Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 reds8n wrote:
Meet the xenobot: world's first living, self-healing robots created from frog stem cells

The xenobots could potentially be used toward a host of tasks, according to the study, which was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a federal agency that oversees the development of technology for military use.

bound to end well eh ?

Battle Toads?

As interesting as the idea is, I don't think those things would do well inside a human body with a functioning immune system. Foreign organic tissue is priority target 1 for phagocytes.

Easy E, for tickling my nostalgia bone you get an exalt.

Grey Templar: I'm thinking that if you arm the little bastards with a spear or something, they can probably poke holes in the white blood cells. Or perhaps we could arm them with little hammers, shaped like "T"s. We could call them, "T" viruses. Even if they aren't technically viruses. But maybe they would be? Microscopic life isn't my strong suit.

They're probably closer to virus's than anything else. And we're not really even sure if virus's count as life to begin with.

But if you're making something to go into the body and help it, the last thing you'd want is for it to have to kill off the body's defenses to do its job. You really need the immune system to ignore them.

That is unless the Immune system is already compromised or damaged or in some way nullified. Which might be the very reason you'd send such things into a human body to effect repair.

Furthermore there's every chance that they might be able to trick the body's immune system or simply flood it with so many that it can't take them out. Which might put additional strain on the person ,but at the same time as these would be aiding rather than infecting the body the strain might be out-weighed by the benefits.

 Grey Templar wrote:
As interesting as the idea is, I don't think those things would do well inside a human body with a functioning immune system. Foreign organic tissue is priority target 1 for phagocytes.

While this is true, the question is would it matter. Based on what I'm reading, these are fairly good sized, multi-cellular constructs. They would have a certain amount of inherent resistance. Think less germs and more parasites.

True, they are a lot larger than human macrophages, but they'd still get attacked like crazy and the body would actively try to filter them out of the bloodstream.

You'd have to have a heavily compromised immune system for these to work, not simply an overloaded one. They'd really need to have a way for these to be ignored by the body's natural immune system before it would be useful. Afterall, you don't want a sick body to be fighting the stuff that is trying to help it. That's just going to make the treatment more likely to fail if you're inducing what would basically be an auto-immune response.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10697529/Prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-eight-hours.html

I see Deep Space 9 has been on reruns again then.

TBH not quite sure how feeling they've been dead and/or decomposing for 900 years or so will do a great deal rehabilitation wise but I'm sure it'll be great finding out !

 reds8n wrote:

Spoiler:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10697529/Prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-eight-hours.html

I see Deep Space 9 has been on reruns again then.

TBH not quite sure how feeling they've been dead and/or decomposing for 900 years or so will do a great deal rehabilitation wise but I'm sure it'll be great finding out !

This could be put to positive use. Presumably the inmate doesnt age, just feels the full passage of time.
Ok, why use this for incarceration. Prisons are not mainly about punishment but warehousing. If you don't spend time in prison after a murder or a rape, no matter how long the sentence felt on the inside you will be out walking 'alongside' your victims the next day. Ok proximity not implied here.
This doesn't add up.

However if someone has the passage of time implied, could this be used for educational purposes. You need a degree in engineering pay the fee and step into the cubicle. Come out after a couple of hours take the day off and rest up for the exam tomorrow in realtime to make sure you have learned everything the box has to teach you. Want to learn Spanish, si senor, walk in and its done.

If they 'feel' the full passage of time, they're going to come out the box crazy.

Dissociated from the people and things they knew 'long ago,' assuming they can function after spending that much subjective time alone with no real physical input.

This is an obviously bad idea that doesn't seem to take any account of how psychology works or how the human brain functions.

I'm not sure it would even work either. Part of the punishment is the loss of actual physical time. If you go in and only lose a tiny portion of "time" then that reduces the risk. At least for career criminals who repeat offend.

Plus I thought we'd already established that simply locking people up didn't actually work and that rehabilitation and education were far more powerful tools at preventing re-offending .

Yes, but think how much the penal system could save. Won't you think about the money?

Cronch wrote:
Yes, but think how much the penal system could save. Won't you think about the money?

if savings are what you are after, last i checked bullets are cheap....

no the monetary argument is a tad absurd.

It's an extraordinarily frightening road to go down. You start with artificial jail terms, then you end up making extremely long ones because people always feel they aren't long enough and the right argues that it's fine because it's not 'real' time and they still have the rest of their life to live, then you're making them harsher and harsher because, again, it's not 'real'. Before long you're throwing people in Black Mirror-esque solitary confinement for millennia or Surface Detail-esque hellscapes for eternities.

Well, yes, but they deserve it, they're Bad People. That's why they're in jail.

I've read too many reddit threads to think there won't be enough people who think "an eye for an eye" is far too lenient to push for it, should it be available.

Yeah, thats kinda stupid.

The only good thing about this is that now scientists are talking feasiblity it becomes Hard SF rather than Science Fantasy.

I still think virtual sentences are worthless because no time passes from the victims perspective. I agree that it is possibly a shortcut to psychosis and an open door to brainwashing and conditioning. Go in a criminal come out a criminal who is also an adherent to The Party.

If conscious time passes then info can be passed, I think if this has any feasibility it is best used for education. I am not thinking Matrix here sadly, because muscle memory is not transfered, so no 'I know Kung Fu', however hard data might be transfered so you could teach someone arithmetic for example, so if you forgive me, 'Battlefield Earth' got it (partly) right.

It may just increase the rate at which time is internally perceived.

The movie Dredd has a made-up drug called slo-mo that speeds perception of time, while the world slowly moves around you.

Your day to day “feels” like 1 second per second. Excitement feels like 1 second per 5 seconds. Boredom feels like 5 seconds per 1 real second.

If you are terrified of needles, but you tell your then girlfriend that you’d give blood *if* they came to your door and asked for it... and then a blood donation clinic sets up in the lobby of your dorm and there’s no way to get to your room that a clinician can’t ask you to donate...

7 minutes feels like 45 minutes. So let’s call that “absolute terror / horror” feels like 6.4ish seconds per second. That’s cruel.

 Orlanth wrote:
The only good thing about this is that now scientists are talking feasiblity it becomes Hard SF rather than Science Fantasy.

I still think virtual sentences are worthless because no time passes from the victims perspective. I agree that it is possibly a shortcut to psychosis and an open door to brainwashing and conditioning. Go in a criminal come out a criminal who is also an adherent to The Party.

If conscious time passes then info can be passed, I think if this has any feasibility it is best used for education. I am not thinking Matrix here sadly, because muscle memory is not transfered, so no 'I know Kung Fu', however hard data might be transfered so you could teach someone arithmetic for example, so if you forgive me, 'Battlefield Earth' got it (partly) right.

That could work. But you might still run into issues with psychosis. If you strap a kid into a machine for 20 minutes and teach him an 8 hour class, he's still going to go nuts from being stuck in an 8 hour class. Only difference is he's got the rest of the day to play. But wait, the reality would be he'd have to go spend another 20 minutes in another 8 hour class. Repeat 3 more times for the whole school day. So you've spent maybe 2 hours teaching the kid 40 hours worth of material, except he's literally gone crazy from the experience.

If conscious time could pass then you'd pass through both teaching and play time. So the kid would get their full day of classes and break times. The only things they'd have to leave for would be to eat and exercise.

Of course chances are such a system might well hit mental barriers in how much information you could impart in a period of time before the brain got overloaded in some manner. It would be pointless to cram hours of teaching into a person if they then had trouble recalling or even sorting the information out in their head.

We do it now, forcing kids to sit through 6-8hrs at school and then further 4-5hrs of homework, I bet you instead of 4x20min/2hr blocks people would insist on not 'wasting" time and forcing the poor kids to sit through 8 IRL hours of teaching. It makes no sense, but that never stopped anyone before.

School already runs into that issue with students getting mentally overloaded. You'd only have a worse problem if you did this.

We are just guessing here, but let us assume we hit a hard cap of 6 hours education per child per day, real time or virtual, and say that to safely upload a six hour education package requires half an hour per child.

What you have then done is condensed the education system. Kids do a half hour class per day then spend a few hours in sports and arts activities and are home at lunchtime as the afternoon schools kids come in.

Not only are you splitting the workday shift into two sections, but you only need arts and sports teachers for the full school day, the hard learning is batched one class at a time through the education machines.

For a set size of school, you could have six times the number of pupils and maintain education quality, with six classes going through the education machines in sequence. And this is just a half day. You get another set of classes in the afternoon.

So you cut the education budget footprint to 8% of what it was prior to mechanisation, plus the cost of the education machines. This would mean a good education for all in even moderate income societies.

Assuming there aren't any complications involved with using the machines, which I suspect there will be.

Me too, but all this assumes it works to begin with. These are hypotheses not promises.

2020 continues to excel


"No bedroom window? No problem. These sun simulators might just make it easier to wake up and catch z's."


.. no bedroom window.

what a time to be alive.
Buy these to prepare yourself for life in the bunker

 reds8n wrote:
2020 continues to excel


"No bedroom window? No problem. These sun simulators might just make it easier to wake up and catch z's."


.. no bedroom window.

what a time to be alive.
Buy these to prepare yourself for life in the bunker

My wife had one of those alarm clocks years ago, they're actually really good. Much more gentle than a buzzer going off, and helped a lot with her SAD.

Or if your window happens not to be facing the sunrise.

 reds8n wrote:
2020 continues to excel


"No bedroom window? No problem. These sun simulators might just make it easier to wake up and catch z's."


.. no bedroom window.

what a time to be alive.
Buy these to prepare yourself for life in the bunker

I have you know that Bunkers are quite comfortable to sleep in.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dygxzw/target-shipt-delivery-app-workers-retaliation

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Reverse tipping.