#Technology Analysis

[risestarkiss]

Rise Ramblings #265

Well that explains this:

...and possibly this?

[twilight-zoned-out]

"Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured."

Although Dracula was published in 1897, some think that it takes place in 1893 because of the way the days and dates used line up. If that's the case, Jonathan Harker's epilogue, seven years later, would have been added around 1900. A new era bubbling with new change and new conventions. The story ends with Jonathan looking ahead to a new century filled with the unknown and being able to look on the past, despite its darkness, "without despair."

[alpaca-clouds]

Poll: Solarpunk Topics to Write More About

So, I have decided to go back into blogging a bit more about Solarpunk - both as a genre and as a movement. But I now gotta ask you: What kinda Solarpunk stuff would you like to read more about in this blog?

[ai-innova7ions]

Neturbiz Enterprises - AI Innov7ions

Our mission is to provide details about AI-powered platforms across different technologies, each of which offer unique set of features. The AI industry encompasses a broad range of technologies designed to simulate human intelligence. These include machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, and more. Companies and research institutions are continuously advancing AI capabilities, from creating sophisticated algorithms to developing powerful hardware. The AI industry, characterized by the development and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies, has a profound impact on our daily lives, reshaping various aspects of how we live, work, and interact.

[cbirt]

InstaDeep and BioNTech scientists introduced ChatNT, a multimodal conversational agent that has an advanced understanding of biological sequences like DNA, RNA, and proteins. ChatNT opens up biological data analysis and modeling capabilities to a wider user base via its conversational nature.

After examining a lengthy segment of DNA, have you ever thought about what secrets might be hidden within it? What about the elaborate ballet performed by proteins and RNA that directs all life’s processes? Typically, this has been the work of highly trained scientists who crack these codes of life. But what if you could have a conversation with your DNA, asking it to reveal its function in a way anyone can understand?

This is where ChatNT comes into play. A groundbreaking AI model that’s changing the game for bioinformatics. It acts as an interface between human language and complex biological sequences like never before seen. Just think of having an AI biologist on speed dial in your pocket, ready to answer any question about DNA, RNA, or proteins in plain English!

Continue Reading

[mask131]

Can you someday do a post about a very important question that always deeply fascinated me: How technologically advanced is Oz?

Wicked as a stage show puzzles me because it implies Oz has electricity, a broadcast radio system, and trains.

How much tech is present in Oz in the books?

Oh boy that's one COMPLICATED question... Now, before I start saying anything, I will point out that I am not an Oz expert by any means. I have not read all of the Oz books. However I do know an Oz expert that tackled the subject! He is here on Tumblr somewhere, but I know his Oz analysis and lore-exploration by his blogs. He started doing them more than a dozen year ago on vovat.livejournal.com ; and then he continued his Oz posts to vovatia.wordpress.com ; I know they have very, VERY helpful when it comes to my own knowledge of Oz, and he tackled several times the topic of technology in Oz and Baum's work, with quite fascinating analyses! So go check out these blogs, you might find some interesting info!

That being said, what can I tell you?

Since I haven't read all the Oz books I will stick to Baum's novels only - but before doing that I want to point out something... It is something I said in my previous Oz post (So you want to know about Oz 5), but the Wicked stage musical is part of a pretty big wave of 2000s-onward Oz adaptations that decided Oz was a steampunk world. I know you entertained yourself a pretty similar project of a Gilded Age Oz, if I recall correctly? And when you look at Oz adaptations, you have this wave of SyFy's Tin Man, and the Amazon series "Lost in Oz", and the graphic novel/animated movie "The Steam Engines of Oz", and more recently the show "Emerald City". Even "Dorothy and the Witches of Oz" had a steampunk-vibe to their Oz. It is kind of the modern direction to go.

Now back to traditional Baum's Oz... Does it have electricity? I don't think so. The Oz created by Baum is... it is something between a fantasy version of the late 19th century American countryside, and your archetypal fantasy land. The Land of Oz is mostly a huge countryside to be honest. Its lots of forests with woodsmen and wild animals ; it is lot of fields and orchards because most of Oz's economy relies apparently on farming ; the only other big industry seems to be metal-working (Winkies, the guy who made the Tin Man) and stone/gem-working (due to the huge presence of precious stones, though no mine or miner is ever descrbed in the Oz books) ; it is a lot of small villages scattered around the one big city that is Emerald City (or around big castles like the Tin Man/Wicked Witch castle) ; this all gives it a very medieval/feudal feel in structure... Though Baum really tried to give Oz originally a "fairytale feel" and thus you have the same historical madness typical fairytales have. For example, just like your typical Renaissance fairytales (a la Charles Perrault), you have mirrors and candies and porcelaine in Oz ; and yet, just like your also typical 19th century fairytales (a la brothers Grimm) you also have guns in Oz! Mind you the guns are rare and rarely used, they seem mostly to belong to the military cast (they are always wielded by soldiers or royalty bodyguards), and they are usually useless against the monsters and magical threats... But they do exist! But Oz seems to lack things like electricity of petrol or even steam machinery. At least in the beginning!

(In fact I had a chat with @artmakerproductions recently about fireworks in Oz. He wondered if the Oz The Great and Powerful idea of using fireworks as something non-existent in Oz could work with Baum's canon, and indeed, while the presence of guns implies gunpowder is a thing in Oz, there are to my memory no mention of fireworks anywhere in Oz... Maybe they appear at one of Ozma's birthday parties, but I couldn't find which one. Fireworks are evoked in his non-Oz/Oz-crossovered work "The Magical Monarch of Mo" but only as a comparison to how lightning appears in this country...)

Is there radio in Oz? Actually there is! In the opening of book 7, to get out of how he had written his way out of Oz in book 6, Baum explained his return to the series by "Oh yeah, Ozians got hold of the radio and now they send me radio messages about what is going on in Oz". So Oz DOES have some sort of radio equivalent. How, since there's no electricity or batteries in Oz? That's beyond me, but here's why it is difficult to say for certain what Oz's technology level is: Baum, as I said, started not giving a fuck anymore about continuity. As I explained the first two-three books are kind of solid in terms of continuity because they were designed as their own closed novels, but book 4 onward Baum just gave up any concrete effort at "solid" worldbuilding and went the "Fuck it, I'll add whatever I want" road. As such, don't expect any serious effort at making a cohesive technological system - Baum isn't Tolkien. He's the anti-Tolkien. That being said, another very interesting point when it comes to Baum's work is that, as you go through his fourteen Oz books, you realize how modern technology slowly creeps onto Oz. Baum was writing Oz book between 1900 and 1920 - and the technological evolution of these two decades quite influenced Baum. The addition of the radio element was one case of Oz "evolving"; in later Oz books there are also magical equivalents of television popping up. But if you want to see a concrete comparison, you can compare the first Oz book, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", with the last Oz book Baum wrote, "Glinda of Oz". The first shows an Oz so technology-lacking people are easily fooled by stage tricks ; while the last book is heavy on technology, with for example evocations of submarines, but it is a technology presented as a form of magic. Which leads me to my last point...

Does Oz have trains? Not by the time Baum wrote them ; though modern day adaptations and authors did add a handful of them to the Oz world (and you can also find things such as ray guns or time-travelling machines in modern Oz books so you know, it evolves with its time). But Baum did wrote about a carriage that did the entire tour of Oz for touristic purpose: that's one of the subplots of "The Emerald City of Oz", and how Dorothy shows her aunt and uncle all about the fantasy land. It is not a train, but you have already here the idea/potential for a train-like system here (even though it is rather a carriage/wagon drawn by a wooden horse that can never tire and doesn't eat). And here's my point: the reason technology is so weird in Oz, and why it is also lacking in many way, is due to Oz being filled with magic.

Most Ozian equivalent to our world's technology is, in Baum, powered by magic. There is no camera or surveillance system, but there are the Magic Picture or Glinda's big magical "spy on everyone" book. There are no lie detectors, but there is Glinda's pearl. The magic eye of the Wicked Witch of the West was explicitely compared to a telescope. Etc etc. Magic replaces most advanced technology around the Land. Advanced technology and mechanism do exist, and Baum was very fond of the idea of the... "magical mechanic" if I can say so. What he does is basically take an actual real-world technology, but take it to fantasy extremes - which notably is why the Oz books are considered early sci-fi. There's how the Tin Man came to be: Baum took the workings of actual real-life prosthetics for missing limbs, but pushed it to the extremes by making a "vintage android". There is how the Woggle-Bug came to be: a great scholar used a machine to project an enlarged image of a small bug on the wall. Quite ordinary right? But turns out the machine literaly enlarged the bug to a greater size - which is a very common sci-fi tropes (all those rays that shrink or enlarge things or objects). And while it is not an Oz example per say, Baum gave us the most blatant example of "magical technology" with the realm of Ev, where lived Smith and Tinker, the inventors of many fantastical automatons, first of which being Tik-Tok, a sentient automat that is considered one of the first robots of modern literature!

So... On one side, Baum tried to show a land that would not advance technologically because magic was there and much more powerful. It is the line by the Good Witch of the North, about how Oz still has magic because it is not "civilized", and one of the traits of "civilization" is advanced technology. Take how guns are treated in Oz: they exist but they are not made a big deal out of, and in fact prove quite useless among the many magical items and beings. And yet, on the other side, Baum's Oz is the literal proof of the law "Any advanced technology is magic" ; or rather a whacky incarnation of this principle, because indeed, the most advanced form of technology in Ozian lands work by fantasy and extravagant sci-fi rules (Tin Man, Tik-Tok), while most of the great spells and magic items of Oz are fantasy equivalents to our real-world technology (the Magic Picture, or even the Gump which works as a fantasy equivalent of flying machines).

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone — while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

❦

Will the wild ox consent to serve you? Will it stay by your manger at night?

Can you hold it to the furrow with a harness?

Will it till the valleys behind you?

Will you rely on it for its great strength?

Will you leave your heavy work to it?

Can you trust it to haul in your grain

and bring it to your threshing floor?”

Job 38:4-7, 39:9-12 (NIV)

❦

It feels like such a Choice to have the Job episode right before the one about resurrectionists. The one that shows even angels failing to bring back the dead, when human doctors are juuuuust about to learn how to do it.

The central question of Job’s story is “why do bad things happen to good people?” And one answer is: do enough science, and we can stop God from fucking with them.

Domesticate the ox to fill Job’s herd. Study different animals to heal Job’s disease. Count the clouds, find the storehouses of snow, and plug them into our weather models so we can evacuate Job’s children before the mighty wind.

Can Crowley call lightning and have it report back to him? Sure. But so can all the electronic doors and lights and phones that he zaps. All the technology that’s so mundane to us that it doesn’t even register as an answer to God’s challenge. Crowley is doing flashier versions of our miracles — the serpent of Eden standing in for all human science. He’s the shiny car, he’s the astrophysics, he’s the lightning in the wires.

He’s also the low-grade evil of car-based infrastructure, the glitchy cell towers, and the one that officially set armageddon in motion. Technology is tricky like that. Will the wild ox consent to serve you?

[quorras]

every time i see someone call tron 'cyberpunk', i lose ten years off my lifespan

[stimboardofatourneykid]

“So much weighs upon your smile, yet your body is as replaceable as it is expendable.”

A self indulgent stimboard of Virtual Analysis Line from All Eyes on Me/We’ll Be Right Back!

📺-📺-📺

📼- x - 📼

📺-📺-📺

[brbgensokyo]

circling back to my hater thought from earlier, it really bugs when fandom disengages from a story and activity ignores its themes and message in favour of unsalted porridge bland shipping and surface level engagement bait

[alderaangiediplanetearthcross]

TIME TRAVEL CRIME ALL MEDIA AND RELATED ANALYSIS AND WRITE UP

[lime-bloods]

TT: Later she instated a lusidroid system to serve the same function, as she began phasing in more robotic solutions in favor of all this ill conceived biotech nonsense that always did nothing but backfire.

on reexamination, this line comes across as such a coded misogynistic slur... like Dirk has a vested interest in making it seem like Meenah had no choice but to adopt cool, logical machinery after all that messy, emotional biology inevitably failed on her. potentially paints his whole retelling of Earth's history in a different light (read: scratch doctoring). the narrative that machines overtaking organisms is inevitable ultimately only serves those on the side of Sk(y)aianet and Lord English/the Terminator...

feel a little foolish having discussed Ozymandias as a gynophobe on more than one occasion and never for a second considered the gynophobe was Dirk!

[tertiarydietarylinkagesforspirit]

ANCIENT BANQUETS

[magnetarbeam]

I think a lot about Star Wars technology as it relates to the stylistic schemes of the story, and what they can do with the technology compared to what it would be thematically fitting for us to see them do.

This isn't exactly something I've gone out of my way to research, but the impression I generally have is that in the time that the OT was coming out, the visuals were meant to be believable to the viewers at that time, with the technological frame of reference of the 1970s and 1980s, when people couldn't even fathom that we might one day have real-world datapads.

More recently, as technological accelerationism has increasingly taken hold in our society, I think the idea has become more "Star Wars is an interstellar society, so it doesn't make sense for them not to always use all the devices we invent to make our lives easier, and more."

And I don't think that's exactly right. As far as I can figure it, that civilization's frame of reference for these things is probably very different from ours. The Galactic Republic was founded 25053 years before the Battle of Yavin. They've had this same technological base far longer than even their longest-lived member species can remember. The galaxy has had far more than enough time to collectively realize what Earth hasn't, which is that a more complex system has more points of failure, and this shit is such old news to them that they're not excited by the idea of using it to make their lives easier, like we are.

Like, digital graphics displays for us get higher-resolution all the time just because we can. Those same displays in Star Wars look like garbage to us because they don't need that level of detail to serve their purpose.

I have absolutely no doubt that the people in that galaxy could make an Alexa or what have you. But if those people were presented with the idea, I think instead of "Ooo, it makes things easier because I can talk to it from anywhere," their first thought, as a collective cultural outlook, would be "I can do those same things perfectly fine by walking over to a computer and doing it myself."

[gausses]

o(*≧▽≦)ツ🎉