It's funny to me that my gut reaction was, "Oh. Why do they want that? Bouba would be such a weird tattoo compared to kiki."
I don't have tattoos. I don't really want them (I appreciate the artistry of them, but I can't stand seeing things on my skin). I don't know why I should care, never mind care the opposite way of most people.
Yeah I agree. I read the short story after having seen the movie and I thought the language/time stuff was clearly different. That's also why they changed the cause of the daughter's death from a climbing accident to an illness, because it wouldn't make sense for her to be killed by mountain climbing if her mother could have seen it coming.
Disagree. I thought there's a part in the story where the narrator talks about the inability to change the future. she knew her daughter would die in a fall and couldn't change it
Maybe my previous comment wasn't clear enough, since I agree with you. I think both versions make sense in their own context:
In the short story she sees all of her life "simultaneously" but it all still works with our typical notions of causality. The future can't influence the past, and so she can't use knowledge of the future in the present.
In the movie, she gets glimpses of the future which she then uses in the present. She learns the Chinese general's phone number from a memory of the future and then calls him. In the movie it wouldn't have made sense for her to see her daughter die in an accident and then not act on that information at all, so they changed it to an illness which she couldn't prevent even with foreknowledge.
I feel its super clear if you read the story before the movie existed. Also the physics examples, which aren't in the movie, make this clear.
There are two views of the world, in one you have freewill and experience making choices. In the other, you have no free will, and the things you do are set. They are set and you know what they are.
That's why its important that her daughter died of something preventable, so when you find out at the end that it hasn't happen yet, yet she does nothing to stop it even though it is in the future, you are getting a taste of seeing the world in this second way.
Cancer, there is nothing anyone can do, and it throws aside the whole premise.
The acting on seeing things in the future break the premise as well.
The point of the story was that you can't act on the future. If you can see the future you can't change it. It's also why the aliens had no strong reason for coming or leaving. They were always going to come, have the explosion and leave.
> and on my first read, I thought [Story of My Life] was downright mediocre—it seemed like some formal experimentation ... wrapped around an unnecessarily confusing plot & second-rate physics mumbo-jumbo in the service of a heavy-handed point. On my second read years later, having read some more about related topics in physics & philosophy since, I realized that I (along with almost everyone else who read it, judging from online discussions & reviews of the story and Arrival) might have been badly mistaken and that the plot was deliberately open to misreading and the physics mumbo-jumbo was in fact the whole point and the formal structure nicely reflected that.
> Didn't she do something like this in the short story as well? The part where she learns the non-zero-sum phrase?
If you carefully read the section, she learns the "non-zero-sum" phrase before having her daughter. The flashforward where she uses the "non-zero-sum" phrase is just her recalling the memory - no precognition required.
> “Mom, what do you call it when both sides can win?” I’ll look up from my computer and the paper I’ll be writing. “What, you mean a win-win situation?” … “I’m sorry, I don’t know it either. Why don’t you call your dad?”…A representative from the State Department named Hossner had the job of briefing the U.S scientists on our agenda with the heptapods. We sat in the video-conference room, listening to him lecture…“You mean it’s a non-zero-sum game?” Gary said in mock incredulity. “Oh my gosh.”…“A non-zero-sum game.” “What?” You’ll reverse course, heading back from your bedroom. “When both sides can win: I just remembered, it’s called a non-zero-sum game”
Unrelated, but what's the best way to read a thread when somebody posts a twitter link like this? I've never really used Twitter but it seems like there's no way to tell if there are any relevant replies or anything more than just this one image unless you login.
I used to use threadreaderapp but now it seems like they are asking for a login too :/
Even if you could see the replies they would almost all be off-topic attempts by paid "verified accounts" to take advantage of the eyeballs on the popular post they are replying to.
Twitter replies to any post that is semi-popular have been a worthless jumble of engagement bait for about a year now.
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com
Not to single out twitter because a lot of web sites simply appear as a blank page.
The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
FYI I have owned a model 3 for about a year now and I have always been able to manually set the speed by pushing the button and then using the horizontal part of the scroll wheel to cycle through the settings.
Ha, maybe that's been an option for longer and I just never thought to try that particular incantation. I even googled this issue and didn't discover that. Will have to try on mine now.
I do find it amusing that you now have the option of long pressing the scroll wheel or pressing the stalk button to thrn turn the wheel to change speeds... But the direction of the change in those two cases is reversed; in one case up on the wheel is faster, and in the other it's slower.
Favorite piece of Riven trivia:
If you've played the game you might remember the one spot where there's a giant sword sticking out of the ground. Since this place also appears in one of the game's FMV cutscenes they had to use a real giant sword prop for filming. The person that made the giant sword prop was Adam Savage from Mythbusters.
Cyan, by the time they got Adam's dagger prop, figured out they could do the whole thing in CG and so did not use the prop. They still thought it was cool as hell and hung it up on the wall. It was only after MythBusters started airing that they found out it was Adam's work, because he mentioned it in an interview. As shown, it now has a place of honor today in Cyan's lobby.
Given the number of times I've been kicked in the face by another person's fins while scuba diving, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near someone using one of these.
While this is definitely a possible explanation, I would hesitate to jump to any particular conclusions until further research is done on specific risk factors. The article also mentions air pollution as a possible cause:
>For example, a 2019 study found that Asian Americans breathe in 73% more tiny pollution particles than white Americans, most likely because of greater exposure to construction, industry and vehicle emissions where they live.
As you mention, there is some preliminary research which suggests cooking oil smoke could be related, but this is far from enough to definitively point towards it as the root cause, or even enough to justify your hunch I would argue. Also keep in mind there could be multiple causes of which cooking oil is just one part.
To add to this, I solved the first puzzle but I'm not getting the right sha256sum for the answer. It's unclear to me which part of the deciphered text I should be doing the checksum on.
The text says: "here are the checksums for all the solutions to the eighty-nine puzzles", is the solution only the newly readable part, or the whole new text that has been transformed?
A little earlier, the editorial instructions read: "These hash values, or checksums [...], were generated by the SHA-256 algorithm -- implementations of which you should easily be able to find and run on your own plaintexts. (By "plaintext", I mean the entire rest of the file, correctly deciphered -- of which, however, only the next chapter will be legible ... until the subsequent decipherment, and so on.)"
You should be (1) deleting everything up to and including "1.#####", then (2) applying the appropriate transformation to what remains. Looking at my code for this step, I see that I removed one newline character at the end of the file before doing everything else, and this apparently yielded the correct result; I didn't do this in subsequent steps.
(I've been playtesting this thing for a while. I'm not all the way through yet.)
Hmmm. The original, in fact, does NOT have the 0x0a at the end of the file; however, in process of deleting first part of file up through and including "1.#####", my linux command line tools (or vim?) added one there (unbeknownst to me at the time). I proceeded to solve first puzzle with the 0x0a there at the end in the head-shortened ciphertext, and I got readable plaintext, but my sha256sum does not match yours. If I remove the 0x0a, I get neither readable plaintext nor a matching sha256sum.
This is odd! We can visually troubleshoot this, and see that the first characters following 1.##### are «Cnrtltos » and the final characters at the end of the (original) file are «!niauago». Taking [SPOILER] alternately the first of the first and the last of the last gives us C, o, n, g, r, a, t, u, l, a, t, i, o, n, s, !. If there is an extraneous character inserted at the end, e.g. a newline, the transformation should be spoiled and illegible: C, newline, n, o, r, g, t, a, l, u, t, a, o, i, s, n, space, !.
Dunno if it's helpful for diagnosis, but my 01.txt that yields the expected sha256 sum ...
... is 0x3E1051 bytes long
... starts with <<Congratulations>>, as you already knew it should
... ends with <<IX%7M3+]vW7+zB]{\>>
(It couldn't be line-ending issues, could it? Do you have any 0x0D bytes?)
And, just in case it helps, my original text file (before stripping everything up to 1.#####, and _without_ the spurious 0x0A byte) is 0x3E404D bytes long and ends with << vhuY!niauago>>.
Thanks for this. This is something that always bugged me when I see explanations of the three-body problem. They'll say something like "changing the initial conditions just a tiny bit can dramatically change the outcome!" as an explanation for why having no closed form solution is significant.
But that never made sense to me, since plenty of things with closed form solutions also do this.
I've always wondered if we could potentially use genetic engineering to open up new possibilities for food. Would it be possible to make some inedible foods edible this way? For instance, what if you could make non-poisonous death cap mushrooms or nightshade berries?
why? we have like 200,000 edible plants known so far, yet, we have a pretty monoculture type of behaviour when eating... investing in tech for this type of thing feels a waste, unless we start to live the utopia of infinite resources
Strangely, everyone I've asked says they would want to be Bouba. No one wants to be Kiki.
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