Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 202 posts

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#121

Post by threads2 »

bmitc wrote: post #120
bruce511 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..." Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would fin…

It is not always possible to qualify every single word, especially in an Internet forum comment, so I might argue that the trap lies with the reader. As when one encompasses a generality, one should consider that it rarely applies to the totality of the categorical word. While the anecdote presented in the article involves a presumably particular sect of Judaism, I don't think one would be hard pressed to find simila…

I like something Schopenhauer said about a lot of errors coming from either defining a concept too generally or too specifically. Something like that

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#122

Post by stevula »

angst_ridden wrote: post #98
prpl wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without going into religion, it’s also mildly interesting for the defining veganism.

I've been in discussions with vegans over the 9.1x10^2 to 1.3x10^8 bacteria in the average indoor m^3 of air.

I guess I don’t see the relevance. Vegans eat other life forms like plants and fungi (it’s unavoidable). Their reservations are specifically about animals. Why would bacteria be an issue?

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#123

Post by enchiridion »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #119
bruce511 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. You fall into a trap of using a single English word to cover a multitude of different world-views. It would be as useful to say that the quote "... how people present..." Within the broad category of "religion" you have thousands of different groups, most of which would fin…

You have AFAICS: religious atheist agnostic Is it even possible to be a religious atheist I wonder

For sure it is. Scientism is an example. It even has creation myths, the stories of the Big Bang and Copernicus being two examples.

This idea is developed in depth by Bishop Robert Barron. Very interesting to consider.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#124

Post by TchoBeer »

echelon wrote: post #110
angst_ridden wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in discussions with vegans over the 9.1x10^2 to 1.3x10^8 bacteria in the average indoor m^3 of air.

Or the bacteria and fungi constantly living and dying within us. The self cells we continually turn over and instruct to die. The second order predation that balances the ecosystem that sustains us. Orcas that enjoy playing with their food. Lions that eat prey alive. Beautiful and terrifying. Our primate and hominid ancestors that ate the flesh of rival clans. I respect veganism and personal choices, but the world is…

That is true, but factory farming is something that we decide to do. You bring up how our ancestors were cannibals, do you also eat human meat?

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#125

Post by dang »

bmitc wrote: post #65

Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what…

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. This post is about as congenial as religious flamebait gets, but it's still that.

Admittedly the upvotes such a post gets are a bigger problem than the post itself, but there's not much we can do about those. (This post was upvoted to the top of the thread when I saw it. I've marked it off topic now.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#126

Post by TchoBeer »

bmitc wrote: post #65

Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what…

Why does that strike you as myopic? Just the opposite, if the Rabbinate decided that they've never heard of these little bugs in the water and so they don't count, that would be myopic. The fact that this is a question which was debated a bunch in the orthodox world shows a flexibility that I think is underrated in orthodoxy. Is religion incapable of fitting their model over the continuum of life, or does it continue to adapt to new information?

I'm reminded of a discussion in the talmud. A rabbi says that he heard from an Athenian scholar that there is a type of... mouse? bug? The aramaic isn't clear, some kind of little animal. Anyway, there's this creeping thing which comes to live when the sunlight hits a certain type of mud at a certain time of day. There's a whole discussion about whether these things are really "alive", vis a vis whether or not you can "kill" them on shabbat (this discussion is had elsewhere about lice, which were thought to have generated spontaneously. Jewish law has always been flexible and adaptable and shifted along with changing understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. I don't see how this anecdote suggests any differently.

P.S. most (probably like 98% of) orthodox rabbis I have talked to permit drinking tap water even though it has little bugs in it, because they're too small to see with the human eye and thus are not forbidden to eat. If they were big enough, you would have to filter them, just like you have to check for bugs before you eat lettuce.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#127

Post by gmiller123456 »

anamexis wrote: post #87
emblaegh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the stink come from chemicals excreted by other living things eating the dead ones. So the stink is not a sign that your trunks are less full of life, just that it got new tenants.

Seems like a technicality. By that logic, all stinky things are caused by living things instead of dead things.

Maybe not ALL stinky things. But apparently humans evolved to be sensitive to, and repulsed by the the secretions of some bacteria, because the ones who weren't died pretty early.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#128

Post by _a_a_a_ »

enchiridion wrote: post #123
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have AFAICS: religious atheist agnostic Is it even possible to be a religious atheist I wonder

For sure it is. Scientism is an example. It even has creation myths, the stories of the Big Bang and Copernicus being two examples. This idea is developed in depth by Bishop Robert Barron. Very interesting to consider.

The guy is catholic, the wiki page of his doesn't mention Scientism, and you describe a belief in science, not any god. So I don't getcha I'm afraid.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#129

Post by zokier »

antongribok wrote: post #24
jebarker wrote: post #4

> But copepods typically range from about 0.2 to 1.7 millimeters in length, just large enough to magnify using conventional lenses and equipment Does that mean conventional macro camera lenses or a microscope?

If we're talking simple math on magnification: It's very easy to find macro lenses that have 5:1 magnification, meaning that an object is projected onto the sensor 5x it's size. Taking 1.7 mm and projecting that onto a Canon R5 45 MP sensor with 5x magnification gives us something that would be around 1934 pixels in length (just under 1/4th the width of the sensor that is 8192 effective pixels wide). I think you can…

> It's very easy to find macro lenses that have 5:1 magnification

That is bit of an exaggregation. Afaik there is for example exactly one 5:1 macro available on the Canon R series RF mount, and in general they are pretty rare.

Re: Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater

#130

Post by Aaronstotle »

trumbitta2 wrote: post #57

Do you think copepods know humans exist? What about us knowing higher creatures exist, and we inhabit a droplet in their oceans?

During finals week in my undergrad at Berkeley, I remember seeing the squirrels and thought, "How nice it must be to be a squirrel and not worry about human affairs."

My next thought was, "What looks at Humans in similar fashion?"

Post reply on HN