Overlooked elephant

Idea from this post by Eliezer Yudkowsky, from the Sequences which I’m currently flicking through in slightly disorderly fashion.

why?

(See original post for context, click image for larger version.)

For myself, the usual curiosity-stopper is not so much “somebody else already knows”, as “somebody else already knows, and it involves hardcore mathematics”…

EDIT: I work in scientific research, and I recently solved a problem which I don’t think anyone’s solved before. It took me ages and the principal motivation was to prove a BIG IMPORTANT THEOREM.  After solving the problem, I found said theorem had been proven before I was born. D’oh. If I’d known the BIG IMPORTANT THEOREM had been proven, I don’t think I’d have bothered proving it; but I didn’t know, and my new proof has generated an interesting research project.

(But there’s an additional wrinkle here. In science there is a strong drive to find new stuff, as this is how science advances. The incentives –  status, grants, job security – depend on it, and no scientist likes the prospect of looking for new stuff and failing to find it… or of finding it, and then learning that, actually, this green elephant has been explained already, and (from the point of view of your job) you’ve been wasting your time. “Have the poets left in the garment a place for a patch, to be patched by me?” asked Antarah ibn Shaddad, speaking for many a researcher keeping a keen eye out for Interesting Problems accessible to their skill level.)

(Hello, Bonjour, grüß Gott, Здравствуйте etc. to all the peeps visiting from LW! This is primarily a sketch-blog; feel free to click around but I’m afraid there’s little cognitively-engaging fare here.)

Questing

Pencilled while taking notes in a lecture by Rod Bartlett, of Coupled Cluster fame. (I should go to more scientific lectures, I get more art done.) Inspired by a minotaur character (my first win!) in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Wolfwood

I was sketching a face and it started looking slightly like Wolfwood from Trigun, so I went with it.

Apropos of which, I recently saw a comment on a Trigun AMV at youtube by someone who said that Wolfwood made him “proud to be a Christian”, which is a strange comment. Wolfwood is admittedly a character of great awesomeness, and he’s clearly a Christian (he calls himself a priest, prays once, and belongs to an order of assassins who carry weapons shaped like giant crosses). But even if it’s reasonable to take pride based on a fictional character, Wolfwood is not presented as anything remotely resembling a role model (I don’t think even the hero is supposed to be a role model, actually) – he’s someone to sympathise with but not emulate. Plus, an actual Christian (rather than an innocently garbled manga idea of a Christian) should probably not be in the habit of carrying around a giant cross with built-in machine gun and rocket launcher, that’s treading dubious territory.

…although there’s a great piece of dialogue when someone tries lifting his cross:

“It’s so heavy!”
“That, my friend, is because it’s so full of mercy.”

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(AMV in question here, although anyone who hasn’t watched Trigun should not watch it, as (a) you wouldn’t know what it’s about, (b) spoilers, (c) you’d be wasting time you could be spending watching Trigun instead.)

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I planned to have a regular update schedule but… didn’t. Rather than promise to anyone that’s reading (or to myself) to do better from now on, I’m trying to make up the backlog with backdated posts. At two months’ worth of weekly posts missing this may take a while, but whatevs.

Burning One

(“Seraph”. one of the classes of angel, literally means “burning one” in Hebrew. I believe the same word was used for snakes, due to the burning sting of their poison, leading some to speculate that the Biblical Seraphim were originally pictured as winged, fiery serpents, i.e. dragons.)