Matthew White

I suggest everybody here take a look at Matthew White's excellent WikiWatch. Despite the last entry being 2006, it is still a very valuable criticism of Wikipedia today. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm

Related: For curated list of the 100 largest atrocities, ranked by largest loss of life, check out Matthew White's The Great Big Book of Horrible Things [0] It grew out of his website, Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, and while he is not an historian by profession (I believe he's a librarian), the book is very well researched (lots of footnotes, citations, etc.) and IMO, "fun" to read. (Only because of his style of writing, obviously not about the content) Each event is a relatively short read, with decent background provided, though the book is quite long overall. Spoiler: One of the items on the list is Caesar's Gallic Wars, and there are many dedicated to various events that transpired the Roman {Republic, Empire} 0. http://www.bookofhorriblethings.com/ 1. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm

I always thought love of religion was the root of all evil. 809 million deaths[1] from religious wars, for example. [1] http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatz.htm

Even in best case scenario, I'm not sure GPS would be accurate enough, as it's only accurate down to few centimeters, you'd probably need more if you'd like to perform that kind of acrobatics as shown in the video. And what about the height? You could of course use GPS, but apparently (http://users.erols.com/dlwilson/gpsvert.htm), average consumer devices have error of few meters. Maybe we could use laser range finders pointed at the ground, but what if the quadcopter tilts? Or what if another quadcopter flies underneath it? Of course it's not unsolvable, but it'd probably require more computing power in the quadcopter. What do you think?

Given that 'first world' means 'US and its allies', that's clearly a loaded question. There was no war between second-world communist countries either. If you take out the 'first world' bit, then yes, there's been plenty of war between democracies, including World War I: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

I don't see why it would have been created for that purpose, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of kudzu sites scraping Wikipedia and cloning its articles as early as 2005: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo3.htm#Bastard

Hmm.... More on the "democratic peace" (it's not so clear cut): http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

This[1] page puts the sum of deaths of religious wars at 800 million. [1]: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatz.htm

No major powers have gone to war however. Stalemates of nuclear war and the lack of conventional warfare between capitalistic countries equates to this weird period in history that does not involve actual military expansion. Economic expansion is enough :D http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-33---(BLITZ)-Old-Scho… An interesting look at "Belgium should not be a country" meaning, pre-1950's, Belgium would be snapped up by an expanding imperialistic country. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm Lists of Democracies going to war..though I would differentiate this between "capitalistic" countries and war. Points and counter-points: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/205/01/20060806nb_cheap_wars_tikkun_web.htm

This first random internet page I found puts Stalin at 20M killed and Mao at 40M. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm So are you willing to settle for 10's of millions?

A more detailed analysis: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm

Actually I think the European thing is just an example of a broader phenomenon: democracies never go to war with other democracies. (I went googling to make sure that was true, and found this: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/demowar.htm which goes through all the potential counterexamples. So I'll amend my statement to say that democracies hardly ever go to war with other democracies.) So the idea is really a bit redundant -- two countries probably won't go to war if the people have anything to say about it anyway. Only when you have decisions being made by a dictator on at least one side are disagreements likely to turn into wars; democracies tend to compromise.

The scale and ambitions of wars today are much smaller which is in essence what you are saying and it is a really important point. We are living in a time of extremely limited war that in comparison with the mid 20th Century is a time of relative peace (the mid 20th Century being one of the most bloody in human history). This graph makes this point better than I: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-1900.htm >think some of this talk about ideologies is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Abstracting your worldview so that you can better explain yourself to others should not be looked down upon. Agreed, and for the record I'm not against ideology or story telling in general. It is what humans do to make sense of their role in the world. It is interesting to me that we live in a time of old dying ideologies and it skews our perspective about the future since long term these treads have never lasted. For example the The_End_of_History(tm) claim that was getting some traction in the 1990s. What will come next?