Interesting Links for 29-06-2014

[andrewducker]

• Asshole Vegan Orders Meatless Meal Right in Front of People
  (tags: veganism vegan food society )
• Great explanation of the various explanations of why there are no aliens
  (tags: life aliens space fermi )
• Lightning is sexist
  (tags: lighting men sexism )
• Britain is facing a major sperm shortage (since taking away the right to anonymity
  (tags: sperm

Comments

[gonzo21]

I've always found the Fermi thing quite quite fascinating. Because it does seem baffling, you'd think we'd have found some sort of evidence by now. Or at least a question mark.

Finding some form of extinct life on Mars would be huge. Starting to look a little unlikely now given how long the Rover has been there though.

[andrewducker]

The two original Rovers havve travelled about 5 and 10 miles respectively, in total.

Curiosity had driven a total of 3 miles in January this year.

So it's possible that they've seen everything there is to see about Mars. But it's a bit more likely that they've scraped the surface of a teeny chunk.

[bart_calendar]

And depending on when life got wiped out the fossils could be 20 miles underground by now.

[gonzo21]

Yeah, but if Curiosity doesn't find it, is there going to be any will/money from NASA to go back and have another look?

[bart_calendar]

Possibility 4 could be the plot of Prometheus 2.

[bart_calendar]

My general theory is that what you need for advanced civilizations is a near extinction event that just slightly fails at wiping out all life and then an evolutionary leap a long, long time afterwards.

E.g. if the comet had not wiped out the dinosaurs but left small mammals around that by a stroke of luck were able to deal with the ice age there wouldn't have been any fossil fuels by the time we can around and we'd have no way to become advanced.

So, it may be that events that almost wife out a planet but not quite are really rare and that the life left behind not evolving right away but evolving long enough later for the previous life forms to become carbon sources rarer still. And all that happening without another near extinction level event even more rare than that.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, so if mankind had evolved millions of years ago we wouldn't have managed our current level of technology,because no resources?

Interesting. I can see it. Certainly be a fascinating idea for a novel!

[bart_calendar]

Yep. We had to evolve right when we did to have the ability to move forward.

[skington]

xkcd suggests that most fossil fuels are not, in fact, dinosaurs. So maybe you don't need the near-extinction event?

"Logical Sense Doesn't Have to Be the Be-All, End-All"

[cartesiandaemon]

Ouch, yes. Although I don't think the title goes far enough:

"disregard story concepts left and right. Characters are secondary to spectacle; geography and time are subservient to the impact of a beauty shot; standard narrative building blocks regularly fall by the wayside."

I think story concepts, characters, and standard narrative building blocks are things you can have instead of logic. I can live without "logic" when a film is fairly consistent in other ways. I'm mostly annoyed when a film shifts gears, and spends 100 minutes telling you thing X is important, and then completely ignores it in the climax...

I'm also annoyed that we seem to have _boring_ giant robot fights. I liked a lot of the first film, but the tensest moments were things like the helicopter decepticon homing in on the military base, or the running fight across the desert, or any of the bits where the robots interact directly with the humans. All the robot-on-robot fights, I couldn't tell what was going on, who was winning, or who to root for :(

Re: "Logical Sense Doesn't Have to Be the Be-All, End-All"

[andrewducker]

I need some consistency, otherwise I lose any emotional connection I have to the characters, which means I lose all interest in the film (special effects are cool, but won't hold my attention for a whole movie)

And yes, they managed to make the fights boring. Dunno how!

[witchwestphalia]

Good link on static vs dynamic languages & large code bases. I'm a strong typing fan myself.

[andrewducker]

Ditto. Anything which makes it easier to manage a large codebase and catch my errors early!

[witchwestphalia]

Type control also lets you figure out what somebody else's code does IMHO.