Converting text into realistic video

When I was watching the documentary series Life On Our Planet, I was struck by how realistic the CGI was. The prehistoric animals wandering through nature seemed as if they were being actually filmed, with both them and background details finely portrayed. I wondered how much time and effort had gone into getting it to look like that.

Life on Our Planet takes advantage of modern CGI and photography techniques that mean film shot in natural habitats, footage of animals that are real but have been transferred to a studio and sequences conjured from scratch on a computer are nearly indistinguishable. Some of the extinct land-based animals digitally brought back to life look a little like they’re hovering across the ground as they walk, and there are a few scenes where implausible numbers of dinosaurs have gathered on the same landscape for a nice photo, but we largely move smoothly between then and now.

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The Raelian cult

In 1974, a 28-year old Frenchman Claude Vorilhon said that while on a hike by himself in a remote area, an alien spaceship landed near him and an extraterrestrial being emerged from it and conversed with him. The aliens were like us physically but much more advanced technologically and were called the Elohim. On another occasion, they took him to their home planet which he said was idyllic and that he was able to mingle with other prophets like Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and Muhammad. He said that the Elohim were wonderful people and had mastered DNA technology and used that to create all the living things on Earth. They appointed Vorilhon as their ambassador on Earth and gave him the name Rael. They told him to prepare the people on Earth for when they would return and reveal themselves to everyone.

I wrote about this weird story in my book The Great Paradox of Science (p.191-193).

Raelians argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution and descent with modification (using the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection) is wrong because life on Earth is too complex to have evolved that way and must have been designed. This same argument is also advanced by theists but for Raelians their designer is not a god. Instead it is a race of extraterrestrials. According to Raelians, on a distant planet there live a highly advanced alien community called the Elohim that long ago had reached an advanced stage of scientific and technical knowledge and developed powerful biological engineering techniques that enabled them to make living cells and to tinker and modify them. They were naturally fearful about letting loose these experimental organisms into their own environment because of the harm they could do, so they looked for a planet that they could use as a laboratory to field test their genetic engineering, to create a home for all their creations so that they could safely see what worked and what didn’t. They chose Earth to use as their vast laboratory. They took the then lifeless planet and set about building life on it. Starting with simple cells, they proceeded to create seeds, grasses and other vegetation and progressed to plankton, small fish, then larger fish, then dinosaurs, sea and land creatures, herbivores and carnivores before they tackled the big project, creating beings like themselves. Thus came homo sapiens. This, according to Raelians, is how the Earth became populated with all the life forms we see around us.

Most people, if they had heard of the Raelian mythology at all, did not take this fanciful scenario seriously but treated it as good, clean, fun.

But not everyone laughed. Vorilhon was able to get quite a bit of media attention for this fanciful tale and and while some interlocutors expressed skepticism, enough viewers were attracted by this bizarre story to join up with Vorilhon and set up a commune, calling themselves Raelians. The cult bought a large piece of land that they called Eden that had a large house with a swimming pool.
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Review: Life On Our Planet (2023)

This new documentary being shown on Netflix consists of eight parts, each about 50 minutes long. It tells the story of the evolution of life, starting with the emergence of the very first cell around 3.8 billion years ago and going through various cycles of flourishing and mass extinctions until we got to where we are today. The series is narrated by the Morgan Freeman who seems to have become the go-to person when you need someone to ooze gravitas and convey authority. I felt that he was too unrelentingly solemn and portentous and could have lightened up the Voice of God tone from time to time.

The documentary describes the five major mass extinctions that have occurred.
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Leapfrogging technology

With rapid advances in wireless technology and mobile devices, we are seeing an interesting development in which some developing countries are moving faster than the developed ones. This is because in the developed world, there exist legacy systems of hardwired connectivity that hinders the adoption of the more flexible wireless systems. Hence many parts of the world that lagged behind in building the hardwired infrastructure because of the cost are bypassing that stage and leapfrogging into the newer, cheaper, and more flexible wireless forms.

For example, I went on a visit to Sri Lanka some time ago, before the use of mobile phones became widespread in the US. I was amazed to see that they were ubiquitous in that country, with so many people of lower socio-economic backgrounds, including street vendors, drivers of the three-wheeler taxis, and others all having cell phones. This was because landline phones were very hard to get and expensive and thus available to only a select few such as businesses and well-to-do people, so when mobile phone technology became available, those who had been shut out of having phones seized on the opportunity because they could easily get one. It is the same with electricity. Many rural parts of the world are going straight to solar-powered electricity generation because the cost of running power grids from generating stations to remote areas is so prohibitive.
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I see doppelgangers

A doppelganger is what we call someone who looks a lot like someone else, although the dictionary says it can also refer to someone with the same name.

I have noticed that I see doppelgangers everywhere. There are many people whom I meet who strike me as having a strong resemblance to someone else I know or, more likely, to a public figure whose image frequently appears in the media. It seems to be a personal quirk since other people don’t seem to see the resemblances that I see. When I am watching TV with friends and family and I say that someone on the screen looks like someone else whom we both know, very often they cannot see the resemblance at all.

The funny thing is that even though I often see doppelgangers of other people, I have never seen a doppelganger of myself. Perhaps we are reluctant to give up the idea that we are so distinctive that there is no one else who could be possibly like us. This may also explain why, when I tell someone that their looks remind me of someone well-known, they are always surprised and because they sometimes do not view it as a compliment, I have stopped telling people this.

Film review: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)

A recent post of mine discussed how the airline manufacturing company Boeing, despite having had a well-earned reputation for producing quality safe aircraft, suddenly in 2018 and 2019 had two crashes within five months of its new 737 Max planes that resulted in everyone on board being killed. The subsequent inquiry into what happened revealed that Boeing had been in decline for some time, especially after the merger with defense contractor McDonaldMcDonnell Douglas, when the shoddy practices of defense contractors and the drive for company profits to boost shareholder value and executive compensation became the main focus, as a 2019 article by Andrew Cockburn revealed that I linked to.

In a comment to that post, Sunday Afternoon pointed me to this documentary that looked at the results of the subsequent inquiry into what went wrong. What it reveals is infuriating about how Boeing executives ignored all warning signs that they were putting a dangerous plane into circulation and not giving pilots the training they needed to deal with its new features.
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Banning football for young children

I have been highlighting for some time the danger of brain injury that is posed by American football, evidence for which keeps increasing. My preference would be for schools and universities to not offer football as an extracurricular activity. If adults choose to risk their long-term brain health by playing football, we cannot stop them, anymore than we can stop them from doing other dangerous things. But there is no reason why educational institutions should be encouraging it.

I really had no hope that my proposal would go anywhere in this football-crazy country (see the extent of fan devotion in this article) but I was pleased to learn that there have been efforts in some state legislatures to pass laws that ban children under 12 years of age from playing it, although none have passed it. California is the latest to try and fail.
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The benefits and risks of DNA testing of ancestry

I know many people who have taken advantage of DNA testing to find out information about their ancestry. I have not been tempted to do so because I am not interested in what percentage of my ancestry comes from various parts of the globe. Since I grew up in an island where my known ancestors also lived, I suspect that one would have o go back quite far to find traces of ancestors from other parts of the world. Even then, and even if there are surprises, I am not sure what I would do with that information. But I can understand why it might appeal to some in the US where people come from all over the world and have ancestors who were fairly recent arrivals, say within the last 200 years, and seem to have great curiosity about their ancestry. Thus they might find interesting tidbits.
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Covid-19 cases are on the rise again

Covid cases are on the rise again in the US, fueled by a new variant known as JN.1. Since many people now test at home, health officials are using wastewater to get measures of its prevalence.

The variant is linked to about 60% of new cases, according to CDC data. A member of the omicron family, JN.1 is descended from the BA.2.86 variant. Its most notable new mutation changes the spike protein that latches onto cells, enhancing its ability to evade our immunity. But even if JN.1 is more skilled at dodging antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations, it is not entirely resistant to them.

A recent study of disease spread found that length of exposure was the biggest factor in transmission. A team led by University of Oxford researchers found that 82% of cases were acquired from exposures that lasted longer than one hour.

Despite COVID’s omnipresence, the chance of hospitalization and death is unmistakably lower than in previous years. The number of people in California hospitals with COVID grew to about 2,000 by the end of December, half of last winter’s peak, and just a tenth of the record high.

But the nebulous threat of developing what is known as long COVID remains, and millions across the United States have already experienced it.

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The decline of Boeing

Problems keep mounting for the Boeing aircraft company. In 2019, there were two crashes in quick succession of the new Boeing 737 Max aircraft that killed 346 people and resulted in the entire fleet of that model being grounded from March 2019 to November 2020 for investigations and to fix the problem.

Investigations faulted a Boeing cover-up of a defect and lapses in the FAA’s certification of the aircraft for flight. The accidents and grounding cost Boeing an estimated $20 billion in fines, compensation and legal fees as of 2020, with indirect losses of more than $60 billion from 1,200 cancelled orders. In 2021, Boeing also paid US$2.5 billion in penalties and compensation to settle the DOJ’s fraud conspiracy case against the company. Further investigations also revealed that the FAA and Boeing had colluded on recertification test flights, attempted to cover up important information and that the FAA had retaliated against whistleblowers.

Then last week, a panel of the fuselage ripped out of a brand new 737 Max plane operated by Alaskan Airways just after it took off and was ascending to cruising altitude. Fortunately there were no casualties and the plane landed safely but the fleet was grounded again to see what might be the problem.
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