, Thiering, and others all come at the same subject from different angles. The non-fiction books put forward theses that are supported by facts. The fictional account, Da Vinci Code, uses clear facts, cloudy facts, and speculation to give substance to a fictional narrative. Because it is an historical fiction, those facts used in the story cannot be dismissed just because the genre is fictional, the facts still stand on their own (or don't if they are disputable).

I'm kind of going in the other direction, "Rural Uglification", at least for the sake of realism. Here is an example from a new project in the works that might turn into a CJ. It uses mainly the stone wall lots and the irrigation ditches to act as a means to channel runoff during flooding periods:

Yikes, I would be Riccochet Rabbit if I had just a Pop Tart. The blood sugar can't handle that much simple carb. {shudder}

My bet is it already happened on 06/06/1006. The Mayans started to perish about that time. Too bad they were wasting time with their calendar system and not reading Revelations.

ephorex_77: Celibate priests is a peculiarly Roman Catholic practice, and one not enforced throughout Church history. Currently the custom for Eastern Orthodox priests is that they may be married as long as the marriage occurs before they enter the priesthood. I believe Nazarenes and Anglicans can also marry, as well as the clergy of the early Culdee Church (Celtic), and I'm not aware of any Protestant sects that can't marry. Some of the RC priests were married up until the time of the 11th century Great Schism, and indeed not allowing priests to marry was one of the contentious issues contributing to the Schism ("The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600 - 1700)"). * Pope Benedict VIII (1018) banned priests from having wives and mistresses, upholding a Church position held in the fourth - fifth centuries but fallen into lapse in the Dark and Middle Ages. * Pope Innocent II ruled subdeacons and above could not have wives (Second Lateran Council, 1139) The only pattern of celibate clerics I'm aware of, from which RC clergy could use as reference, in Jesus' time were desert hermetics and monastic orders within the Essenes (Qumran/Zadok and some Theraputae, but not village Essenes). These orders were considered the fringe of the fringe for the multitude of Jewish denominations and sects of the time. The rules governing Essene orders are extensively documented in the "secular" writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls collection. The norm for mainstream Judaism, including the clergy, was to be married. Even in non-Judeo-Christian religions, celibacy is normally reserved for monastic orders.

Ah, some interesting tidbits to ponder regarding the underlying historicity of the Da Vinci Code (BTW, I liked the movie but only after having read it twice). * The box office take of this movie has been running about 2 - 3 times overseas what it's grossing in the U.S. * Authors Baigent and Leigh, writers of the non-fiction book, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" (1982), lost their lawsuit of copyright infringement against Dan Brown in British court. Note that Teabing is an anagram of Baigent. Although the Priory of Sion is a matter of great historical dispute, it does have serious scholarship backing it up. * A pastor graduating from the seminary prior to 1991 would not have been properly schooled on the Dead Sea Scrolls, although they would have had access to the Nag Hamadi library (my copy was first printed in 1978). The DSS were not published until 1991, and only then against the objections of the Ecole Biblique who had denied access to other scholars to the scrolls for decades ("The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered"). Vermes translation of the Scrolls in English (first edition in 1962) covers only a fraction of the corpus. * Emperor Constantine changed the day of rest from Saturday to Sunday in 321 AD ("Documents of the Christian Church"). * The alteration of the scriptures is extremely well documented, especially by the early church fathers themselves! Here is a passage from Metzger's well researched work, "The Text Of The New Testament, Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration", 'ALTERATIONS MADE BECAUSE OF DOCTRINAL CONSIDERATIONS...In the mid-second century Marcion expunged his copies of the Gospel according to Luke of all references to the Jewish background of Jesus...The manuscripts of the New Testament preserve traces of two kinds of dogmatic alterations: those which involve the elimination or alteration of what was regarded as doctrinally unacceptable or inconvenient, and those which introduce into the Scriptures "proof" of a favourite theological tenet or practice.' * As an example of the above, the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 prophesy was "almah" [maid], not "bethulah" [virgin]. Isaiah used the word bethulah five times, and in those instances it is evident from the context that he implied chastity. Equating virgin to almah was a presumption by the RC church originating around the second to third centuries. If the Apostles had been relying on the Septuagint for their Isaiah source, they would have been misled by the sloppy use of "parthenos", which substitutes for three different Hebrew words (naarah, bethulah, and almah)! By way of example, Justin Martyr, around AD 160, pointed out the error, while Bishop Irenaeus, around AD 180, gave dogmatic justification for the expanded interpretation ("A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs"). * The word for the extended family of Jesus is "desposyni", meaning "of or belonging to the master or lord". There is biblical support for four brothers and at least two sisters. A reference to Jesus' descendents survives in a quotation by the fourth century Eusebeus in "Historia Ecclesiae". * And jumping ahead, my favorite of the movie was the covering of the Templar capture. There are numerous well documented references to this event, along with the preceding Cathar massacre known as the Albigensian Crusade, centered around the Langedoc region ("The Dark Side of Christian History"). -- My point is not to be a church anti-apologist, but to point out that Dan Brown did some excellent historical research in providing the backstory for his fictional account. I couldn't find anything in either the book or the movie that contradicts my several dozen references on early Church history (note that I don't have any materials covering Opus Dei, can't speak to them). You should do your own independent research to confirm any truth in his backstory, but B&N and Amazon have shelves stacked with references.