I was gifted an ivory keyed Steinway grand piano in high school by someone who heard me play a couple of simple pieces in a retirement home. I did not know him but a family member was an occasional acquaintance of his. It is a stunning instrument.
Zombie physiology also seems a stretch—-how do organisms with so many open and often bleeding dirt-covered wounds maintain hemodynamic stability in the face of inevitable septic shock and/or blood loss? A movie where a virus just makes infected people seem normal and very friendly but want to furtively bite other people to spread disease and then have delayed onset terminal sickness, like a subtle version of rabies, would be terrifying and more plausible.
In "World War Z" (the book), the scientific "questions" regarding how the zombies work are brought up but not answered. For instance, in the book, the zombies freeze solid in winter and when spring comes thaw and just start going again. The fact that ice crystals normally rupture cell membranes is brought up as a question of how this is possible; but no attempt is made to answer the question, because that's not the point of the book.
Wood frogs can survive freezing solid. Their liver produces glucose to flood all cells, prevent cell freezing, and protect against dehydration. Ice forms around cells and organs but not inside them, preventing lethal damage.
And if the book was about how such a "virus" might work, the author could have brought that up. But since the book is actually exploring how different cultures or people groups might react to the same event, going down that road would be a trap, and only invite more intense scrutiny from pedants. Explicitly "lampshading", as a sibling commenter put it, is the better way to achieve the author's goals.
In other words, the problem is "lampshaded": The author indicates to the audience that they are well-aware something doesn't make sense, in a way that encourages the reader to ignore it going forward.
In Demon, the third in John Varley's Gaia trilogy of sci fi books, the (alien-manufactured) "zombies" were animated by colonies of worms that fed on the soft tissues of the corpse, and simply replaced the actions of the lifeless muscles. They thus had very human outlines, and if anything, far more horrifying looks than half-rotted corpses.
They also didn't last very long; they were meant as disposable remote-controlled troops.
The "original" (in the non-Vodoo sense) zombies shown in George Romero's "living dead" movies made no claims that the undead were scientifically explainable -- it was later movies like 28 Days Later that tried to rationalize them as infected, living people, to their detriment, I think.
In 28 Days Later the infected starve to death, I can't remember them being overly supernatural.
It is The Walking Dead in which the zombies are basically immortal but useless. Unless the plot requires otherwise. After Season 1 it is a terribly written show. Don't get me started.
28 Days Later is scarier because the infected, living humans can chase you down, climb and open doors, and the infection spreads much faster. I always wondered what The Walking Dead would have been like if the survivors couldn't clear out a prison full of zombies with hand to hand weapons. 28 Years Later is coming out this year, and they going to show what happens to humanity stuck in the UK that's been overrun by the Rage virus and presumably quarantined all this time by the rest of the world.
To me that makes it more boring though. The interesting part about the Romero movies is that the survivors underestimate both the zombies and their fellow survivors. They think because they can deal with individual zombies that they are safe. But they forget that zombies in mass are dangerous and that even more than that, their fellow survivors might be not be friendly.
You're not wrong per se, but you are in comments of an article about applying rigorous scientific analysis of "B-Move Monsters" in exactly the way that you're criticizing? This is kind of the most appropriate place for someone to bring up this kind of thing, maybe go back to the comment section of a cinema sins video if you want to dunk on nerds for being too nerdy about art
‘Artificial intelligence’ is a term of academic branding genius, because the name presumes successful creation of intelligence. Not surprising people trust it.
Getting two imperfectly compatible BLE libraries from different OSs to work together involves guesses, prayers, and lots of hand waving of devices in the air. It’s like trying to learn Hogwarts spell casting with a wizard textbook missing half of every page.
Optimizing among edible fats sometimes seems like optimizing among which brand’s cotton sock design makes us run faster. The sock companies and sock researchers are very confident there are critical differences.
The article linked by you is extremely weak. It is not clear what exactly it wants to say and all its arguments are logically flawed.
It should be obvious for anyone that taking some fish oil capsules is quite unlikely to have by itself any significant health effects, unless by accident it happens to complete exactly what was missing from an otherwise healthy diet.
So the article fights a straw man.
On the other hand, having a correct fatty acid profile of the entire amount of fatty substances that is ingested every day has an overwhelming importance for health, as has been demonstrated by a very large number of cases documented in the medical literature.
This has been confirmed by my personal experience. A few years ago I have been scared by a diagnostic of incipient atherosclerosis. At that time I was eating large quantities of dairy, so saturated fatty acids formed the majority of my daily fat intake. I have made some radical changes in my diet, in order to ensure a correct fatty acid profile, i.e. a minimal proportion of saturated fatty acids and a majority of oleic acid, complemented by small, but appropriate quantities of linoleic acid, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids (DHA+EPA) and liposoluble vitamins. After a year, the symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and also other older cardio-vascular problems have disappeared. Since then, I feel much better than before.
Regarding the part of the article about how to get enough omega-3 acids, that theory is just BS that is based on some kind of flawed vegan philosophy (i.e. automatically ALA from plants => good, DHA+EPA from non-plants => not good) instead of being based on scientific facts and on market prices.
For some people it may be enough to eat plant-based food rich in ALA (alpha linolenic acid), but that is certainly not applicable to anyone. The efficiency of conversion of ALA into DHA and EPA is very low and it varies a lot from human to human. The efficiency is lower for men than for women and it is lower for old people than for young people.
Therefore it may happen to be OK for young women to eat only plant-based food rich in ALA, but for old men it is very likely that they must eat some food rich in DHA+EPA. In theory, with enough money one could pay for a medical study to determine whether one's own body can produce enough long-chain omega-3 fatty acids from ALA, to discover thus whether one can be content with eating plant-based food, without omega-3 supplements. Nevertheless, it is much cheaper and much easier to just take a DHA+EPA supplement, even if it may happen with a rather low probability to be useless.
Even for the people who can produce enough DHA+EPA from ALA, eating large enough quantities of flax seeds, walnuts etc. may be much more expensive than eating a very small amount of fish oil and/or less pleasant. There exists a vegan alternative for fish oil, the Schizochytrium oil (from a fungus-like organism and which is improperly sold as "algae oil"). Even if the price of Schizochytrium oil has decreased by a few times during the recent years, it remains at least 3 to 4 times more expensive than fish oil, which makes it unaffordable for many. However there is hope that its price will continue to decrease until it will become competitive with fish oil.
The cheapest vegetable source of omega-3 acids are the flax seeds. From 1 kg of seeds, a young healthy human might produce 18 grams of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Where I live, in Europe, 1 kg of flax seeds is a little more than $5. This results in a price much higher than the price of fish oil and in the same ballpark with Schizochytrium oil. However, because of the uncertainty about the personal conversion factor, one would have to eat a few times more than the minimum, which would raise the price well above that of Schizochytrium oil and one would have to eat a lot of seeds. With other seeds or nuts the price would be much higher.
This was the argument that let NYC to ban coin based toilets in decades past, with the assumption that people should not need to pay and businesses/govt should provide restrooms for free. But no replacement was ever provided.
Come to NYC, walk around busy areas for a while you will not infrequently see less fortunate people urinating in the subway stations, on the sidewalk, on walls and buildings, by trash cans, and sometimes (if the mood strikes them) right in the middle of the street.
No matter how much we conspire to destroy the environment on earth, by burning fuel or nuclear war or otherwise, the earth (or parts of it) will likely be more hospitable to humans than any other alternative. We can shoot some vials of DNA towards Alpha Centauri etc, but so much for the interplanetary humanistic escapists.
"and the more information we have, the more likely we are to be able to extrapolate our capabilities"
I don't believe that. Major progress usually comes from entirely new technologies, not from continuous development of the already known ones.
You wouldn't be able to extrapolate current IT sector from the state of things in 1924, because the transistor, the crucial building block for really heavy computation, wasn't around.
Same with people in 1824 trying to predict current civil aviation from their state-of-the-art balloons.
There's a lot of extrapolation going on already. It's like if you speculated an evil demon as running a VR simulation in the year 1900, more powerful than current computers. No knowledge of transistors needed. On the level of math and physics, there are new discoveries, but they don't come that often for the kind of thing big enough to help in this case.
You could have used that line about extrapolating our future at any point in history, and it would have been wrong each time. So I don't think it will be right now.
Well, [checks watch] it's 2024 so I'll just jetpack over and up to the parking lot, and drive my flying car home, and catch the 2nd week of the Moon Olympics.
It'd be nice, but you know what, let's look after what we have, and if we get to Star Trek, that's fine, but if we don't we still have somewhere to live.
I wonder if super-people like this balance their various activities so that doing each charges them up for some of the others, and then they can hit a resonance like state of being in-the-zone excelling at each one in turn. And not letting small interruptions derail the system. It would be the opposite of being stuck in a soul-sucking
rut between unsatisfying work and unsatisfying non-work life.
It took me awhile to realize that some people can simply talk a really good game. They will genuinely pick up a little bit of a skill but can speak about it as if they’ve spent every waking moment thinking about nothing else.
I had that realization when an amazing-guy-“
at-everything said something at 100% confidence and 100% charisma that was quite wrong.
On the flip side, maybe we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the things we know. The above comment was a topic I didn’t consider myself an expert in, but in hindsite I’ve spent many hours/days on the subject and am quite interested in it. So maybe it’s not that I knew less but rather I lacked the ability to demonstrate that knowledge. (Which is its own, admirable skill).
Perhaps by riding other super-fast sailboats and surviving so far.
Analogously that is the only way I could rationalize the Wright brothers attempting an airplane flight (after surviving many glider flights), which otherwise would seem an insane proposition.
The Wright brothers were developing a major advance for humanity; I might take more risks for that. Also, their airplane was moving quite low and slow - much less risk than these boats, I would guess.
Finally, they were the engineers of their plane - they probably knew the risks well. Maybe that describes these watercraft pilots too.
Syroco describes their attempt the same way. Sea transport has a huge environmental footprint and has changed very little in the last 50 years.
The Wright Brothers' plane carried neither passengers nor cargo, yet it presaged an entire industry of air travel. Likewise, these speed-record boats will only demonstrate a new technology. But likewise, they might transform an enormous industry.
That's true. I've been hearing a lot about using kites for large cargo ships. They'll never be going that fast, but the tech does serve a very valuable purpose.
> Finally, they were the engineers of their plane - they probably knew the risks well. Maybe that describes these watercraft pilots too.
I think that is the key here. Don’t compare these to a reliable production airplanes, they are more akin to a prototype plane.
With prototype airplanes we call the pilots a special name: “test pilots”. But that is just because with most airplane designs there is an expectation that they once will graduate out of testing and will be piloted by regular pilots. But some airplanes never do that. They were only ever meant to demonstrate some principle or explore some new frontier. Same with these sailboats, their crew are “test pilots”, and they perform a test program to gradually validate the performance and safety of the craft. And most likely they will be only ever crewed by the crew who did that program.
So what does it mean that they are “test pilots”. They all probably have a lot of experience with all kind of sailboats and especially fast ones, and then they have a proven track record of having a good intuitive understanding of the physics involved. If all you ever did is to capsize a dingy on a local lake you are probably not getting this job.
And then test pilots get access to the engineers designing the craft and they talk a lot about expected performance. There are all kind of curves and diagrams one can inspect to understand how the craft is likely going to handle.
And then they don’t just leave the pier for the first time and run a world record speed. They first go relatively slow, and only when they are certain they understand how the craft behaves do they try to go faster and faster. This might also mean that they are initially very picky about the conditions they launch into, and as they gain more experience they can “expand the envelope” and try gnarlier weather.
Then of course they prepare for adverse events. They wear appropriate personal protective equipment, have a plan what they do if they are thrown overboard or capsize, and they also most likely have rescue boats at the ready to save them if something goes wrong.
And then on top of all of that they all probably have a psychological makeup where they value going fast, and being the first more than being safe. Even with all the safety precautions and mitigations and good design activities like these are risky. People who all above wish for a long and peaceful and slow life are probably not going to gravitate towards these jobs.
The Wright brothers were involved members of an international “glider” community and, yes, they won the race to be the first to successfully strap an engine to one and fly it.
But remember that the Wright brothers didn’t even try to patent “the airplane”. Their achievement (and patent) was about safely controlling an airplane so that it could fly. More than two years before their 1903 flight, Wilbur Wright gave a presentation in Chicago where he said “ As long ago as 1884 a machine weighing 8,000 pounds demonstrated its power both to lift itself from the ground and to maintain a speed of from 30 to 40 miles per hour, but failed of success owing to the inability to balance and steer it properly. This inability to balance and steer still confronts students of the flying problem, although nearly eighteen years have passed. When this one feature has been worked out, the age of flying machines will have arrived, for all other difficulties are of minor importance.”
I'm not a health professional but consider daily walking through green areas (parkland) can be beneficial, particularly with a faithful companion. This old article provides some other ideas. (Link needs the trailing period!) https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/06/15/the-str....
reply