> Scorpions hibernate in times of extreme cold, which allows Asian species to live as far north as nearly 50 degrees latitude. "That's under snow a good four months a year," said Fet. "There's no way they are active there in cold weather, but they hibernate, and do this even in Asian deserts where it becomes very cold."
You don't need to go too far South in the US... Had a scorpion walk up to me while I was using a public toilet in Northern Nevada - I fired up quite a few neurons and sweat glands!
I've read that the original land animals were creatures such as this. But with spinnerets. One has to wonder, what was a formerly-sea-creature doing with spinnerets. And what possible use could they have on land, if this was the first land animal. What would they catch in their web?
Are biological components like a scorpions tail, or eyes or legs coded in a special way?
Not a biologist but it appears that biology is really good at preserving the integrity of body parts even though they can be found in multiple species.
Wow. Thanks for this link. The description of the genes in flies is amazing, it seems they have done some experiments to see how flies develop with each part of these genes modified.
Yeah, flies breed so quickly that knockouts are really easy to test. The fact that it's the same set of genes conserved in mammals is nuts. If you find this fascinating, you may also wish to look a bit deeper into the genetics of morphogenesis and embryogenesis
If they artificially recreate the DNA somehow and then, again, somehow, bring these things to life, may as well edit the DNA and make them a lot larger. Now, that would be horrifying.
Nature already had that idea with the centipedes and millipedes, the issue is that they won't be classified as an arachnid, since one of the "key" features is having exactly eight legs (actually four pairs):
At some point, after we start unlocking more secrets of the brain, we're going to understand how some shapes and biological attributes have been instinctively ingrained in our brains.
Then Hollywood will have some scientific basis to proceed from to make some true nightmare fuel that ticks all the right horrible boxes.
I agree with you, and this reminds me of the Black Mirror Playtest episode where, (spoiler alert), they create an artificially intelligent game that adapts itself to maximize terror.
That episode was more disturbing than most. I can't imagine signing up for something as horrible as that. It's literally torture as described in 1984, but worse.
Hayao Miyazaki had a scathing critique of a team that created a neural network designed to draw/animate on its own. It’s worth noting because his main criticism is that the more we offload these techniques to machines, we lose an element of creativity in ourselves.
Videos only two minutes but even that little time of ripping into the team that made the NN is hard to watch.
I see no value in a machine that draws pictures like a human except to shovel monstrous quantities of mass produced crap to further starve the masses of any attention span. If the future of entertainment is plugging in a bunch of parameters and spitting out some optimal result that appeals to some demographic, a practice that we can almost see fully realized today except for the part where machines create all the content, then there will be no new entertainment worth consuming in the future.
NN generated books, movies, shows, paintings, all worthless. It's the maximum viable version of youtube videos made for children that are cobbled together with a bunch of random assets, so that perhaps a baby will stay quiet and maybe click some ads.
What about enabling humans who can't draw pictures or animate to still put their ideas into an attractive-enough visual form to tell a story? How many amazing stories are there out there right now that never get made because of the enormous cost in finding and retaining talented animators?
Don't let a lack of drawing skill hold you back. Try reading the web comic Schlock Mercenary [1]. A good writer who couldn't draw started making a comic anyway, and now he's a good artist too.
The future value of NNs for creative media is in human productivity enhancement, not in replacement. Speedier asset generation, probably new procedural content, new image filter techniques. Personally I'm very excited to see what humans will be able to do with all of our new tools.
You could set a scene on a “city street” or “small town street” or “country road” and have the NN make the setting without it having to be drawn by hand.
After all, movie studios already do something to that effect. When I was in Rochester a few years back they were using a few streets to film action scenes for Spider-Man 3, which would have been far more expensive in New York and hardly anybody would have noticed the difference.
From what I've read and seen of Miyazaki, he is pretty blunt person irrespective of cultural norms. I think a lot of successful, deep creatives are like this.
I posted that after viewing this[1] from the article. I would say there's quite a bit more there going on that gives me the heebie jeebies than just radial lines that move.
Eight legs. Fangs. And a whip-like tail.
...Its remains were found imprisoned in amber, as if Mother Nature herself tried to lock this tiny terror away from the rest of the world."
Gee, is that bad writing or what? Sounds like crap tv, not the NYT.