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Mon Dec 31 06:48:12 EST 2018 Slept from midnight to six. High of forty-one and rainy. New year's eve. Goals: - Code ranged list filter Done. https://github.com/pgorman/rlist - Nap Done. Watched more MSTK3. The Experiment 1204: The Day TIme Ended episode is right up my alley. > This whole movie is like the cold open of a Columbo episode. Ha. Nap in the early afternoon. A lot of rain — enough to to melt every trace of show. Glad I went to Whole Foods when Market Fresh was closed last night. Their ugly tomatoes — beautiful flavor. Watched Brian Regan standup on Netflix. Funny. Odd twenty-four-minute format. Vacuumed. https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/ab77a3/tactical_advantages_and_disadvantages_of_european/ > European castles were meant to be held by a very small garrison while an army was raised elsewhere to attack the besiegers. Oftentimes it was just a few dozen men, only a handful of which would have been professionals. > […] if the castle was in a town, citizen had to defend it along the garrison. > Occupying force also had to lay garrison behind them, weakening them slowly, but they must do it to protect the town from being taken back, and to protect supplies coming to the front. > A castle completely controls the surrounding countryside. 40 men inside the castle? Let's pass by! A week later, local militas rally and there are now 300 dudes in the castle, attacking your supplies, controlling the population and creating a base of operations for local resistance against you. > Medieval castles were also ridiculously expensive to build and maintain, and were used as a means of force projection, much like a aircraft carrier is today. With a powerful castle, your lands became basically unconquerable by most medieval armies, which were mostly levied peasants that couldn't fight in an campaign for long and had little to no supply lines, making a siege impossible. With your opponent unable to defeat your properly garrisoned and maintained castle, you could launch counter-attacks from the safety of the walls. > Depends on the time periods you compare, but really it comes down to europeans being a lot better at sieging castles due to siege equipment. The japanese didn't really have or use any of those. > Particularly if we examine the late 14th and early 15th centuries we see a significant gap in the technology used by the Europeans and the Japanese. The Europeans often had significantly better armour and arms, and the European use of siege equipment was commonplace. Whether Europeans were besieging the Japanese, or the Japanese were besieging the Europeans, you would expect to see a convincing victory for the European force under most circumstances. > The construction styles between the two areas were completely unique and as such it is difficult to determine the European period in which a Japanese army would encounter similar resistance to that of their own fortifications. I would certainly say that a Japanese army from the Muromachi period (1338-1573) would be able to overwhelm a Roman fort, and would certainly be defeated by a 15th century European army. However, that leaves a little over 900 years of European history unaccounted for and it is difficult to determine where in that 900 years we experience the crossover point in which the Japanese of the period would be unable to defeat the Europeans. > Perhaps, but build a European castle in Japan and it's fall at the first relatively large earthquake. Didn't feel like going outside to get rained on, but tromped around the apartment for ten minutes. An OK last day of the year, and an OK year overall. Servings: grains 9/6, fruit 4/4, vegetables 4/4, dairy 1/2, meat 0/3, nuts 1/0.5 Breakfast: carrots, apple, spinach, orange Lunch: banana, pita, hummus, tomato, coffee Dinner: beer, ice cream, orange, flatbread with cheese and tomato 139/83

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