True, but the comparison with old technology makes the video more interesting. The replacement for the hydraulic actuators and also the twin scanning system are motivated by the historical development.
Replying to your first point. There is actually a new branch of science called extreme event attribution [1]. Basically all weather events are now analysed to see how much more probable they are due to climate change. You are right one event might be anecdotal and could also have happened without climate change. But looking at the frequency of these events, the probability of extrem weather events has risen. In other words what was a once in a hundred years flood is now a once in ten years flood - keep in mind this is an example and a once in a hundred years flood can of course happen more often.
What I am trying to say is we can attribute the trend of extrem weather events to climate change. So the argument that Fiona is more probable in a world with climate change than in a world without climate change is legit.
Modern nanotechnology is a multi disciplinary approach using effects on the nanoscale for new technologies. Therefore people from different fields come together to synthesis, simulate, analyse etc. nanoparticles/systems. Of course in the media nanotechnology is this big catch all word, where everybody immediately thinks about self replicating nanomachines - this is still fiction.
Eventhough nanotechnology has not fullfilled this science fiction promise of atom precise manipulation the result are still astonishing. Just to name a few: Computerchips, memorychips, displays, catalysts, composite materials, surface coatings…
The parts of chemistry that work are just rebrandings of physics and the parts of physics that work are just rebrandings of math. Nanotech is a subset of physics with connections to solid state physics, quantum mechanics, materials science, optics etc. I don't get why people say nanotech is charlantry when the semiconductors chip manufacturing industry is top down nanotech manufacturing.
Isn't that basically what "multi-disciplinary" means?
Additionally, scientific niches rebranding themselves is a thing that happens, for examples when Computer Science rebranded itself from Mathematics and Electrical Engineering.
These speeds look pretty good to me to be honest. What's the line between bad internet and good internet, seriously?
For personal use and regular work use wouldn't it be maybe 100 down?
I'm more concerned about data caps once my speed can reach 100down, at least currently.
edit:
Also stability is huge. My partner's old house had 100down, but it would bottleneck or drop out about every 10minutes which made the service garbage for everything other than casual static web browsing.
What is the actual speed you get? Also mobile coverage is so bad. My phone frequently drops to edge connection in the middle of a city in Germany. I haven’t had this bad mobile coverage in any country including several third world countries.
Those were the measured speed +-3 Mbps. Sometimes inside of buildings my connection also drops back down to edge but I think this got way better in the last 2-3 years.
12gb on mobil. Landline is without a cap, but I heard if you consistently download 5-10Tbs per Month, customer service might call and ask if you want a „better“ contract ; )
Do you use a digital labbook? If so what do you use?
I am currently trying MS OneNote. Just pasting everything in. Pictures, screengrabs, thoughts parameters. But I am wondering if there is a better alternative.
I had some fun with this. After a while you can find a lot of clues to spot the ai picture. I looked at ca. 15 pictures and got two wrong. Then this happened: https://pasteboard.co/JFldXA6.png
Sorry for posting a picture - the picture shows one normal face and one not quite so normal. Guess which is the real face : )
This is the problem with historic games. Either you acknowledge the bad and good things, or you white wash the past. As the author notes at the end:
„As I have argued here many times, fiction is often how the public conceptualizes the past and that concept of the past shapes the decisions we make in the present.“
"Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past… The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it." - From George Orwell's 1984.
What's weird is that this was meant to shock, but here we are in 2020 and this seems to be a good idea to a lot of people for some reason. 1984 was influenced a lot by Orwell's observance of Stalinism, where they would edit out people from old photos who had been executed and so forth. Stalin took a close interest in editing screenplays, editorials and even fiction produced in the Soviet Union to make it fit the narratives of Marxism. Why did he spend so much time on all of this? You have to make the whole ideology hang together if you want to transform society. The ruler must remove all contradictions everywhere so that all voices sing in unison one unifying vision and that includes popular art and media. There must be no contradictions!
Orwell is accurately describing how history is recorded. Yes, all history, well-research history included. History is necessarily fuzzy and non-absolute. Historians work in conditions (social/political contexts) that shape not only what records are deemed appropriate to use, but also the means through which history ought to be recorded, presented and publicly disseminated. For example, Herodotus was a historian who relied in hearsay and myth to inform his largely oral depictions of world cultures. This was the accepted standard of his time. Fifty years ago, history was largely told as a series of 'big men' whose impact was absolute and only resisted by other big men. Today, history is largely social history, and uses lots of sources that account for everyday interactions, and the product is typically a monograph and a few blog posts or op-eds.
To get back on track, Orwell (in this passage and throughout the entire book, really) is basically dramatizing fundamental means of understanding the past, and the effect this has on how the future is imagined. Yes, it is about dogma, but no, the enforcement of dogma does not necessarily have to be as institutional or intentional as you seem to be suggesting. A fundamental aspect of social existence is that understanding the past draws heavily on our assumptions in the present, which in turn are drawn from how we view the past. Our understanding of the past shapes how we reify the world around us, which in turn influences how we imagine future possibilities.
The problem is more with the positioning of the game. They want the "Historic" label, but in reality it's Fantasy. Modern fantasy is a fertile ground for fun, diverse and "history inspired" stories. But trying to rewrite history with the excuse of "but it's fiction" is wrong, and I agree with the author, irresponsible and dangerous. But I guess the marketing is too tempting, AC:Valhalla should instead be positioned as Skyrim, not as a "moderately historical accurate game with more diversity".
His complain is waaay more nuanced then that. It is that that while the game acknowledges bad in England Christianity and even adds some more ahistorical bad, the Vikings are treated as basically saviors.
I disagree with this conclusion because it disregards agency of players. I see more similarities to warnings about the dangers of books in contrast to how it might display historic events too critically or too uncritically.
One mistake might be that we try to patronize people too much and that enlightenment might favor a relaxed approach. I am sure if historic depictions nurture interest in an era, people would search for additional information.
As a player you cannot do _anything whatsoever_ to change the setting and rules of the game: you cannot be nicer or less nice to the indigenous people, you have to loot and destroy their religious centers, you have endure having their religion mocked by your compatriots, you cannot convert to the local religion...
You have to play a Aryan colonial invader who disdains the local culture and religion because your own culture is so much superior, and you have to do that wearing the historically inaccurate trappings of of what people a century ago imagined vikings looked like -- trappings that have been appropriated by neo-nazis.
There's no agency at all for players in this regard.
Spec Ops: The Line [0][1] puts a nice spin on just that. You have agency. Just stop playing [2]. It might just be the most harrowing game I've ever played.
Spec Ops: The Line was trying to make that point with respect to you, the player, committing virtual war crimes. I thought it was clumsily executed, but it had a point. You knew what you were doing and the game told you it was wrong.
The problem with Assassin's Creed Valhalla is that, rather than presenting you with the option to kill civilians and take slaves and letting you choose not to participate in this aspect of the time period/history, the game is hiding that historical fact in order to let you safely indulge in a sanitized historical fantasy. As a player who doesn't know better (AKA most people in the world), you don't even know the alternative you could be choosing.
My experience of that game was quite different. I found it to be the heaviest handed, hypocritical virtue signaling of any game I have ever played. "Just stop playing"? Are the developers going to give me my money back?
I meant agency in regard to the conclusions you draw from playing, not that the degrees of freedom within a game are unlimited. You played it perhaps (I did not) and thought that the game forces you to identify with characters mocking something or someone. I haven't played many games that didn't depict such mockery in a negative light if the player has no influence on it anyway.
Some games allow you to have a choice in it, but doing so is not synonymous with holding that view.
> trappings that have been appropriated by neo-nazis.
Don't make the mistake in handing such symbols to neo-nazis. They will turn it around on you. For them Vikings might depict an ideal but they probably aren't interested in a deeper cultural analysis anyway.
The Norse are not Aryans. The Aryans were nomadic horse tribes who lived some 3000 years before the game started and were closer to the Mongols than anyone of recent memory.
But words sometimes mean more than one thing, and for better or worse, "Aryan" is far more frequently used in the sense developed in the scientific racism movement of the 19th century.
Surely people are aware of this before they buy a game? And I mean, at the end of the day, it's a video game. There are also video games about killing aliens, killing other players, killing monsters, capturing animals and making them fight other animals, and more. You could likely pick any game created and find someone that it upsets.
Nobody plays a game and suddenly becomes the character in the game, no more than anyone reads a book and becomes the character in the book. If someone disagrees with it after purchasing it, then they don't play it.
It sounds like this game is vilifying one religious/cultural group as a whole while glorifying another. I’m not familiar with many games that do this (at least not for real/nonfictional, extant groups at any rate). Some might argue that this is the same things as having Muslim terrorist villains, but the distinction is that these games don’t vilify Muslims in general but rather terrorists.
Player or reader agency is not in contradiction with "fiction is often how the public conceptualizes the past and that concept of the past shapes the decisions we make in the present."
People do conceptualize past based on entertainment they have seen voluntary, whether consciously or subconsciously. Majority of people engaging with fiction wont rush to read about real history. Which is not even complaint, it is just a fact.
Which is why blog posts and writings that compare the two from people who actually know history do have value for minority of those who are curious or interested to fact check fiction. Cause even curious minority wont be necessary interested in reading massive historical book about vikings or England just because they played game.
Maybe thinking about lightspeed as the upper speed limit helps? You could also think about the clock experiment by Hafele and Keating where two synchronised clocks where flown all over the globe and after a while they disagreed with each other.
Or the popsci answer: Things that move fast get more massiv and time gets slower for them, at the speed of light time stops. Without time no speed.
Wow! I was asked by a friend if dead/flat batteries were weighing less, since I was working a little bit with batteries. Back then I dismissed it as utter nonsense. But I still googled the question because you never know right? and I stumbled upon either this article or a similar one: https://www.quora.com/Is-a-charged-battery-heavier-than-a-de...
After finding and reading an answer that agreed with my initial assessment I never continued to investigate why my friend would make such a claim, but now I guess it was related to this phenomenon. Guess I owe somebody an apology. Crazy how somethings seem so outlandish that I did not even ask myself if this was possible or what fundamental differences there are between batteries of different states of charge. Also it would have been quite easy to test this in retrospective...
Note to myself: I should be more careful and curious in the future!
Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
That alone tells me a dead battery of one composition will weigh some fraction less than a fully-charged one of the same composition, assuming all other things are truly equal (number of atoms in the containing can, etc.) The fractional difference might be very, very small (billionths of a gram difference?) but should still be present.
A colleague at work tested two batteries by bouncing them in front of me. Had he merely told me about the bounce effect I would have been extremely skeptical, so I'm glad he didn't give me the opportunity to get egg on my face!
I found and submitted this article when looking for the physical basis of the effect afterwards.
