Astropaleonerdery

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

Sauropod watercolour

This species of rodent, much like its freshwater cousin, builds complex wooden structures, creating artificial reefs to farm fish and seaweed. Unlike their relatives, though, their supply of wood is limited. While most rely on driftwood or tear down human docks, some populations have opted to construct intricate lures, possibly to attract human attention and provoke shipwrecks. This brings in a new source of materials to grow their ever-larger barriers.

Mercury-Redstone 3 (Mercury Spacecraft No. 7/MR-7) Freedom 7 on Launch Complex 5, during prelaunch activities.

Date: April 21, 1961

All that's left for me to climb To the heavens is the chasm of the night And a matter of time

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

Data is always trying to mimic humanity and learn, but often he’s hampered by his programming. People fall asleep at his poem recital, don’t enjoy his music or paintings, and even playing Sherlock became boring… all because he kept defaulting to an algorithmic perfection. Both his poems and much were technically flawless, but they had no soul. His paintings could only imitate other artists styles. And because he memorized all the Sherlock novels he was able to instantly solve the mystery before it even began.

And that, I think, is the most significant.

And I also think that’s why Starfleet folks are realistic about the holo deck, too. It’s there to govern experiences during long deep space exploration so that you can get a hit of not being confined to a ship, but it can’t replace real life. They are taught boundaries and limitations of everything.

Because in that episode Worf asks the computer to generate a table with one side lower than the other.

And it goes from looking like this:

To looking like THIS:

From astronautix.com:

Frisbee, Walter: American phantom cosmonaut. Mysterious tenth member of second NASA astronaut group. The fearless Frisbee was in fact a joke on the NASA press corps created by astronauts Lovell and Conrad.

When the second group of astronauts began training, reporters overheard them discussing the exploits of the tenth member of their team, Walter Frisbee. Snatches of conversation between astronaut trainees James Lovell and Pete Conrad indicated that the talented Frisbee was being kept under wraps by NASA for mysterious reasons. He was reputed to be the son of a Romanian nobleman, and the best and most fearless test pilot that ever lived. Attempts by reporters to track down Frisbee were fruitless. Whichever astronaut they quizzed about him acknowledged his existence but said he was away at that moment undertaking some form of exotic training. Frisbee’s name began to appear in news stories when NASA stepped in and ordered Lovell to cut it out - he and the other astronauts were just having a little fun at the expense of the press….