RE: [OT] Sea Leopard

Quoting Brian Bilderback <bbilderback@hotmail.com>:

> Ryan M Gill wrote:
> 
> >>OK, that makes sense.  Armor wasn't their strong suite, was it?  Of
> >>course, most of the terrain they fought on didn't beget huge North
> >>Africa/Russian Steppe-style tank battles, either.
> >
> >Hmm. There was this big area of land that they captured called
> >Manchuria that has pretty big wide open spaces. Korea isn't a big
> >swamp either.
> 
> Yeah, and China and Korea had HUGE tank forces - it takes 2 to tango, 
> remember.  Besides, Not I said MOST of the terrain.  I was thinking of
> the 
> island campaigns, Burma, etc.... If I had said ALL the terrain they
> fought 
> in, then ytou'd have a point.  MOST and ALL are not the same thing.
> 
> *RANT MODE ON*
> 
> this is actually a minor irritation of mine on the list, and I'm not
> sure if 
> it bugs anyone else or if I'm just sensitive, but here goes.	I've
> noticed 
> that when someone makes a statement about a generalization, people 
> immediately cite a given exception to the generalization, and present
> that 
> as a refutation of the generalization.  While it is important for
anyone
> who 
> states a generalization to remember that there are exceptions to the
> rules, 
> it's also important to remember that the exception does not
necessarily

Happens everywhere else as well. Think of all the
"my-uncle-foo-who-smoked 300-
a-day-and-lived-to-see-140" that people seem to think means smoking
isn't the 
biggest killer around. The fact that warfare is only a close second to
smoking 
as the leading killer of the C20th is supposed to be made irrelevant by
the 
anecdotal evidence of uncle "foo".

It's a human failing - you have to go learn how to handle large
populations. 
The human brain comes naturally equipped to understand populations of a
few 
dozen people and no broadcastable knowledge.

Suddenly you have populations of millions and the direct or anecdotal
evidence 
which was acceptable as truth for the few dozen doesn't work.

It works the other way as well sometimes, just to be inconvenient.
That's why 
people are wankers on the roads - they've been safe so far, so the use
the 
generalisation that they'll always be OK, not understanding that in this
case 
the exceptions are the ones that matter - It doesn't matter how many
times you 
survive a risky overtaking, it's the time you don't that hurts...

Basically, right, human judgement is all up and down the wall...

________________________________________________________________________
_______
      Katie Lauren Lucas, Consultant Software Engineer, Parasol
Solutions