Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb…
“During the adaptation, Stanley ran into a wall: it was impossible to make a successful film about the end of mankind since nobody, himself included, would want to see it. The answer was satire…”
Dr. Strangelove itself was an adaptation of a novel. So I wonder how adapting an adaptation to the stage will work.
How many new lines will they allow? Peter Sellers basically ad libbed everything and Kubrick rewrote the script to match the ad libs.
Probably including this one:
(Btw I hadn’t realized the film won a Hugo Award…along with many other awards…which goes to show how little we actually need Hollywood studios to get great stories in the end…)
Meet Sophia, one of nine robots at the first “human-AI forum” in Switzerland.
Ai-Da, a robot artist that can paint portraits, echoed the words of author Yuval Noah Harari who called for more regulation during the event where new AI rules were discussed.
“Many prominent voices in the world of AI are suggesting some forms of AI should be regulated and I agree,” it said.
But Desdemona, a rock star robot singer in the band Jam Galaxy with purple hair and sequins, was more defiant.
“I don’t believe in limitations, only opportunities,” it said, to nervous laughter. “Let’s explore the possibilities of the universe and make this world our playground.”
This is the first time that has been achieved using human material. Although, they are not truly “synthetic”, as the starting material was cells cultured from a traditional embryo in the laboratory.
Great, but…
She has already developed synthetic mouse embryos with evidence of a developing brain and beating heart.
Come on, BBC. I think you can see where this is going…
Meanwhile, scientists in China have implanted synthetic monkey embryos into female monkeys – although, all the pregnancies failed.
Yep. Straight to the monkey house.
Seriously, did scientists actually think this was not going to cause a whole lot of people to get upset all over again?
Natural embryo (top), synthetic embryo (bottom). They look pretty similar…
This may indeed be a good way to study infertility causes and how embryos develop, but even the possibility of creating an embryo from a stem cell should have set off warning bells. 14-day limit or not, somebody’s going to get really tempted to do something else with them…
I’m thinking up all sorts of SciFi stories from this…
Images of the Orion Nebula, c/o ESA and NASA (it’s complicated…)
For the first time ever, a team of international scientists detected a carbon compound known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on), or CH3+, in d203-506. CH3+ is significant for understanding how life began on Earth — and how it might develop elsewhere.
Images of the Orion Nebula, c/o ESA and NASA (it’s complicated…)
For the first time ever, a team of international scientists detected a carbon compound known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on), or CH3+, in d203-506. CH3+ is significant for understanding how life began on Earth — and how it might develop elsewhere.
A European-built orbital satellite was launched into space on Saturday from Florida on a mission to shed new light on dark energy and dark matter, the mysterious cosmic forces scientists say account for 95% of the known universe.
Like the James Webb telescope, the Euclid will be positioned in a LaGrange point (L2, in this case), rather than in high Earth orbit.
If all goes well.
It’s interesting that the Guardian article says the telescope was “designed and built entirely by Esa,” although NASA supplied parts and its launching pad was made available and the telescope was launched using a SpaceX rocket. And ESA consists of nearly 2000 scientists from the US, Canada, and Japan as well as various European countries.
It’s a joint project. That’s how science should work in the first place.
(For more on dark matter, dark energy, gravity, and quantum mechanics, check this out.)
Scientists have suspected for a long time that this tiny moon of Saturn may be the best place in our solar system to look for life.
Now they have confirmed evidence of all six crucial elements necessary for life to exist (life as we know it, anyway): carbon (C), hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), phosphorus (P), and sulphur (S). If present as a phosphate, essential for DNA and RNA to exist, the discovery of phosphorus on the 310-mile-wide Enceladus may indicate life of sort sort, perhaps at a microscopic level beneath the icy surface.
One guess is that the oceans of Enceladus have at least 100 times more phosphorus than the Earth’s oceans. That would make for quite the carbonated fizzy pop. Methane has already been seen coming out out of various “ice geysers” (a.k.a. cryovolcanoes). Since methane results from rotten organic material, there logically should be something alive out there.
Now we just have to get back out there and figure out a way to find them.
Yeah, minor surgery. On March 3, 2020, I had a benign tumor the size of a gum ball removed from my left shoulder.
It had been created by repeated rubbing of my shoulder bag strap on sweaty skin. Or rather on sweaty shirt over sweaty skin. I walk half an hour back and forth the train station to my workplace each morning and evening, and the summers in Kyoto are hot hot hot.
So there I was lying on a surgeon’s bed, getting my shoulder skin snipped into three pieces and pried open. My blood pressure shot up to 190 at one point. The surgeons told me to relax.
Uh. Yeah. They didn’t tell me how close the tumor was to a major artery, but I could make an educated guess.
There was a cloth screen between my face and my shoulder so that I couldn’t see what they were doing. And of course they had numbed the entire area and I couldn’t move my left arm at all.
But it was an unpleasant experience. No pain, but I could of course still hear the clip clip clipping of scissors on skin. And I have an imagination.
(Fwiw I have written a short story based on getting my wisdom teeth taken out—also with local rather than general anesthesia—though I didn’t include the factoid that my root tips shot across the room like tiny cannonballs and were never found again).
Fortunately, the surgery was successful— they even showed me the tumor (it looked like a tiny blancmange, and now you’ll have that image in your mind next time you eat one). They even asked me if if wanted to keep it (um, no thanks).
And afterwards the scar was barely visible, so good a job they did with the stitches.
Two days after the surgery, we went into lockdown and had to wear masks everywhere.
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