When you are young and care about other people, you should really get vaccinated. When there are many vaccinated individuals the number of infections drops dramatically, which helps to protect vulnerable individuals (some of them might be young).
I have no real needle phobia but in the past I was never very fond of them either, because they felt unpleasant. But with my recent vaccinations I really could not tell when it started or ended. Modern injection needles are a lot smaller than the ones that were used a decade ago.
Some tips:
Try to relax your muscles. Lift your arms and let them fall down again.
Look away is the most solid advice here. Pain from vaccination (at least immediate pain) is mostly in our heads. I hate needles but I always tell about it to the person giving me the shot (or take blood) and look away. If you ever got stung by a bee or got a paper cut, those are probably a thousand times more painful and you don't even see those coming to be prepared.
This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really amazing company is that they also have great graphical designers and story writers. It is the integration that makes Pixar movies so great.
There's a story told by (if memory serves) Lasseter that when they showed Luxo Jr. in 1986 at SIGGRAPH, someone came up to him afterwards with a question. He was dreading the conversation, because he thought they were going to ask some terribly technical question and he'd have to flag down one of the studio members for help, but the questioner just asked "So is the big lamp the mom or the dad?"
When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I would love to walk through one of their internal scene files and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate to.
Unfortunately I couldn't find the video either but it was fairly similar to the TED talk you linked (just longer and had slightly more "internal" details).
The system would need to integrate a wide range of information sources, which is a difficult job. Given the reputation of the DOD in developing complicated systems, it seems very unlikely that it will be successful.
The whole idea seems pretty unlikely to me. The ratio of the length of the day versus the night has not changed, and I don't see any reasonable biological explanation for a process that is possible only when the days are long.
The most reasonable explanation is simply evolution. More efficient microbes will grow faster and will out-compete the others. But more efficient microbes will also produce more oxygen. So even with a short day length, they would have eventually produced the oxygen.
Physics and chemistry impose some serious constraints on all life forms. On earth we have convergent evolution, independent groups of species independently develop similar solutions for a specific problem. Life on other planets will have similar problems, e.g. reproduction, locomotion and perception of its environment, and its solutions will probably be similar to the ones we have on earth.
First we need to decide how intelligent are the dolphins, then let us look at the stars.
Every single life form on Earth today had exactly the same time to do its evolution in. Us, bats, dolphins, tapeworms, birch trees, amoeba, mushrooms, all of that had exactly the same chance(s) in the same time span.
And we don't even know if and how mushrooms and trees communicate, let alone if they "think", for our near-sighted definition of thoughts. We don't even know what to make of birds, e.g. crows, with respect to the size of their brains and what they can do.
Is our planet, taken as a whole, alive, in some form of the Gaia hypothesis? The correct answers as of this time are either "we don't know" or "it depends on the definition of alive."
That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
Even H.R. Giger was boring and unimaginative with regards to how he envisioned the Alien. That's clearly a creature influenced by Earth-ism - a quadruped, with a single head and mouth and a flexible spine and claws, it's basically a weird cat.
> That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
Budget constraints aside, Star Trek aliens were used as a prop to explore extremes of terrestrial human behaviour and culture from an outside perspective - take a human and remove emotions and have them governed purely by logic, you get a Vulcan. Take a human and exaggerate their tendencies towards violence and honour, you have a Klingon, and so on.
Even in the original series there were truly alien aliens - for example the Squire of Gothos was a being of pure energy who just assumed human form, Devil in the Dark had a silicon-based creature, and the Tholians were an intelligent crystalline species who could only exist in high temperatures.
In Star Trek TNG there was a story arc that culminated in the reveal of a precursor humanoid race that had seeded their genome around the galaxy so that they ultimately resulted in the “big” races like humans, Klingons, Vulcans, Cardassians and so on.
Even if you discount the semi-canonical explanation that the Alien was a mixture of human & "entirely fabricated" DNA, Giger's Alien was shaped the way it was for literally- and metaphorically-painful sexual artistic reasons, not as a serious hypothesis for alien life.
> First we need to decide how intelligent are the dolphins, then let us look at the stars.
The premise is wrong. The premise here is that intelligence is the only factor. Physics doesn't allow dolphins to enter the bronze age. Hell, even if dolphins grew arms and hands they couldn't enter the bronze age. They're probably smart enough to do so, but there are other factors limiting them.
We have looked at Earth. We can look to the stars at the same time. It isn't an "or" operation.
Yeah but we're not really talking about bronze ages or if a species can achieve comparable technology, but whether we can correctly detect intelligence, or even life, around us.
I don't think we should label dolphins as un-intelligent just because their physical environment doesn't allow them to smelt metal.
My point is - I'd like to avoid judging something as (not) alive or intelligent just because it is (or isn't) similar to our daily life.
> My point is - I'd like to avoid judging something as (not) alive or intelligent just because it is (or isn't) similar to our daily life.
I think this is fair, but I also think when people say "detect intelligent alien life" it is shorthand for "intelligent and technologically capable life that would also be able to develop things like radio and interstellar travel." The latter is pretty cumbersome. I don't think dolphins are unintelligent, I don't think an ant is either. But in this context that's not what we're talking about. Language has limits and we use shortcuts like this all the time. Let's just be clear what page we're on and let's try not to inject another page just because the same word is used to mean multiple things.
> Even H.R. Giger was boring and unimaginative with regards to how he envisioned the Alien. That's clearly a creature influenced by Earth-ism - a quadruped, with a single head and mouth and a flexible spine and claws, it's basically a weird cat.
When the franchise came into being, you're probably right. But in all fairness, the back story and the biological concepts in the Alien universe has been refined since then. For example, the human-like qualities of the xenomorph creature is now explained by the biological merger of an alien substance with the host. When a human was infected, the substance developed into a parasite that took-on characteristics of the host.
Fundamentally, the black goo (i.e. the substance) we saw in Prometheus was pretty much the source of all the alien creatures. It was basically an instrument that deconstructed existing life forms and rebuilt weaponised variants of them.
> Every single life form on Earth today had exactly the same time to do its evolution in. Us, bats, dolphins, tapeworms, birch trees, amoeba, mushrooms, all of that had exactly the same chance(s) in the same time span.
This is patently false as these species have very different places within the phylogenetic tree. Emphasis on tree, since their adaptivity experiments did not have a linear timeline either; we didn’t evolve to have speech from scratch, we’ve adopted existing partial solutions, e.g. having a tongue, to develop it.
And we don’t need to delve into phenomenology of being a mushroom, adaptivity gives us an observable proxy to the “intelligence” of an organism; how general and efficient of a problem solver they are, the ultimate problem being surviving genes onward. Turns out humans do exceptionally well, for the problems they’ve encountered so far. We’ll see if/how we can solve anthropogenic coordination problems of our day.
> That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
You need to cook a "complex adaptive organism" solution with the same periodic table and a handful of forces. It's like coding a CRUD application with slightly different sub-requirements and the exact same programming language. How different can they be?
If you need more creativity you have to break apart from physical requirements and the right genre for that is fantasy.
"And we don’t need to delve into phenomenology of being a mushroom, adaptivity gives us an observable proxy to the “intelligence” of an organism; how general and efficient of a problem solver they are, the ultimate problem being surviving genes onward."
By that logic the most intelligent animals is a cockroach
Viruses and prions reproduce, not only are they not intelligent, they are not even alive.
> By that logic the most intelligent animals is a cockroach
Firstly, please notice the quotes around intelligence; clearly we’re playing with a fast and loose definition.
Secondly, if humans had driven themselves into extinction with nuclear warfare, that would as well have been true.
Intelligence is not mere symbolic processing, nor symbolic processing is guaranteed to be adaptive, as evidenced with its failure modes in our perennial irrationalities.
> Viruses and prions reproduce, not only are they not intelligent, they are not even alive.
I know one particular virus twisting humanity’s arm these days, and in a way that is not fully intelligible to us yet. I wouldn’t readily diminish the internal logic that’s going on there.
Indeed. If there were civilizations that communicate on geological time scales, how would we even know they are alive? If whales and dogs and bats are too alien to communicate with, what hope do we have with aliens?
Completely agree - the vast differences in the Earth's species and their intelligence should be an indication of the enormous range of possibilities we should expect...Saying that, since "most intelligent" species on Earth are bipedal, it means it's most likely intelligent aliens would be too, does not only seem ignorant to the sheer number of factors and possibilities, but also to other species on Earth and ways intelligence can be manifested.
But changes in the environment and initial starting point can result in very different approaches. For example land mammals, reptiles and fish are quite different from each other. Because they've "always been here" we don't appreciate how different they are. Imagine if we had no fish and then found a planet with water that had fish in it -- that would seem absolutely shocking to see animals that could breathe underwater.
Honestly this would be pretty hard to imagine. Even if we had no concept of fish (which I find extremely unlikely given other evolutionary pressures, physics, and mechanics of life, but let's not go there) we would think "birds, but in a denser fluid." I don't think this would be "absolutely shocking" to biologists of that planet. Similarly like how biologists here have predicted methane based lifeforms. Now if we were talking about a fluid like sulfuric acid then yeah, that would be absolutely shocking, but not for the reasons of breathing (it's about electrons).
And all these animal/alien minds swim through time like a fish swims through water. Reminds me of that David Foster Wallace joke.
> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Both mammals and reptiles that live in the water use very similar methods even though they are not at all closely related. It is an example of convergent evolution.
> Physics and chemistry impose some serious constraints on all life forms.
On earth's carbon based life forms you mean. Its a huge blindspot, basically monkeys looking for other monkeys. If we believe our life is sufficiently compelex biochemically, it figures that other "life" may have the same complexity but with very different structures.
So the argument for ET life to have almost exact homologs of terrestial life is bordering on naievete at best, and dangerously intolerant at worst.
No, its more like saying “our star and the planets and most satellites in the solar system are generally spherical due to gravity. I postulate that all stars and planets in the universe are subject to those same forces and will also generally be spherical”. That isn’t a dangerously intolerant idea. We can say that life is unlikely to arise from a solid block of iron, due to what we understand about the atomic properties of iron, the possible chemical reactions, etc. There just isn’t much going on at a basic physics level for it to “do” anything that could likely lead to even the most generous definition of “life”. That isn’t naivete.
It is your kind of fantastical thinking that life somewhere else somehow isn’t subject to the same physics as life here that is naive. It’s not wanting to be bound by boring concepts like chemical reactions, gravity, perceiving your environment in some way, etc. We don’t take people seriously that say that stars in other galaxies are actually the heads of long bright snakes and us thinking they are just boring balls of gas is our “blindspot”.
We don't know factually if a beetle can think and remember.
We know about proteins.
We don't know how some aquatic life can survive in the mariana trench.
Biochemistry is indeed chemistry but it isn't as straight forward as we'd like to imagine. Till this day there are cell structures we are uncertain of and would be completely wandering in the dark were it not for cheap but powerful computation available 24/7.
Lets go smaller and things get blurry. The standard model looks...hmmm.
> We don't know factually if a beetle can think and remember.
What does this mean? We don’t know the exact capacity of the mind of a beetle. We don’t know how its subjective experience compares to our own. But we know that the structure of neuronal tissue allows information to be stored, just like we know that the structure of DNA allows information to be stored. The relay on chemicals, temps, and pressures where weak chemical bonds and be reliably broken and made.
> We don't know how some aquatic life can survive in the mariana trench.
Again, what does this mean? This feels like the misunderstanding when we say “we don’t know how the pyramids were built” which means we don’t know everything about the exact methods used, but we understand the general technological levels of the time. While people take it as “the ancient Egyptians had a secret technology” or “they couldn’t have built them”. We haven’t been able to observe certain behaviors or exact mechanics or feeding habits for some animals, but we understand how they survive.
> Biochemistry is indeed chemistry but it isn't as straight forward as we'd like to imagine. Till this day there are cell structures we are uncertain of and would be completely wandering in the dark were it not for cheap but powerful computation available 24/7.
Understanding the exact mechanisms is not the same as understanding why cells would be round, or why a semi permeable membrane is important, or why they need energy to resist entropy, or how they need a reliable way to encode and store information,etc.
Understanding very specific and exact biological processes is not the same as understanding basic constraints placed on all matter. If its too cold for chemical reactions to regularly take place, that is a constraint. If a material does not have a structure that can be broken down and remade, that is a constraint. The inverse square law is true everywhere, which is why we can say we won’t see giant flying dragons on any planet.
From An Empirical Study of Vulnerabilities in Cryptographic Libraries[0]:
> Among our most interesting findings is that only 27.2% of
> vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries are cryptographic
> issues while 37.2% of vulnerabilities are memory safety is-
> sues, indicating that systems-level bugs are a greater secu-
> rity concern than the actual cryptographic procedures.
These libraries were developed by security experts and even they made some serious errors.
