"Eventually - around 2000 - everyone understood
this, and gave up hoping some subculture could
somehow escape this dynamic."
The whole article is really about music, and carries continuous undertones relating to the mechanics of music scenes.
So why 2000 as the magic year music died? The Internet.
That's the whole answer. The internet killed music. Not just because of peer-to-peer file sharing, but so many other aspects of pre-internet music economies simply didn't make sense anymore, from composition, to production, to distribution, to consumption, all aspects of recorded music were turned inside out and flipped upside down.
Sure, performing music hadn't really changed all that much, but the controlled release of physical copies of music simply didn't work anymore, and so The New Thing wasn't permitted to steep in its own Newness, and fester and grow moldy and get weird anymore.
The transformation of distribution technologies from 1990 to 2000 was like taking a healthy adult St. Bernard, and replacing all of its internal organs with the organs of 50 kittens, and expecting it to come out healthier than before. Except the St. Bernard's brain doesn't know how to breathe with 100 kitten lungs, or pump 50 kitten hearts, or swallow food into 50 kitten stomachs and digest vital nutrients.
From a technology perspective, with music, where we are now, is like where music was in 1950. We're still figuring out the new capabilities of what can be done with this technology, the same way people back then were still figuring out amplifiers and feedback and taped distortion. In that respect 1990 is still 40 years away, culturally speaking. Longer still if more disruptive technology keeps getting introduced, and upsetting established skills.
There are no more geeks to create scenes, because geeks haven't had enough time to learn the vast depths of modern technology, to master it, and spawn new scenes.
I guess it takes some considerable imagination to create possibility ratings for impossible or unprecedented events.
If something like a hypothetical transparent force field invoked by thought, words or gestures, that can stop bullets, blades and fire in mid-air isn't actually known to be possible and might warp reality, would it warp reality more than time travel, which might be possible on paper, in certain ways, although not readily understood?
Well, fwiw, the game's mileu is historical fiction, so the system isn't intended to deal with high fantasy magical effects - just a little nudge of reality, here and there.
Ugh. How awful. Apostrophes and (full stop) dots repurposed as letters within words. But at least there aren't any accented characters or other diacritics.
Phonemes aside, why would anyone design that, and imagine it as a feature and not a bug?
dots represent pauses or glottal stops. what other symbol could be used for it? Apostrophe represent either [h] or "th" like in "thin". Again what other letter could be used?
It is only because the difference between the
rate of change in a static universe and the
rate of change in an evolutionary one is that
between zero and very nearly zero that the
creationists can continue propagating their
folly.
Well, there's still another part sneaking past the fact that biological differentiation occurs at geological time scales: We haven't been around long enough to witness and record an actual "smoking gun" event, that clearly demonstrates the emergence of a completely new plant or animal.
We're aware of things like the three-toed horse, and we know they used to exist. But that's just a small difference on an animal that still exists, and other than that whole thing with the toes, it's still pretty much the same thing. We've seen lots of animals disappear, but nothing replacing them.
Maybe insects are a ripe branch of animals that will bear some fruit, since their life cycles are so short, but otherwise, for the most part, modern theory points out that not only will none of us see a new, radically different class of creatures emerge within our own lifetimes, but not even within the projected limits of our modern civilizations and their effective capacity to record history will we be likely to observe such an event.
So, neither since the start of our recorded history, nor until after the history we do manage to record starts to disappear beyond the possibility of rediscoverable recognition by the next order of civilization which may arrise, shall a truly different creature spring forth from the free-for-all of biological propagation.
In other words, we've never actually experienced a period where a certain life form did not exist and then emerged from some other thing, and we'll probably never get a chance to see such a thing happen, not in 5 million years, and even if we do spot a new previously undiscovered animal, and it turns out to be an example of the emergence of a new and distinctly different animal, even if it makes it into the history books, and the animal is hardy enough to persist in nature, our history books won't last forever, and after we're gone, the next civilized culture (human or oherwise) might not find them, and learn to read them before they disintegrate into unrecognizable ash and dust. But we know it's there. We're sure evolution isn't just a theory.
And so too, are we faced with a scenario, whereby even if hypothetical civilized lizard people of the dinosaur era had been there to witness a new class of rodents spring forth, the records of their culture that we do find might not include that one passage. And so too, with civilized trilobite scholars, if they were there to see the original sharks and amphibians emerge, and wrote it down, we'd probably never find that chapter in the trilobite bible where they realized what they had just seen.
That's a tough idea to pitch to people, and in casual conversations at dinner parties, it's devestatingly easy to stymie people who try to explain it.
I definitely know people who fit profile one, that I do not admire, and some who fit profile two, that I don't pity. I also don't harbor strictly negative opinions or emotions regarding cold personalities, although I suppose incompetance is rarely a welcome character trait.
Come to think of it, it would seem that most of the working world is aligned toward producing profile three, wouldn't it? That doesn't really bring forth any sort of jealousy, so much as it is just depressing.
I guess there's probably always room for neutral respect and civility... which is somewhat cold... but uh... geeze, sometimes social sciences can be brutal, huh?
Wow, that video is really cool! The sliding lock-tumbler mechanism offers a really interesting amount of control over the aperture shaping the beam! Sort of like a brush in photoshop!
Well, an abstract description of processes like these always lends extra heft to what your brain will try to rationalize out of a written description. Especially with computational "decision making" people have a tendency to conjure up ghosts or perhaps a little gremlin at the heart of a nest of wires, watching a TV set, and ruminating over what to do next.
But when you stop and think about what collimation actually is, it's just a manner of focusing a projected beam, either with masking, and obstructing the path of a beam (as with x-rays which are high energey photon beams), or also possibly by bending and focusing a beam, using magnets to direct a beam of charged particles (such as positrons).
So, if working in three dimensions, you might wish to control depth of penetration, but honestly, with X-rays you'll only have so much success, so it's really about how many beams converge upon a region, and the shape they create as they cross over each other, while intersecting, when projected from different angles.
There are a number of ways to approach this strategy, of creating three dimensional shapes, by drawing cross-sections in modern 3D animation programs, like Maya and 3D Studio Max.
The easiest way is to draw a spline or a bezier curve, along one axis, then apply a "lathing" function, which duplicates the spline, rotating about the axis, and then connecting the splines at each control point on the spline/curve. Then you get a crude vase-like shape.
So, take that idea, and apply it to a light source with an articulated aperture. The aperture can create a shadow in the shape of a spline. It might strobe exposures, with small, discrete doses, effectively pixelating or rasterizing the dose with many small exposures, or continuously emit radiation while in motion.
Then, if you attach this beam source to a motorized system, that can rotate the source about an axis on a system of rails, and trigger exposures with different aperture shapes while being positioned around a target at the center of the axis of rotation, hey presto! The software-defined shape has guided the beam, using the same sort of motion control that translates coordinates to a set of motors, as has been done with stop-motion animation cameras in movies for decades!
So, it's like the reverse of a camera, and yes, radiation sources are like flash-bulbs, and you selectively cast shadows, by controlling a gate or shutter, and possibly the shape of the opening in a barrier that stands between the source of the target. (scanline, round dot, square...)
EDIT: As loarake mentions, the actual behavior of a radiation beam is not the same as light. When radiation penetrates a medium, each type of radiation may scatter, reflect, refract differently when interacting with the medium, depending on the material, if it's bone, flesh, metal dental fillings or implanted appliances or something else. Many materials may absorb the radiation and express the interaction by radiating heat, or the radiation will ionize the matter, triggering electrical interactions, and chemical decomposition and reactions. This aspect of radiation is truly the pure random factor (hence monte carlo simulations), the unknowable Schroedinger's cat in a box, but it's real and for every dosage, some radiation will ionize some matter eventually. This along with the conversion to heat is the part that kills tumors, causes burns, and exposes film.
I seriously miss low-tech phones that are actually so low-tech and dumb that the only features they boast are the most practical necessities.
The worst part about most phones of any era is that they become ruined with sinister bloatware, designed to funnel you into dark patterns of paying for garbage that burns any trust you might invest into a device, until it's a charred unregocnizable mess.
Unfortunately, even now, if they made a device that was purported to be "dumb" and no-frills, I probably wouldn't believe that the phone were as pared-down as I might wish to believe, simply because I'd be sure that the chipsets available to manufacturers might actually possess far greater power under the hood, than some simple throwback of a handset might seem to house.
Unfortunately, even now, if they made a device that was purported to be "dumb" and no-frills, I probably wouldn't believe that the phone were as pared-down as I might wish to believe, simply because I'd be sure that the chipsets available to manufacturers might actually possess far greater power under the hood, than some simple throwback of a handset might seem to house.
You'd probably get a 32-bit ARM at a few hundred MHz, with several MB of RAM, like this:
I don't know if that counts as being minimal to you, but they're certainly not putting even low-end smartphone SoCs in these. Interesting that a low-end smartphone costs roughly the same, with all the smart features, but not as much ruggedness:
So why 2000 as the magic year music died? The Internet.
That's the whole answer. The internet killed music. Not just because of peer-to-peer file sharing, but so many other aspects of pre-internet music economies simply didn't make sense anymore, from composition, to production, to distribution, to consumption, all aspects of recorded music were turned inside out and flipped upside down.
Sure, performing music hadn't really changed all that much, but the controlled release of physical copies of music simply didn't work anymore, and so The New Thing wasn't permitted to steep in its own Newness, and fester and grow moldy and get weird anymore.
The transformation of distribution technologies from 1990 to 2000 was like taking a healthy adult St. Bernard, and replacing all of its internal organs with the organs of 50 kittens, and expecting it to come out healthier than before. Except the St. Bernard's brain doesn't know how to breathe with 100 kitten lungs, or pump 50 kitten hearts, or swallow food into 50 kitten stomachs and digest vital nutrients.
From a technology perspective, with music, where we are now, is like where music was in 1950. We're still figuring out the new capabilities of what can be done with this technology, the same way people back then were still figuring out amplifiers and feedback and taped distortion. In that respect 1990 is still 40 years away, culturally speaking. Longer still if more disruptive technology keeps getting introduced, and upsetting established skills.
There are no more geeks to create scenes, because geeks haven't had enough time to learn the vast depths of modern technology, to master it, and spawn new scenes.