As a member of a prominent Transylvanian family, I am appalled, and profoundly offended, by the idea of someone even as much as suspecting Peter Thiel could be a vampire. He might be an evil bloodsucking parasite, but he lacks the sophistication mortals have come to associate with vampires over the centuries. It's shocking, really, that some people might confuse him with one.
Why vampires live forever
121–130 of 193 posts
Re: Why vampires live forever
#122Oh there are vampires. They are very old. But they are mostly illusions of light. Once the veil is removed the disappointment of hell sets in. Smoke, mirrors, DNA, sound.
The French people didn't invest the most elaborate head chopping off machine for just spectacle…
Re: Why vampires live forever
#123Hope the author has some garlic silverware lying around after such a revealing article
I realize now that I might be in trouble. Thanks everyone
I am deeply offended by someone associating Thiel with vampires. That idea is completely absurd. Vampires are famous for being handsome, interesting, elegant, well educated, and having impeccable taste for fashion. Thiel has none of these traits.
Re: Why vampires live forever
#124Reasonable hypothesis. Supported by data. Seems legit
Re: Why vampires live forever
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think this [ed:periodical dilution] makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever. You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong. It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
as someone that donates plasma twice weekly I wonder what health effects of removing and filtering the blood regularly has if accumulation of byproducts is a major issue
I believe research has shown that blood and plasma donors have mild positive benefits.
Re: Why vampires live forever
#126Incredibly sad to lear that Peter Thiel owns so much land in one of the earth’s most beautiful places.
If I was a kiwi I would be livid at the government allowing this purchase to go through.
Re: Why vampires live forever
#127The novels Blindsight & Echopraxis by Peter Watts have a nice vampire sub-plot... basically his world has vampires which have been revived from the fossil record. They are posited to have gone extinct in recent times, but before then were human's key predator, keeping our populations strongly in check and then having to hibernate for decades to allow the breeding to provide new meat! He's super interested in brain di…
I can't believe I haven't seen this yet: https://blindsight.space/memories/
It never occurred to me to see if there was a film!
Mind you even more amazing I was on youtube yesterday and a short film showing the first chapter of the brand new book (published really recently) that I was reading popped up.
Now I see that there is not only that film (in the DUST series) but also a miniseries someone has made...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=antimemetics+di...
Re: Why vampires live forever
#128The novels Blindsight & Echopraxis by Peter Watts have a nice vampire sub-plot... basically his world has vampires which have been revived from the fossil record. They are posited to have gone extinct in recent times, but before then were human's key predator, keeping our populations strongly in check and then having to hibernate for decades to allow the breeding to provide new meat! He's super interested in brain di…
I have not read Echopraxis yet, but I thoroughly enjoyed Blindsight. Some very thought-provoking concepts in that book. The idea that vampires needed to take “anti-Euclideans” and the way the ship was constructed to avoid generating right angles were some great details.
Just a heads up, don't go in to Echopraxia expecting it to feel like Blindsight. When I first read it, I was actually pretty disappointed overall, and a few of my friends had similar reactions.
Over a couple of years a few re-reads, though, I've come to enjoy it perhaps even more that Blindsight, but in a completely different way. It fills out a lot of the posits opened in the first novel, without coming to specific conclusions, but it gives you a lot to think about.
Re: Why vampires live forever
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider some writing contemporary to Rockefeller (there is a section on cards): https://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/social.amusements.willis.... Consider that Titan was written maybe 100 years removed from the events and you're reading a secondhand telling of it from a blog. Maybe there is more context in the book if you're really curious, or maybe the context was lost from Rockefeller's time to the book, or from the…
> Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God? My favorite example of this is the string of fishing line around Manhattan. https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
The difference is that it is an explicit belief of most jewish groups that God put these "clever" gimmicks into the rules on purpose, God wants you to look for them and be rewarded for looking for them, and God thinks the way jewish people debate about rules is awesome, and that "clever" workarounds are just the best.
Contrast this with my Catholic tradition which insists that if I get cheeky with God I should expect to be slapped back down. Jesus seems nifty though, so it's a tradeoff.
Also, I'm lying. Catholics had no problems playing dumb games with "The rules" to eat beavers when they weren't supposed to eat "meat" and also fish aren't "meat" to this day. We're fun like that.
Re: Why vampires live forever
#130Hard to tell if it's a sarcasm or not.