Brain cells last as long as they need to. The Brain is certainly more static than, say the testes, but it changes like the rest of the body. Old neurones die, new ones are born, old connections wither, new ones are formed.
Actually, no, no new neurons are created after your birth, only connections. Mechanically severed connections do regenerate, but dead cell is dead forever, there is no replacement.
Simply put, anytime you manage to kill of some neurons they are gone for good. Have fun drinking
Those old expectations died a little bit when we started understanding stem cells.
Even so the new neurons aren't that numerous and aren't exactly equally available to all parts of your nervous system.
There is evidence that stem cells placed into the brain will develop into new neurons.
The brain is an incredibly complex organ and like Shoku or someone said earlier, it would be a good idea to have some experts here.
Well right now we can't even accurately model the 300ish nerve cells in a c. elegans (tiny transparent worm, nerve cells are always the same,) to get functional locomotion in the simulation so there's still this huge computational barrier keeping the inner-inner workings out of our reach. As such we sort of don't have any use for brain experts. Almost everything that would have significance to the game you could get from a basic psychology textbook and even there you'd be pushing the computer power available by including a lot of that stuff.
We non-experts and those lightly-introduced to neurobiology should mostly be enough to answer the questions normal people would ask anyway.
I guess the root question is: Does alcohol grant dwarves a performance boost, or does lack of alcohol inflict a performance decrease?
Those mean the EXACT same thing. Does sending my laptop to the shop decrease my performance or does getting it back increase my performance?
You've got to say compared to what.
The difference between aesthetic value and other value is still fairly important though, I think.
Let me put it this way: If real life worked like Dwarf Fortress, the best piece of artwork you could place in a room would be an extremely expensive computer in a beige case. Since the game doesn't keep track of whether the value of an item comes from its aesthetic/decorative value, or from function or something else, ridiculous things like that end up happening, where there's no reason to use statues for decoration instead of stonefall traps or animal traps or what-have-you.
Naw, those computers with fancy cases would have a higher value because of the many bigass fans an managing rings of blacklight-neon and menacing spikes of heat sink.
You ain't never snatched a baby and you ain't no friend of mine.
I approve of this :
DMake goods of whate'er sort.
Construct Depot (b)(D).
Make sure depot is accessible to wagons (optional) (D)
have a designated trader with appraisal, JoI, persuasion skills (optional)
when merchants arrive on map (q)depot to move (g)oods to depot.
Wait for merchants to arrive and dwarves to move the goods.
When merchants arrive and your goods are in the depot, (q) (r)equest trader at depot
when trader and merchants are in depot, (q) (t)rade
on trading screen, select goods for trading with arrows and enter.
(t)rade. Merchant must break even to even consider transaction, often must make substantial profit, depending on skill, as well as value of goods- low cost transactions (<100) you may often get away with less.
When done, exit screen, and un-(q)(r)equest the trader at the depot to free him for other jobs.
Don't hate me for loving trading!
it would be nice if it followed some sort of pattern instead of being entirely random.
Sorry? I don't know how to respond to that.
Trading requests following some sort of pattern, I expect.
Well one day we may boot up DF and once we get 30 dwarves some little human child will come by delivering a newspaper (or whatever) talking about how the main pigtail crop failed leaving the elves raggedier than even they would tolerate.