As Shown Inside, 2D Animation Kinds (flash, Puppet, Or Otherwise) Can Be As Lively & Vibrant As 3D Animations,

As shown inside, 2D animation kinds (flash, puppet, or otherwise) can be as lively & vibrant as 3D animations, sometimes more so. That said, 3D animations can still age well even if not particularly lively.

when ppl say flash animation pretty much always what i can tell they’re actually thinking of is what is referred to in animation practice as puppet animation, which i agree sucks like 90% of the time (there are a FEW shows that use it very masterfully, like homestar runner and one i’ll show later, though)

guess what? this is flash!

this is also flash!

THIS is puppet animation:

the funniest part is that most puppet animation isn’t even done in flash anymore. people use after effects instead because it has MUCH more sophisticated and useful tools meant specifically for puppet animation.

the technique can be used well, however. my little pony does it so fluidly it looks practically seamless.

homestar runner doesn’t focus nearly as much on fluidity, but instead on constructing strong, expressive key poses and making every frame really count.

puppet animation isn’t even limited to digital mediums. in fact, it’s not new at all.

the adventures of prince achmed is the world’s oldest surviving feature-length animated film - that’s right, predating snow white by over 10 years - and it was done entirely using puppet animation; black paper cutouts atop illuminated backgrounds. and it’s truly fucking breathtaking.

It'd be great for pastoralists too, especially if there's a portable version of the above alongside dogs.

Don’t Kill Wolves - Just Keep Them Away

You’re operating a farm or ranch. What do you do when wolves are killing your livestock or pet dogs? Trap them and shoot them, right? That’s what farmers and ranchers — and government agencies — have been doing for decades.

Now there are new, nonlethal alternatives. Even better, these solutions are more permanent than lethal methods. Kill a wolf, and there’s another wolf behind him, eager to attack. Keep a wolf away, and the rest of his pack will stay away too. They may even help keep other packs away.

“We don’t believe that hunting wolves on a broad scale necessarily will help mitigate livestock depredation,” says Brian Roell, wildlife biologist and wolf specialist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

“It’s not the wolf population that’s the reason for an increase in livestock depredation,” Roell says. “It is the pack of wolves at a much smaller scale. So, if you have a hunt and you don’t affect the wolves that are the ones causing the problem, you won’t change the depredation.”

The goals of Michigan’s wolf plan include minimizing conflicts with livestock and pets and looking after the state’s wolves in ways that are “science-based and socially responsible,” he adds.

A Michigan project

Brett Huntzinger is applying more effective, nonlethal techniques to prevent wolf depredation in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. And it’s working. Prior to Huntzinger’s project, most of the farms had wolf depredation issues. In FY2022, there were no confirmed depredations due to large predators.

Huntzinger is a federal Wildlife Service employee who earned a master’s degree doing wolf research with Professor Emeritus Rolf Peterson at Michigan Technological University. During 2022, he worked with 10 farmers who are raising approximately 900 livestock. He helped them install fencing, fladry — which is temporary fencing with flapping flags attached–lights, sound devices, and multi-strand electric fencing around carcass burial sites and in predator travel routes near livestock.

When he installs radios to use sound to keep wolves away, he tells his kids: “I’m setting up all-night cow disco parties.”

Every farm he has worked with presents unique challenges. “I tell my kids that sometimes it’s like the crime/murder investigation shows on TV, and we are the detectives, Huntzinger says. “You never know what you will find.”

Huntzinger uses trail cameras to monitor predators’ travel routes. “I often find there are more predators around than people think,” he says.  

Rolf Peterson, his former teacher and ongoing advisor, has high praise for Huntzinger. “Brett is extremely good at this, and he’s devoted to solving problems that wolves might pose,” says Peterson.  “He is the type of person who can easily relate to farmers and landowners, as he lives on a farm himself and has several horses.  He also has very extensive field experience from his MS thesis work at Michigan Tech, when he tracked wolves for hundreds of miles on skis to find out what they were killing in winter.”

According to Huntzinger, nonlethal wolf depredation prevention techniques are not only effective in the short run. They can have an unexpected long term benefit: turning predators themselves into livestock guards. “If you can teach a resident wolf pack to not attack livestock, they will defend that area against other wolves and predators,” Huntzinger says. “In a way, the resident packs act like guard animals for the farms inside their territory. The trick is to use the nonlethal methods to keep the individuals in the wolf pack from starting to attack livestock.” 

In 2022 Congress increased the Wildlife Service’s funding for depredation prevention to $2.5 million, up from $1.38 million in FY2020 and 2021. Michigan’s funding doubled from $60,000 in FY2021 to $120,600 in FY2022. With this additional funding, Wildlife Services in Michigan was able to stock many types of nonlethal equipment available for loan, including 1,800 yards of electrified fladry, fencing supplies, posts and solar fence chargers. The agency can also provide 100 solar-charged flashing LED lights and other types of motion- activated flood lights and alarms, as well as three solar-powered radios with deep cell batteries for use as an audio predator deterrent.

Read More

This can help save the wildlife in the long run. Keep them indoors if possible, but give them orange accessories either way

Interstellar travel could make human language evolve beyond recognition, study says

https://sciencespies.com/space/interstellar-travel-could-make-human-language-evolve-beyond-recognition-study-says/

Interstellar travel could make human language evolve beyond recognition, study says

It’s a captivating idea: build an interstellar ark, fill it with people, flora, and fauna of every kind, and set your course for a distant star! The concept is not only science fiction gold, its been the subject of many scientific studies and proposals.

By building a ship that can accommodate multiple generations of human beings (aka. a Generation Ship), humans could colonize the known Universe.

But of course, there are downsides to this imaginative proposal. During such a long voyage, multiple generations of people will be born and raised inside a closed environment. This could lead to all kinds of biological issues or mutations that we simply can’t foresee.

But according to a new study by a team of linguistics professors, there’s something else that will be subject to mutation during such a voyage – language itself!

This study, “Language Development During Interstellar Travel“, appeared in the April issue of Acta Futura, the journal of the European Space Agency’s Advanced Concepts Team.

The team consisted of Andrew McKenzie, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas; and Jeffrey Punske, an assistant professor of linguistics at Southern Illinois University.

In this study, McKenzie and Punske discuss how languages evolve over time whenever communities grow isolated from one another. This would certainly be the case in the event of a long interstellar voyage and/or as a result of interplanetary colonization.

Eventually, this could mean that the language of the colonists would be unintelligible to the people of Earth, should they meet up again later.

For those who took English at the senior or college level, the story of Caxton’s “eggys” ought to be a familiar one.

In the preface to his 1490 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (Eneydos) into Middle English, he tells a story of a group of merchants who are traveling down the Thames toward Holland. Due to poor winds, they are forced to dock in the county of Kent, just 80 kilometres (50 miles) downriver and look for something to eat:

“And one of them named Sheffield, a merchant, came into a house and asked for meat and, specifically, he asked for eggs (“eggys”). And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant got angry for he could not speak French either, but he wanted eggs and she could not understand him. And then at last another person said that he wanted ‘eyren’. Then the good woman said that she understood him well.”

This story illustrates how people in 15th century England could travel within the same country and experience a language barrier. Well, multiply that to 4.25 light-years to the nearest star system and you can begin to see how language could be a major complication when it comes to interstellar travel.

To illustrate, McKenzie and Punske use examples of different language families on Earth and how new languages emerged due to distance and time. They then extrapolated how this same process would occur over the course of 10 generations or more of interstellar/interplanetary travel.

As McKenzie explained in a UK press release:

“If you’re on this vessel for 10 generations, new concepts will emerge, new social issues will come up, and people will create ways of talking about them, and these will become the vocabulary particular to the ship. People on Earth might never know about these words, unless there’s a reason to tell them.

“And the further away you get, the less you’re going to talk to people back home. Generations pass, and there’s no one really back home to talk to. And there’s not much you want to tell them, because they’ll only find out years later, and then you’ll hear back from them years after that.”

An example they use is the case of Polynesian sailors who populated the South Pacific islands between 3,000 and 1,000 BCE.

Though the roots of these sailors are traced to Taiwan (ca. 6000 BCE) this process of expansion led to the development of entirely new cultures by the 1st millennium BCE. The Polynesian languages that emerged bore little resemblance to the ancient Austronesia language (aka. “Formosan”) of their ancestors.

Similarly, the authors cite language changes that take place within the same language community over time, using the example of “uptalk.” Also known as “High Rising Terminal,” this phenomenon involves statements ending with a rise in intonation.

While it is often mistaken for a question by those who are unfamiliar with it, the convention is actually intended to indicate politeness or inclusion.

As the authors note, “uptalk” has only been observed in the English language within the past 40 years and its origins are unclear. Nevertheless, the spread of it has been noted, particularly by members of the Baby Boomer generation that use it today, but did not in their youth.

Another issue they identify is sign language, which will require adaptation from the crew since some crewmembers will be born hearing impaired.

Without someone keeping track of changes and trying to maintain grammatical standards, linguistic divergence will be inevitable. But as they note, that might be irrelevant, since language on Earth is going to change during that same time.

“So they may well be communicating like we’d be using Latin – communicating with this version of the language nobody uses,” said McKenzie.

Last, but not least, they address what will happen when subsequent ships from Earth reach the colonized planets and meet the locals. Without some means of preparation (like communication with the colony before they reach it), new waves of immigrants will encounter a language barrier and could find themselves being discriminated against.

Because of this, they recommend that any future interplanetary or interstellar missions include linguists or people who are trained in what to expect – translation software ain’t gonna’ cut it!

They further recommend that additional studies of likely language changes aboard interstellar spacecraft be conducted, so people know what to expect in advance. Or as they conclude in their study:

“Given the certainty that these issues will arise in scenarios such as these, and the uncertainty of exactly how they will progress, we strongly suggest that any crew exhibit strong levels of metalinguistic training in addition to simply knowing the required languages. There will be need for an informed linguistic policy on board that can be maintained without referring back to Earth-based regulations.”

Just for fun, let’s see what kinds of linguistic changes could take place.

For starters, let’s assume that a generation ship does take a full ten generations to reach its destination – in this case, Proxima b. Ten more generations pass before the next ship arrives, bringing people from Earth who still speak modern English.

Using the language evolution-simulator Onset, and an English-IPA translator, we can get a small taste of how a simple English-language greeting, and a common request (if you’re in a 50s sci-fi B movie), would change over twenty generations:

“Helluhuh fret, goot tu’uh be’yat yu. Took be’ye to’o u’ul ley’eru, pley’yaz.”

As you can see “Hello friend, good to meet you. Take me to your leader, please” comes out a little different after twenty generations of separation.

How about something more complicated, but no less familiar? Here’s a famous speech that fans of space exploration and history should recognize. After twenty years of interstellar travel, here’s how that speech would sound:

“Wu’eh cho’oz to’o go to’o too Bo’od! Wu’eh cho’oz to’o go to’o too Bood id teez dey’ich udh do’oh tey’e de uttur teedgz, dot biga’ozz tey’e ar ey’ery’eh, boot biga’ozz tey’e ar hard; biga’ozz tat goal wool surve to’o olgoodiez uhd bez’hur too bezt oov uhur eluree’iaz uhd skeelz, uhd biga’ozz tat chaludi iz wuhd tat wu’e ahr wooleet to’oh igsept, wuhd wu’e ahr udu’illid to’o postbode, ohd wuhd wu’e iddet to’o wud.”

Can you guess what speech that is? Keep in mind, this is just a basic simulation of how the English language might change for a group of colonists, never mind people here on Earth.

And when you take time to consider all of the spoken language and dialects spoke today, and that any combination of these will be brought with the colonists to the stars, you can see how confounding it all could be!

There is a reason why the myth of the Tower of Babel remains embedded in our collective unconscious. Language barriers have always been a hurdle for human interaction, especially where long stretches of time and space are concerned.

So if humanity plans to “go interstellar” (or interplanetary), we’ll be taking that hurdle to a whole new level!

In the meantime, you can check out several other articles we’ve done on the subject of generations ships, how big they would have to be, and the minimum number of crew they would need.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

#Space

Don't forget medical rights for trans people are human rights.

Transphobes terfs and radfems deactivate and kiss my ass challenge

Patrick Nunn, from "The stories of oral societies aren't "myths"; they're records", pub. Aeon