You could define it as "the degradation of cellular maintenance". Androgenic hair loss is more like a non universal signal of hormonal maturity, like pubic hair growth.
Also, recreation is technology. If it turns out that ten mammoths are more efficient and require less human maintenance to modulate tundra and encourage the ecocycle, we know how to do it. We don't need to start a 50 year investment in 2050 and hope it works. Mammoths are likely to be equally or more useful than AI image generation or gigantic warehouses that sequester carbon given various precision-machined parts and chemical engineering. Animals are more efficient and require fewer externalities than most human endeavors. Even if we just ignore the externalities and admire these new impressive technologies. Life is very efficient.
I mean, is it? It's a total tangent, but I've long been having a problem wrapping my mind around the topic of efficiency of life. At whichever scale I look, from ecosystems to inner workings of cells, I see systems held in balance by negative feedback loops, zero-sum games. That is, everything fights everything else for resources, and what we call "balance" is a temporary equilibrium between reproduction, destruction and starvation. Feels like the exact opposite of efficiency. And yet, I can't deny that life can and does a lot with very little. I'm not sure how to reconcile this.
I have this general image in my head wrt. efficiency. Imagine you want to put a box a meter above the ground. There are many ways to do it. You could strap a PLC controller and a rocket engine to it, and keep it up actively. You could put it on a floating platform, filled with hot air, or better, helium or hydrogen. Or, you could just put a mast in the ground and bolt the box to it. The first one is obviously the least efficient, and the last one the most.
When I look at life, I see a lot of things being balanced by means equivalent to the rocket engine approach.
Ok, so, try dividing time into a view of it repeating, and progressing.
Time "repeats" in that we have days, years; your heart repeatedly beats about once a second; menstruation is about a month.
Time "progresses" more literally in that nothing repeats, "repeating" seems like an abstraction. Tuesday, Nov 12, 2024 only happens once; Tuesday happens every week; Nov 12 happens every year.
It's not very workable to keep in mind the literal physical view that every day, every second is unique. Interferes with using experience.
Here's [0] a nice video on Schrodinger's equation, where it's written nicely
H psi = ih d/dt psi
H is doing a lot of work. psi is the mysterious wave function. h explains what it's talking about by giving the units.
The i on the right side, in this writing, is associated with the time partial derivative d/dt. i, the imaginary number, is associated with rotations, which means in a way this writing of Schrodinger's Equation is implying rotational time, repeating time.
Suppose time really is legit repeating even way down deep. Then try reinterpreting your negative feedback loops as repeating time.
To extend speculatively, invoke the notion of fractals, where you can iterate and find more complexity thereby.
So suppose that life repeats time, but in the manner of a fractal where you uncover more structure by iterating.
It's been a while since I took any classes about it, but I don't think i implies "repeating time." I'm pretty sure it's just from the fact that waves themselves are repeating, i.e. periodic. But Schrodinger's equation doesn't say anything about the nature of time itself IIRC.
Yeah, yes, Schrodinger meant no such thing. But suppose for a moment that a wave, in going up and down repeatedly, is manifesting time itself repeating. Like time legit has an aspect where it's a repeating thing.
To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.
So here is the evidence: We know the big bang fulfilled the math criteria of being a black hole. We also know how black holes work from the outside from observations today. The simplest theory explaining both of those is that the math for the inside of the black hole is wrong, while it is right for the outside, and that we observe in our own universe/black hole is what really happens inside. Any other explanation simply has less evidence behind it.
Speculating that there is some strange singularity there is just as much sci fi as speculating that there isn't and that what we observe from the big bang is the normal state. Any theory saying that the black hole has a singularity inside would need to explain why the universe isn't a singularity, otherwise its provably wrong, since we know the universe isn't a singularity.
The only evidence against the universe and the big bang being a black hole is that it lacks a singularity, everything else adds up to it being a black hole. Ignoring that evidence is more unscientific imo. Also saying that the universe expands due to "dark eneregy" is also baseless sci-fi in that case.
Anyway, if black holes do become big bangs like that then it could be testable by looking at distributions after a big bang etc and compare that with some different ways of calculating black holes sucking up mass in different scenarios to see if it is reasonable. Science starts with speculating about stuff, speculation is not non-science. At least this is more testable than stuff like dark energy.
Edit: I've also studied all the math and physics in college for the testable parts of GR, I haven't studied string theory, at that point I no longer felt the physics made sense, I don't think it is wrong for me to hold alternative theories to the untested ones.
I mean, yeah there's tons of theoretical work. Predictions about lensing and structure have been done and verified. We've taken pictures of black holes. Susskind did a big fancy simulation for Interstellar that lined up great with them.
Perhaps if someone who gets the language did it for today's date, we'd both get some clarity. I've tried working backwards but the labyrinthine explanation doesn't project
This is why I think Akira can't be surpassed. Not just because it was done on acetate, but because of the level of skill and consideration required to animate that way. You can't just undo that brush stroke onto the cel and try something else.
As much as technology has democratized the field, I think it also lowers the heights. I desperately hope I'm wrong and just old, but I haven't met someone who puts up something that they think is better. Maybe it's just because we're in the transitory phase - but digital animation has been around for decades at this point. Maybe it's Ikea versus handcrafting, and the shift is in the expected quality rather than the art elevating itself to meet priors.
Akira was a big budget corporate thing though. It's technical excellence came from having the budget to employ multiple highly skilled animation leads and hundreds of animators drawing hundreds of thousands of cells.
I think animation done in computers can be excellent, but is disadvantaged because computers make it easier to do thinks quick and cheap and the economics of animation incentivises taking that direction.
Redline is a rare example where I think it's done well.
Akira is a cult classic and a pivotal point in anime - much more in the US than in Japan. If you don't know of a film surpassing it in skill and consideration in the thirty years since it was made it probably says more about your exposure to anime. Maybe it's just that Cyberpunk is less popular now and the big genres are of less interest to you.
The big genres of modern anime seem to predominantly be pandering to base weebs. Waifu shit meant to sell body pillows. Where is all the serious animation like Magnetic Rose at?
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