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Yeah, very curious about how there is this calibre of high stakes drama and intrigue among 1920s elephant keepers.


My pitch to American readers is that Mortadelo & Filemon is like raunchy Spy VS Spy with Tom & Jerry characteristics.

In fact, if you liked the old British TV sitcom Bottom, you'll likely enjoy M&F.


Mortadelo y Filemón were a parody on Sherlock Holmes and Watson first, but being a polar opposite duo a la Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Later, at the mid-late 70's they shifted to a James Bond like parody, being secret agents instead of private detectives.

And, OFC, as Don Quixote, they made fun of the Spanish society itself leaving no one without a critique. Politicians, bosses, the average Spaniard mentality of being half a cheapskate lifehacker and half a rascal, the Church, the shitty state infrastructures for its time, and so on.

The Brits have a similar setting with the Rowan Atkinson movies depicting incompetent spies with a Mr Bean like character.


Very good definition. Definitely Tom-and-Jerry-esque mixed with blue collar scroundrel overtones.

I would expect to have more new Tintin comics as result, but probably will be at most a good falsification (Don't made me make talk about the new "Lord of the rings" film).


The Hayes Code exists to have a standardized industry guideline in response to individual states issuing dozens of differing film censorship bills. So while it is not a law, it is a guideline for how to be compliant with a rapidly proliferating number of censorship laws.


Bonzi Buddy Reloaded


What’s amazing is that if you install and run BonziBuddy (in a Win98 or XP VM, ofc) is his little RAM the whole thing uses - despite being blatant spyware.


There used to be a care for the craftsmanship, I tell you! :b


Also check out the lovely novel Klara And The Sun, about a solar powered AI robot friend, gifted to a sickly child.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun


Making Civ VI playable locks in the folk hero status


Yeah, the way I read it, it was some elderly customer at the McDonald's who tipped off the cops.


Exactly this, if you give a hoot about actual useful applications for AI, there is a great need to clear out all the grifters and scammers attracted by the initial hype cycle.


I suppose the much more bothersome scenario is finding a microbe that is ambiguously novel, and doesn't neatly fit any particular family of Earth microbes, but also isn't radically different enough to be confidently classified alien.

Like did we accidentally discover an eccentric and rare Earth microorganism that thrives in this unusual environment, or is it an honest to god extraterrestrial and life in both spheres just happens to converge along certain lines by evolutionary convenience or chemical necesssity? How would we tell?


Chemical space is very very large. Like we can say for certain that only a very tiny percentage of all possible synthesizable organic molecules have ever existed in our universe. The combinatoric explosion is just so enormous that I think its incredibly unlikely that the only configuration of molecules that supports life is our own here on Earth. In fact, I think we know this given that there are artificial amino acids that can be incorporated into our existing protein biochemistry without a problem. Thats a small example but it points to a much larger space of chemical compositions that can support life. So an entirely separate evolutionary process would almost certainly land in a very different chemistry for things like information storage and molecular machines like protein.

Also our biochemistry is compositional, it takes small building blocks and remixes and combines them to build larger structures. I suspect that this is also a necessary feature of life in general. It’s very hard, basically impossible, for natural evolution to build huge structures like proteins just by pure uniform random selection. Instead it takes small pieces randomly, then puts them together to get complex life.

Point being, its a very very path dependent process. Any small difference in the early building blocks gets exponentially magnified when evolution uses those blocks to build life. So that leads to easily detectable, drastic differences in biochemical structure. This is evident on earth in that our biochemistry has a feature called left handed chirality that seems to be a purely random accident of the very earliest steps of life. That then was transmitted to every living being on earth. There’s probably a fifty-fifty chance that extraterrestrial biology is right handed instead. Every step in evolution also probably has random accidents just like that. Our particular biochemistry is the result of a trillion coin flips. There are probably many other biochemistries that work just fine, but look way different


You’d sequence this organism. If it came from earth you could tell. People would have either sequenced it already or a distant relative species where you could compare sequence divergence and when they shared a last common ancestor. Convergent evolution might lead to similar phenotypes but the actual sequence of genes involved is only going to be similar if those genes shared an evolutionary history.


> How would we tell?

You'd send a second mission to do analysis in situ.


Alien samples won’t have carbon-14, which is created in the atmosphere.


Why not?


Because carbon-14 is created in the atmosphere.


Are we sure it can't be created in nitrogen rich atmospheres outside earth?


Which extraterrestrial bodies with nitrogen-rich atmospheres do you have in mind?


What's the connection with taoism - are we talking early inner cultivation type stuff?


taoism as a religion were founded by the first Tianshi (prophet) Zhang Daoling somewhere near Chengdu during late East Han, then the doctrine spread to poor people and formed a movement called Wudoumi in Sichuan and ultimately its variant Taiping-Tao shook the foundation of the Han empire and began the "Three Kingdoms" period.


But isn't Zhang Daoling (AD 34-156) born too late to have brough Taoism into Shu (1046BC-316BC)? That's why I am asking about inner cultivation - like are we talking precursor practices that would become relevant to taoism arising in Shu, or do you just mean Shu fits the general area in which Taoism would later show up?


I see, the Shu is often called as either name of the state (1046BC-316BC) and/or the region of SiChuan basin


Ah, that makes sense - thank you for clarifying!


Is it? As far as I understand it is a philosophy. Like many ideologies, it got turn into a religion afterwards


You're right, don't know why you got down voted

Taoism originally developed by Laozi(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi) as one of many ideologies in Warring States period(~4 BC)

It became into a religion starting from Han Dynasty(~1 AC)


Because they're not: the distinction between "Religious Taoism" and "Philosophical Taoism" is generally recognized as an Orientalist[0] conception i.e. an excuse to talk about the parts they liked or could think of as Western (Philosophical) and ignore the parts they didn't like or couldn't (Religious). It's viewed as emerging from a collection of oral master-student based traditions that have always included spiritual components, such astral-project/"far walking" and mystic unity with the Dao. There wasn't a distrinction between philosophy and religion like there is today, hence why a lot of Chinese philosophy relies on concepts like Tien ("heaven", though more in a process sense) even if it seems otherwise secular/philosophical.

[0] I think you still see this mix-up today due to a lot of people reading the TTC or the Zhuangzi from Gutenberg or some other free online translation, not realizing that all those translations are from the 1800s and not a reflection of modern scholarship. For example, Laozi hasn't been considered a historical figure for a while now.


It is a typical HN behaviour to downvote you when they don't like your comment regardless of whether the comment is right or not even though you are not supposed to downvote for those reasons


It's more like a semantics issue. In Chinese there's taoism can either mean 道教 the religion or 道家 the pre-Qin school of philosophy


Or the opposite.


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