Interesting Links for 29-04-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Unrecord - First Perdon Shooter games have now reached the point where they're uncomfortably realistic.

(tags:games graphics fps reality )

2. On women's rage

(tags:anger women patriarchy )

3. Vertical farming is dying

(tags:farming Technology )

4. Anyone know anything about non-European musical notation?

(tags:culture music language )

5. Puppy! Meets! Kittens!

(tags:puppy dogs cats kittens cute video )

6. How Edinburgh University got its awe inspiring graduation hall

(tags:university Edinburgh architecture history Scotland viaDanielDWilliam )

Comments

[cmcmck]

6. The Scot picked up his doctorate there although part of his time had been spent in Paris.

[dewline]

1. Are we surprised that we got to this point?

2. Entirely fair.

3. I suspect this may be a premature statement about vertical farming in general.

4. I know that it exists, and not much else right now. This will be a learning experience.

5. Awwwww.

[channelpenguin]

4. I know various other systems did and do exist.

As far as I recall, it's only Western Europe that went for instrumental harmony in a big way, and so needed notation. As a musician myself (who does not *really* read music) I can say that the amount and length and complexity of melody/rhythm that the musically inclined and practiced person can hold in memory is VAST. If you don't do it, you have no idea what people are capable of (I'm not 100% melodically/rhythmically accurate though my errors of memory are small and I'll always be in key and style. Others ARE. I'm pretty much 100% for lyrics though:-) I'm talking hundreds of songs in my case. And my memory for melody/rhythm is not exceptional in any way - at least for non-reading musicians that I know. It's totally common to be able to do this).

My point being that for melody/rhythm, there might have been no necessity for a written form across most cultures across most of time. It's the complexity of Western harmony that made one so.

[rmc28]

1. I want to put that next to Jen Walters' speech in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on her experience in controlling anger.

[andrewducker]

I am looking forward to seeing that at some point.

Vertical Farming

[agoodwinsmith]

One's gut feeling is that it will be back as climate change increases. However, I admit that I didn't think about the energy consumption when I enjoyed watching documentaries about the tall greenhouses in the Netherlands - they were filmed so beautifully.

On the eighty-seventh hand, though, any company that trots out the following statement doesn't know which end of the plant goes in the dirt: "By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Our Company achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.”

Edited to add:
And, I have thought for quite some time, that should hostilities increase against one's country, one's greenhouses are oh-so-vulnerable to bombing and drones and even just rocks. If a country is willing for its neighbour to be without heat and light through the winter, they certainly won't spare the radishes.

Re: Vertical Farming

[mellowtigger]

I don't understand why space agencies (and their billionaire equivalents) aren't investing heavily in this tech research, since we'll need it for any long-term plans elsewhere. I expect we'll also need it in arcologies here soon enough too, but I'm pessimistic on that particular point.

Re: Vertical Farming

[danieldwilliam]

For the space agencies I think they have looked at the numbers of vertical farm start ups and the funding they have received and decided that someone else is working on the problem at a pace they can live with. For free the space agencies can probably get to a point where the tech works on Earth and they can then put their limited money in to the "now, make it work in space / micro-gravity / cold & dark & low pressure".

Some of the billionaires seem to have shorter time scales than the space agencies for humans living extra-terrestrially. Perhaps they have funded some of the start-ups as a silent partner?

Re: Vertical Farming

[danieldwilliam]

There's a long list of useful technologies that struggled to get adopted when they were first developed and it was only when something in the peripheral markets changed (lower cost inputs, higher cost substitutes, some better technology in an adjacent field) that they took off. I think the Romans could make steam turbines but lacked the metallurgy to make them strong enough to do useful work / had lots of slaves to do the work.

You could see vertical farming being very popular if California's water situation worsens for example.

There are probably a lot of places that might keep an eye on the technology as as mitigation for food security worries.

Update -> Re: Vertical Farming

[agoodwinsmith]

So, then, there's this:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vertical-farming-strawberrry-fields-forever-1.6828585

A Fraser Valley (BC) farmer is planning to go up for Strawberries.

The reasoning is that we've had some extreme weather in the last number of years, and, as he says, while they farm between 25 and 30 acres of strawberries, they are usually only able to harvest 10 acres' worth.

What is not explicitly mentioned in this article is that the reason there was catastrophic (really - it was horrendous) flooding in the farming area is because it is all on a drained lake bed.

No, I'm not kidding.

I'm pretty sure that much flooding will ruin a vertical greenhouse just as easily as a field.

Hope springs yada yada.

[conuly]

4. Anyone know anything about non-European musical notation?

Okay, so I don't have twitter, and certainly don't intend to get it now that Musk is driving it into the ground (not that I intended to before, but you know) so can somebody else, not me, maybe reply to this person in the thread and let them know that, actually, lots of languages have numeric systems around base-5, base-20, base-12, and occasionally odder ones like base-21? And maybe respond to some other people in that subthread that the French system of counting with scores is not universal among speakers of French, and many longstanding French-speaking communities have words like "octante" or "huitante" for 80 rather than "four score"?

It's suddenly urgent to me that everybody knows this.

If not everybody, then at least you now know this :)

[andrewducker]

Well I do now!

[ninetydegrees]

1. Do you magically heal/stay up/respawn like in all FPS too? ;) Joking aside, I wonder what kind of computer you need to make this run at this level of graphic realism.

[anna_wing]

Chinese and Japanese classical music uses cipher notation i.e. numbers to indicate pitch, and symbols for other information. Gamelan does too. There's a lot of information on-line.