When I was a kid, my school took us the boston science museum and I wandered off to the microscope exhibit. The museum collected and displayed a bunch of things from Boston Bay, and looking in- as a kid learning about computers- it seemed like some of the "animacules" behaved in complex ways- like a computer program with sensor input and mechanical actuators. Some would spiral endlessly while others would zip forward, then back, then turn and zip forward again. I decided then and there I would figure out how these things worked, applying my hacker knowledge of computers.
That led to a career in biology although I don't think I really used microscopes much at all over the next 30 years. Recently I adjusted my hobbies and built a microscope from components and use it to apply object detection to tardigrades. Guess what- the state of the art is to collect enormous numbers of images of a microbiotic organism and cluster them into a small number of states (like a markov model) and estimate the transitions between them. I don't even want to solve any specific problem- I just love watching tardigrades. They're hilarious little animacules.
No, I haven't, because I don't want to support users with something I'm teaching myself with (it changes quickly as I learn that I did something wrong). In short, I use aluminum extrusion on optical breadboard to build a rigid frame and then mount linear stages based on stepper motors, smooth rods and 3d printed bearings and mounts. This forms a 3-axis stage to move the sample (could be a slide, or a dish, or whatever) which I control using FluidNC (normally intended for CNC) and some hand-written Python scripts for the UI/camera interfacing. It uses industrial vision cameras.
Most components are fairly inexpensive- at least compared to scientific systems- but aren't cheap for a typical hobbyist. The breadboard is >$200, the extrusion is another $100, the cameras at least $250, and my total personal time investment (converted to salary dollars) would be ludicrous.
The important advantage of my design is that I control the closed loop camera/motor control stack (with machine learning inline), and I can raster scan to make large field of view stitches with the camera moving constantly and super-short light exposures.
Here's an example video tracking a tardigrade (keeping its snout as close to the center as possible) I made with the previous generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaMFDjC1DQ
Then I use a special tool (really just a mouth tube that has a glass tube at the end) to single tardigrade to a glass-bottom petri dish that goes into the scope. I take movies, then label ~hundreds of frames manually with "tardigrade" "algae" and "junk" then fine-tune an existing object detector with those frames. The centroid of the object detection provides the direction to move the stages to center the detected object.
The other mode is fast scanning, which I described above (move the camera continuously over a large field of view, pulsing the LED quickly/periodically and dropping any empty frames).
(at work I get to play with grown-up microscopes and they are another class entirely; precision machines with extraordinary capabilities and price tags to match)
I used to do species population spot-check counts of the aeration basin floc thru a crappy optical scope back in the day at the municipal wastewater plant. I loved finding the tardigrades occasionally and watched them for ages.
These pics remind me of an indy game way back on the PS3 called Flow[0]. It was designed as a low stress, low impact, and a fairly calming game. You were a small underwater creature that swam around collecting things to become a bigger creature. You used the 3-axis feature of the controller instead of the d-pad and joysticks.
If anyone is interested, thatgamecompany [sic], the studio who made Flow, also made Flower and Journey. Both are amazing and touching. I haven't played their new game Sky.
On the topic of calm games... there's one on my mind that I played years ago on PC but I forgot the name.
It's a very simple but gorgeous 2d top-down "strategy" game. It has calming music and a soft colour pallet.
You control these flying boids/bird things by ordering them to conquer other "planets". The goal of the game is to conquer all planets on the map, with progressively more difficult stages.
Each planet you own periodically spawns more "boids". Every planet has a number which describes the amount of boids on the planet.
The only actions given by the player are orders to move boids from one planet to another. If the destination planet is an enemy planet, the boids will attack. If the destination planet is friendly, the boids will combine in forces. If an enemy planet's boid number drops down to 0, it then becomes a friendly planet.
Planets have trees that sprout, and the boids are like leaves that sprout from the trees.
I think once you beat the game you unlock a dark mode.
Does this game ring a bell to anyone? I now want to play it really badly again :)
Also played Eufloria a long time ago and there was another game that had similarities called Galcon which maybe had more in common with RISK. The developer had Galcon Fusion and Galcon Legends on Steam back then which I think supported multiplayer yet were largely singleplayer, but they were removed from the store after they released Galcon 2 which is aimed at cross-platform multiplayer.
My wife and I get into the ocean pretty often -- sometimes, every day. But when I leave my swimming attire hanging in the bathroom for more than a couple of days (I try not to do that, but sometimes forget), it starts to smell really fishy. My wife asks why it smells so bad after 2 days, but not immediately after getting out of the ocean. I tell her The ocean is a soup of life, and when you get out there are millions of living critters in the fabric -- it's all alive. After 2 days... not so much
I assume the stink come from chemicals excreted by other living things eating the dead ones. So the stink is not a sign that your trunks are less full of life, just that it got new tenants.
Maybe not ALL stinky things. But apparently humans evolved to be sensitive to, and repulsed by the the secretions of some bacteria, because the ones who weren't died pretty early.
I wish there were a way to "productize" this, or automate it at least.
I'm imagining some sort of aquarium-like tank you stock with ocean water that is able to maintain the microscopic life, allow them to flourish. Meanwhile, some sort of slow or periodic pump draws aquarium water into an attached, miniature "photography studio" where an appropriate camera+lens feeds a constant live stream to a display or to the web or to a Bond-villain's giant projector in their lair.
What a wonderful "screensaver" to have when the occasional appearance of a micro organism graces your screen. Perhaps too there are as-yet undiscovered species we might find with such a device?
2. Then you have to map out to the zooplankton culture chain you want to grow. Usually in the aquarium trade the target are foods that larval fish will eat etc. There are only a few types commercially available. So you would never see the diversity you are seeing in the article.
Conclusion, you can only do it with fresh sea water from the ocean. I would recommend taking a sample from 0 to 10ft on a reef during a full moon or where there is a lot of light. You will see much variety!
I think it can be done. Automated liquid handling and microscopes do exist.
We had a confocal microscope in our lab with a robotic arm attached and can automatically image samples. I'm not of the details but the samples are big compared to its field of view so I believe it searches for images with cells before imaging. A lot of experiments are done on these plates with liquid wells.
This isn't our model but shows a larger scope with automated robotic arm and a "plate hotel":
My daughter, 18 at the time, "productized" this for me - by buying me for Christmas a cheap digital microscope. We looked around the house for something to look at, and decided to try a drop of water from our aquarium.
I don't know the company, but there was one sold in a local toy shop some years ago. The idea was that this was essentially one "slice" of a pond, think of a very thin aquarium tank that was in the window. It had been seeded with a variety of small plants, algae, tiny critters and the like.
Meant to be a closed system, where it was all what was inside the glass, plus the sunlight from putting it in the window. Very cool, you could see tiny things swimming around in there.
I believe they operate one of these in the microscope exhibit at SF Exploratorium. They're right on top of the bay (literally on a pier) and sample the water all the time, and IIRC, they put the samples into accessible high-end microscopes.
When I was a young kid in the early 1980s, my grandpa had a large book about Darwin's voyages and the Theory of Evolution. The book probably dated from the 1950s or 1960s and contained countless photos of fascinating creatures, reproduced with all the printing technology of the era.
Whenever we visited him, I would flip through the book and marvel at the creativity of nature.
These photos made me feel a little bit in the same way.
If you have access to 'dirty water' (like a puddle of muddy water from a dirty area... or seawater) and a laser pointer, you can make a DIY microscope at home and see the stuff inside yourself.
Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia” had a really profound effect on the history of science. Here is the book— check out the letter to the king. I think people’s minds were blown and were ready to accept some new realities.
That letter is really something. I tend to think of grandiose flattery towards royalty as something that belongs in the ancient world. The puns on "small" and "least" at the end were also unexpectedly funny. I wonder how much people took this kind of flattery seriously, or if it was done with eyes rolled and tongue in cheek.
Keep in mind that this letter and book helped guarantee funding for the Royal Society!
Edit:
The text
“…Philosophy and Experimental Learning have prosper'd under your Royal Patronage. And as the calm prosperity of your Reign has given us the leisure to follow these Studies of quiet and retirement, so it is just, that the Fruits of them should, by way of acknowledgement, be return'd to your Majesty. There are, Sir, several other of your Subjects, of your Royal Society, now busie about Nobler matters: The Improvement of Manufactures and Agriculture, the Increase of Commerce, the Advantage of Navigation: In all which they are assisted by your Majesties Incouragement and Example. Amidst all those greater Designs, I here presume to bring in that which is more proportionable to the smalness of my Abilities, and to offer some of the least of all visible things, to that Mighty King, that has establisht an Empire over the best of all Invisible things of this World, the Minds of Men.“
Right, it's as much personal flattery of the king as it is a statement of allegiance to and gratitude for the institution of royalty! I'm sure the Civil War must've been quite a scary time, and I have no doubt that he's sincere about having greater peace and safety under the the restored monarchy. It's a really fascinating glimpse into that time period, beyond just the history of science.
> I wonder how much people took this kind of flattery seriously, or if it was done with eyes rolled and tongue in cheek.
Probably everyone who wasn't an idiot knew it was kinda silly and the sentiments not genuine, or at least exaggerated, but did it anyway. Cf business English, résumé cover letters, et c.
Just imagine, you could have been born as one of quadrillion of these guys, but instead you are a human, that’s more than lottery luck we all got, if you can read this.
To elaborate this point a bit: the "lottery" concept requires you to believe there's like a queue of souls and they each get allocated to different bodies, and you're lucky you got a fancy one instead of a microscopic shrimp. A different -- and to me, more plausible -- way to look at it is that "you" are an emergent property of a specific complex organism. How you actually emerge is a fascinating and difficult discussion, but putting aside the mechanics, the implication of this framing is that "you could have been a microscopic shrimp" is meaningless, like asking "what if that cloud were instead a bowl of soup?"
That problem used to mindfuck me. Eventually I realized it's more of an emergent problem, that only exists in our brains. Problem goes away by taking a step back and viewing the world from a perspective greater than self.
Yes, but as a thought experiment it is considered by many as the only way to make unbiased decisions about moral principles and how society should be structured. Moral philosopher John Rawls's uses the terms original position and veil of ignorance. You can think of them as "What we'd all decide for the world if each of us did not know ahead of time which person they'd would be born as".
> The Veil is meant to ensure that people’s concern for their personal benefit could translate into a set of arrangements that were fair for everyone, assuming that they had to stick to those choices once the Veil of Ignorance ‘lifts’, and they are given full information again.
> One set of facts hidden from you behind the Veil are what we might call ‘demographic’ facts. You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. By removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles that discriminate against any particular group.
It's been pointed out how in the Avenger movies, Thanos wiping out half of all life in the universe having the effect of disappearing half of humans didn't really make sense, cause it would probably mostly take out insects, or maybe there's a small handful of planets that contain majority of individual lifeforms that would take the brunt of that.
I suppose it's implied it was "half of life" on a per-species basis. It's basically magic, so probably best not to think about it too much.
I'm not really up on Hinduism, but one of the implications of "atman is brahman" would be that, reciprocally "brahman is atman".
Therefore, also it's not the case that "you can reincarnate into any of those life forms" but rather that all those lifeforms, including you, are incarnations of the same over soul.
So, you always already are both those forms and not, and have just forgotten it was so.
And, then, finally, when you do bad things to those other incarnations you are doing them to yourself: it's not that you have to reincarnate to have someone else do shitty things to you, but rather the case that karma is always already in balance.
Anyhow, just my shitty heterodox take based on a single poorly applied mathematical rule.
Now look at it from the other side. If it really was quadrillion times more probable to be born (hatched?) as a plankton, why exactly weren't you? Either tremendous luck, or something wrong with the assumption.
I don't understand that logic. Asking 'why aren't you part of the other thing' is answered 'because something has to be not part of it', not 'because luck'.
I admit I don't understand it fully either. If you want to read about it from more famous people than me, it is called "self-sampling argument". I'll try explain what I think I know.
Why some group is not empty is different from why it is me who is in that group, when I could very well be in the other one, like almost everyone. When the other group is much larger, then most potential "me"s will observe that they are in the larger, more typical group. The others will be surprised because they get the less common result, but most will not.
There are more intuitive examples than being human versus insect. Let's say, vast majority of people are not members of a royal family, so, knowing nothing else about myself, I should expect not to be, either. (Fits, afaik.) There are also some counterexamples, like that most people live elsewhere than in my town, but these are often tailored to me.
Going back to the plankton problem, I observe the equivalent of being a prince. Someone has to be, for sure, but is there a reason why me?
During finals week in my undergrad at Berkeley, I remember seeing the squirrels and thought, "How nice it must be to be a squirrel and not worry about human affairs."
My next thought was, "What looks at Humans in similar fashion?"
If you ever visit Amsterdam for some time, and like to visit musea, check out Micropia [0]. It is a museam where they exhibit microbes, that you can explore using microscopes.
In most of NY city, there are Copepods in the water.
Since Jewish law prohibits drinking insects that are large enough to be seen without a microscope, there has been quite a discussion if that makes the water undrinkable.
As a result, many religious Jewish New Yorkers will only drink filtered water. So, no copepod protein, but maybe cleaner water?
Which was later released on consoles, then the company made games like Flower, Journey and Sky (free on mobile platforms). If you're not into gaming, I'd recommend setting a few hours aside to go through Journey at least.
Just tried to find out where to buy it for PC, but could not. This page https://thatgamecompany.com/flow/ has a little PC icon next to the OS ones, but maybe that version doesn't actually exist.
It's very easy to find macro lenses that have 5:1 magnification, meaning that an object is projected onto the sensor 5x it's size. Taking 1.7 mm and projecting that onto a Canon R5 45 MP sensor with 5x magnification gives us something that would be around 1934 pixels in length (just under 1/4th the width of the sensor that is 8192 effective pixels wide).
I think you can convert 5x into 10x or 15x pretty easily without much loss in image quality.
That's not the problem, the problem is getting enough light (without boiling your specimen, which they briefly mention) and nailing the focus. At such magnification, both problems are challenging.
> It's very easy to find macro lenses that have 5:1 magnification
That is bit of an exaggregation. Afaik there is for example exactly one 5:1 macro available on the Canon R series RF mount, and in general they are pretty rare.
There's a few 5:1 dedicated macro lenses. Around 2:1 and above though, handholding becomes near impossible and you almost always need focus stacking due to the very shallow depth of field. Not to mention powerful lights.
So even this "conventional" option that you can readily buy is quite the niche.
For a 0.2mm subject, 5:1 is not enough. Luckily, one can use a microscope objective on a camera, like this:
It doesn't have to be a bellow, they can also be a fixed tube, but the idea here is that the camera's sensor is at a specific distance to the back opening of the microscope objective. It would be the same distance where normally the eye piece of the microscope goes.
This way, you can do 10:1, 20:1, 50:1, 100:1. You'll have ever greater problems though the more you magnify (vibration, light, composition).
The device in the bottom is an automated focus rail, a WeMacro in this case. You set a start point and end point, and it takes all photos in between. It can move by as little as 1 micron and is quite cheap.
If you enjoy this view into microworlds, here's one of my favourite macro photographers. This is a collection of garnets (sand grains) that are 0.2 to 0.3 mm across. That's basically dust IMO!
He talks about his gear here. His technique and patience is extraordinary. His gear is fairly modest: Olympus OM-D EM-1 Mark II camera, MC-20 Teleconverter, Olympus 60mm macro lens, Kenko 16mm extension tube, & Raynox 505 close-up lens. That's an older model of Micro Four Thirds camera (the format has magnification and depth of field advantages over fullframe) so you could probably acquire such a setup in the range of $1K used. And then spend a lifetime refining your art... :-)
For that size I would use a 1X or 4X microscope objective attached to a camera (this is in fact how my DIY automated microscope at home for looking at tardigrades does it).
I don't understand the part about needing high light intensity- at such low magnification, I have to attenuate my LEDs significantly and take extremely short exposures (like, running a 1A LED at 10mA and 1-10us exposures). But I can't fault his results.
For the light intensity, it's likely that he's using a much smaller aperture to increase depth-of-field than you are, and that will crank up the light requirements.
It's not inconceivable that a conventional camera could work here, although it is borderline. Quick napkin math: Sony A7RV produces 9504x6336 pixel images from 35.7x23.8mm sensor, resulting roughly 266 pixels/mm. With a 2x macro lens (Laowa has some), it would mean that 0.2mm subject would be 266x0.2x2=106 pixels across. Not exactly HD, but possibly still usable.
Macro photography most likely. Microscope images tend not to have bokehs like the ones in the article. You can use flourescent microscopy to make those glow in the dark images but the field of view is about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude too small for this.
at such low magnification, the depth of field (not field of view) is pretty big, you can usually see significant out-of-focus detail. But normally people just put the sample in a well and cover it with a coverslip, which makes a thin section.
I wonder that the commercial model is for endeavours such as this? I guess you collect royalties from people who want to publish the photos, but although you get a one-off wow factor I don't see there being a big market for these kinds of photos.
Is it a hobby/pursuit or can you actually make a living doing this kind of thing?
I have the same question over nature and wildlife photography. Maybe there is a royalty model when people license the images or publishing coffee table books. This is like open source work. You do it for the passion and maybe someone will give you enough contracts for a living.
There’s also a reasonably large set of people who do so because they have a significant trust fund or large inheritance coming so they can basically do whatever they like and the money doesn’t really matter. Don’t necessarily feel sorry for them!
People collect things of all sorts. Taxidermy animals posed doing human things. Preserved butterflies in a frame. Things with bones of animals and people. Artwork made from human hair. Photos of snowflakes. Photos of fish. Photos of people, the horror.
Why would photos of something like this strike you as any different. Why shouldn't the artist making prints not be able to make money from the effort, experience, and skill of producing those prints in manner that are worthy of a print? It's like asking anybody can write code, why should someone be able to make money doing that. Hell, computers write code themselves now. What makes you special you feel you need compensation for it?
Also, it could just start out as a hobby. Got anything you do on the side that started out as a curious nature, became a serious interest, then got good enough other people were interested in what you did?
"These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter. Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes"
If you want to go down another order of magnitude or few, fluorescent microscopy of single-celled organisms is pretty interesting. This collection of images is stunning:
These techniques also revealed the sheer scale of microbial life, as even the clearest ocean water from the most remote, nutrient-limited tropical seas will contain as many as 100,000 cells per mL. Below that there are the various viruses that infect or cohabit with these bacteria and small plants and animals, which are invisible to light microscopy.
> the sheer scale of microbial life [...] ocean water
There's also the sheer predation of it. IIRC, for some coastal surface biome I've long forgotten, viral half-life was like an hour, and a third of bacteria were virally lysed each day. A cup of beach water is not just teaming with life, it's a war zone.
At https://www.whoi.edu/what-we-do/explore/instruments/instrume... you can read about the VPR (video plankton recorder), which is towed behind a ship and takes photos of a small region. It's a great tool for seeing patterns of different species. The videos at the bottom of the site might be interested to folks reading this thread.
Are these photos in true color? What do the RAWs look like? I can't tell if the coloring is real, or if it's more along the lines of astrophotography where the colors are fake, but illuminate something key about the photo (in this case, body structure).
This article reminds me that I’ve been meaning to buy a microscope to play around with. Any suggestions for an affordable, beginner-friendly microscope setup?
>Foldscope combines low-cost materials with precision optics to create inexpensive microscopes that are affordable for communities worldwide. With a magnification of 140X, Foldscope can visualize tiny things like bacteria and microorganisms as well as larger samples like insects, plants, fabrics, and tissues. Foldscope can also attach to mobile phones for imaging. This portable microscope is also waterproof. With that versatility, the possibilities are endless!
My experience is USB digital microscopes are much better because you can look at the picture on a big screen. The eyepieces of most cheap microscopes are terrible in comparison.
With a screen you can show the kids what’s going on. It’s a shared experience.
The animals are captured one by one and placed carefully into a drop of water for viewing in an (inverted?) microscope. Is not a random sampling. You can spot all of those animals with the naked eye.
Nope. Life is exclusive from earth at this moment. No fossils or live animals, fungi or plants of any kind in Mars.
But if there is still some subterranean water at the correct temperature in a deep Mars cave... who knows? They can stand huge pressures and extreme environments very well.
We have not found any evidence of life of any sort on Mars, much less of multi-cellular life. I imagine that even the most optimistic pan-spermic ideas would involve far more primitive/rugged life-forms than crustaceans.
> These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter. Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. It’s hard to avoid these relatives of shrimp and lobster—Walter has studied them all over the world, in the Red Sea as well as Antarctica. Wherever there’s water, copepods thrive.
I'm wondering how this was handled in the end. Do Orthodox Jews drink the tap in NYC today?
Guidance from rabbis varies (no central source of authority in Judaism). Some orthodox rabbis will view the copepods as not kosher and suggest filtering the water. Less orthodox rabbis will say the water is fine because the copepods are not visible to the naked eye.
Within reason, it's nothing, or `betal bshishim` which is equated to one sixtieth. It's void, as a concept, in Hebrew tradition.
It helps if you think about it in terms of historical hardships of the Hebrews. It means if you're hungry and your neighbor cooks for you and there's a tiny bit of non-kosher fat in the soup or something like that, or if you're starving, Yahweh will forgive you because it's such a small amount and you're so hungry it's not right to penalize you for that which you couldn't control. Something that is one sixtieth is colloquially so insignificant that it equates to nil.
This general approach is true within all Jewish traditions. For example, if you get sick on Shabbat you're allowed to drive to the hospital (and doctors are allowed to help you), or if you're ill during Rosh Hashana you don't have to fast. It's a very nice aspect of Judaism: "follow the rules, yes, but don't be stupid about it."
No, that would be silly. "The Naked Eye" is what normal human eyes can see without aid. There is a lot of grey area there, but microscopic creatures that you can only see with specialized equipment invented in the past 100 years certainly are not visable to the naked eye for any reasonable definition of naked eye.
Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading.
> Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes.
Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. Religions seems incapable of fitting their model over the apparent continuum of life. It was also somewhat humorous to read this.
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. This post is about as congenial as religious flamebait gets, but it's still that.
Admittedly the upvotes such a post gets are a bigger problem than the post itself, but there's not much we can do about those. (This post was upvoted to the top of the thread when I saw it. I've marked it off topic now.)
IMAO This is a trap to force the scientist to introduce religion in their work. Researchers should not spend their time studying religious concepts to validate religious questions. Is bad for them. In the best outcome, the scientist will lose valuable time and their prestige will be linked and borrowed for a religious agenda. At the worse case if the answer is not the same as in the religious books it will spawn more and more questions and the scientist will soon find themself tangled in an hydra of philosophical minutia, and fighting against a closed group in the undesirable role of outer enemy that must be critizised, cancelled or menaced with the goal to reinforce the sense of community.
This people should be redirected directly to ask any religious doubts to a religious figure. Period. Don't let them abuse of your time.
Zoologists are not trained into the subtle details of the concept of kosher. This is the work for a Rabbi. If the Rabbi needs a biology book to study the question, the researcher could kindly suggest several sources so he can start learning.
I think I'll disagree that this is off topic. What I quoted is a literal quote from the article. I wouldn't have mentioned it or caught it if it wasn't. From my perspective, the entire point of the article is the beauty and smallness of things that we are otherwise unaware of. The idea that books thousands of years old didn't anticipate, and thus don't accommodate, such is interesting. And I thought the discussion was good.
"religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth" etc. is generic religious flamebait. We don't want that on HN, because it leads (in the general case) to horrible threads that are as nasty as they are predictable. I'm sure that's not your intent, but we have to go by the effects these things generally have.
You may be right about connections to the article (I haven't checked) but that is not as important as preserving the ecosystem in general, which is the motive behind moderating HN this way; not arbitrarily but based on many years of experience with how these things usually go.
I suppose myopic can often, maybe more often than not, have a negative connotation, but it’s just been a word on the tip of my tongue lately (I’m sure there’s a word for that), and I generally mean it as having lack of foresight.
I think there can be a bit of religious protectionism, because I don’t see similar comments being labeled as scientific flame bait, because I have often provided much harsher myopia critique to non-religious topics.
But I can see the general moderation point of view and that, maybe disappointingly so, comments referencing religion can be hot, so to speak, and that my comment train got lucky.
Edit: I made the original comment somewhat in passing, and just commented on the part that caught my eye other than "wow, I need to read more about these things".
I'm gonna have to disagree here, I don't think the single line from the comment passes the threshold for flamebait. The comment wasn't offtopic, and the conversation it led to was both interesting and not really a flamewar.
I don't often see comments replying to dang's moderation (from people other than the ones he's moderating), and generally, I think dang's influence is beneficial, but I would like to see the moderation be more tolerant (IE, slight adjustment of thresholds around "generic flamebait").
Pejorative generalizations about religion are obviously religious flamebait. This isn't a borderline call. If this thread didn't erupt into a nasty conflagration, that's only by chance, the same way that not every lit match dropped in a dry forest starts a forest fire. It's still not cool to drop them.
Unless he has considerable rabbinic training, Walter is not competent to judge whether the (invisible) copepods are kosher or not. The categories in the religious laws have some connection to biology but are not determined solely by physical conditions either. At the risk of over-simplifying, these laws are meant to be possible to follow. Nobody is going to decide that, henceforth, all strictly observant Jews must filter their water to remove microscopic animals.
Here's my favorite story about scientists judging what's kosher, starring none other than Richard Feynman:
One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions."
Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interest in.
They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?"
"No," I said, "but... what is the problem?"
They said, "In the Talmud it says that you're not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?"
I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t' interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud.
The followup anecdote in that same article was also fun:
I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought "Here's fun!"
My plan went like this: I'd start off by asking, "Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak, yak." And then they would have to say, "Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man."
Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, "Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?" And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully, until I've got them - trapped!
And do you know what happened? They're rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! AS son as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist - I can't remember how - and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea - phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie - they got right out.
While I agree with his observation here, if his narration can be assumed to be accurate, it is somewhat rich coming from Feynman who was famously dismissive of things he didn't find interesting. He saw the world from a very particular point of view.
Or the bacteria and fungi constantly living and dying within us. The self cells we continually turn over and instruct to die. The second order predation that balances the ecosystem that sustains us.
Orcas that enjoy playing with their food. Lions that eat prey alive. Beautiful and terrifying. Our primate and hominid ancestors that ate the flesh of rival clans.
I respect veganism and personal choices, but the world is a big place with lots going on that will forever escape our ability to control. That's how I frame my own decision, but I respect others' too.
I guess I don’t see the relevance. Vegans eat other life forms like plants and fungi (it’s unavoidable). Their reservations are specifically about animals. Why would bacteria be an issue?
>> Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth.
You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..."
Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would find minor, or very major, things to disagree on. Judaism is massively different to say Druidism or Buddhist. Crumbs, _within_ Judaism you have a full spectrum from Ultra Orthodox to unpracticing.
I would thus caution you from viewing the world as falling into either religious or irreligious. Ultimately that classification is not meaningful.
It is not always possible to qualify every single word, especially in an Internet forum comment, so I might argue that the trap lies with the reader. As when one encompasses a generality, one should consider that it rarely applies to the totality of the categorical word. While the anecdote presented in the article involves a presumably particular sect of Judaism, I don't think one would be hard pressed to find similar analogs in most of the other major religions in the world. It's no surprise because the foundations of these religions were developed thousands of years ago, in which humanity's understanding of the world beyond itself was still infantile, at least more infantile than today's juvenile understanding. So I don't think it's much of a leap to generalize to religions rather than single out this particular one. Religion is more about culture and control than it is about searching for understanding, the latter of which you might find more in spirituality, art, and science.
The big bang isn't a creation myth, it doesn't say anything about what existed beforehand, and if come up with enough evidence, the "theory" would be invalidated and replaced with one that is less inconsistent with our observations. I am not aware of- but would love to learn of- creation myths which are continuously updated as new data is available.
Scientism is something that philosophers claim exists when they don't want to get in an argument with a scientist.
I’m more talking about the creation myths of science. One example being Copernicus having to break free from the suppression of the Church. The other being the Big Bang, which some claim usurps religion, when in fact it was originally devised by a Catholic priest.
What I’m driving at is that science is an awesome tool, not at all at odds with religion. It’s one, very effective method, but it’s not the end all be all for truth.
The scientism I’m driving at is people putting blind faith in science as a replacement for other forms of understanding. The argument is that religious or philosophical understanding come in when science has reached its absolute limit. The two are not competitive with each other.
Why does that strike you as myopic? Just the opposite, if the Rabbinate decided that they've never heard of these little bugs in the water and so they don't count, that would be myopic. The fact that this is a question which was debated a bunch in the orthodox world shows a flexibility that I think is underrated in orthodoxy. Is religion incapable of fitting their model over the continuum of life, or does it continue to adapt to new information?
I'm reminded of a discussion in the talmud. A rabbi says that he heard from an Athenian scholar that there is a type of... mouse? bug? The aramaic isn't clear, some kind of little animal. Anyway, there's this creeping thing which comes to live when the sunlight hits a certain type of mud at a certain time of day. There's a whole discussion about whether these things are really "alive", vis a vis whether or not you can "kill" them on shabbat (this discussion is had elsewhere about lice, which were thought to have generated spontaneously. Jewish law has always been flexible and adaptable and shifted along with changing understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. I don't see how this anecdote suggests any differently.
P.S. most (probably like 98% of) orthodox rabbis I have talked to permit drinking tap water even though it has little bugs in it, because they're too small to see with the human eye and thus are not forbidden to eat. If they were big enough, you would have to filter them, just like you have to check for bugs before you eat lettuce.
It’s literally life - a living thing - inside a drop of water. What is the problem here? The title doesn’t imply anything about how curated it is or isn’t.
"Photos capture tigers, elephants and giraffes that live in the broom room"
The "drop of seawater" is just a literary construction here. This animals don't live "in a drop of seawater", they live in the ocean. They are superfast also for animals so small. I had photographed some of them and you need to apply a restrain of some type to be able to take a clear photo. They are extremely migratory animals. Even more active than birds probably, if we take in mind their relative size.
That led to a career in biology although I don't think I really used microscopes much at all over the next 30 years. Recently I adjusted my hobbies and built a microscope from components and use it to apply object detection to tardigrades. Guess what- the state of the art is to collect enormous numbers of images of a microbiotic organism and cluster them into a small number of states (like a markov model) and estimate the transitions between them. I don't even want to solve any specific problem- I just love watching tardigrades. They're hilarious little animacules.