In my humble opinion it's not that bright to think of animals as an utilitarian resource for the human race to plunder, or to consider their monetary value as any sort of a yardstick.
Certainly if we hold these kind of ethics we've got no excuses if an advanced alien race wants to use us in their medical experiments.
In the end, all non-human testing of potential treatments are meant to be fail-fast/fail-cheap. In terms of fail-fast, the timeline for seeing "lifetime" effects of a drug is far shorter in a rodent than in a human. In terms of fail-cheap, the ethical and monetary cost of a rodent suffering or dying due to unwanted effects of a drug candidate is judged to be lower than similar suffering in a human.
I do agree that lab animals aren't a resource in themselves – they're just the currently "next best" model to test in before trying a drug out in humans. In fact, mice are actually quite expensive in terms of time and money – custom-genotype mice can cost hundreds of dollars each, and that's just the up-front purchase price. The overhead of maintaining a mouse line is also quite high, with a huge loss incurred for accidental death or euthanization before they've been used as a model. When many research facilities were first shut down due to COVID lockdown this year, I heard that many labs at my university had to euthanize all their mice as they wouldn't be able to care for them. This represents a loss of months of research time and possibly thousands to tens of thousands of research dollars.
Another thing to consider is that many drug candidates that make it to the animal testing stage don't succeed with safety and/or efficacy testing. According to the FDA, 92% of pre-clinical animal tests actually fail to predict drug effectiveness in humans. This highlights a pressing need for other fail-fast/fail-cheap methods that should precede animal testing, like cell culture methods that could be used as a pre-animal screen.
>the ethical and monetary cost of a rodent suffering or dying due to unwanted effects of a drug candidate is judged to be lower than similar suffering in a human.
Thank you for the insightful comment, I'll cite the part that is relevant, since my (very serious) point was indeed that by this logic a more "advanced" being than us would have (by our own morals) the right to conduct medical experiments on us humans, because we are capable of feeling less pain.
>Certainly if we hold these kind of ethics we've got no excuses if an advanced alien race wants to use us in their medical experiments.
If an advanced alien wants to use us in experiments, I doubt they'd care much about what we say on the matter. And for all we know, the aliens might come from a predator background and only consider vicious species as true equals.
Just to drop you down a peg, I can invent a sci-fi scenario in which my point is made too: An advanced race views how we treat animals beneath us and decide to reciprocate as we are as far beneath them as mice are to us.
In addition to affirming what I want by repetition, I try to generate logical ammunition for an argument: to think in depth how and why something is bad for me.
It's very interesting how just repeating something makes it more "real".
I'm really starting to think that the physical body (which contains the animal mind) is really just an advanced self-learning AI that improves itself by pattern recognition. And of course our consciousness (the self aware part) is what can steer this AI more precisely.
It's almost like a stubborn mule (your physical avatar) and a rider (your self aware consciousness).
The mule just wants instant gratification, while the rider wants to get up the mountain. So you have to work with the mule, by providing instant gratification that gets you both up the mountain.
I'm not sure if you've read much about neural plasticity - where behaviours get programmed into the brain like a trail path. The more the trail gets walked on (repetition), the deeper and more permanent it becomes.
But I don't think the animal mind understands logic that well, so you can program it through repetition, hence making it more "real".
Sorry for my hazy morning scribbles. I meant real as in how this property often is employed to mold our reality or behavior. Indeed the information has more copies - or links (as a better analogy for brain structure). I should have made it more clear that I don't use repetition to "program myself" or change habits, but to affirm thought. I am familiar with the concept since it's actively in use everywhere from religious mantras to marketing.
Generally life can be seen as a copy mechanism for DNA. The logic of it is (drumroll) to make more copies. I'm not sure about artificiality, but mentioning that reminds me that we are already capable of simulating neural nets that very much correspond to some (simple) real organisms.
In any case, I agree that our brain is structured over time and old "animal" areas of the brain appear sometime to have a firm hold over the cortex . Deeply ingrained habits have indeed 'deep pathways', and of course they're not only localized single neurons that can be flip-flopped.
Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the brain structurally change, or rather to correspond to thought. The software/hardware analogy is useful but I want to add thar the human brain is really not just a programmable computer, but much more.
Anyone reading or creating PDFs to begin with should ask why even bother with such a static and outdated format that was made for when it was common to print out documents on paper to read them.
I'm not sure what the alternative is supposed to be. ePub is reflowable, fine, but it absolutely chokes on placing images. At least with PDF's, I get the book in a form that was designed by a human being to be read by a human being.
He's talking about it from the perspective of a user of an ebook reading app. He might not know what the problem is. The point is he shouldn't have to know or care what the technical issue is. He's trying to read a paper and when he reads an epub version it usually looks like shit.
This is a usability issue. It might be possible to make properly formatted epubs. However, from his experience most authors aren't making properly formatted epubs, so using epub isn't an option for him.
I've experienced the same quality issue with Epubs. It has been probably 5 years since I've tried reading one, so maybe they have gotten better. Can you give an example of a freely available Epub with proper image placement?
I think part of the issue is that people subconsciously expect ebooks to look like they would expect print books to look. That's not all nostalgia. One of the reasons print books are formatted the way they are is because over centuries of tweaking designs people figured out a near optimal way to present a combination of images and text. You could create print books that mimic the look of the average reflowed EPUB text, but it would look terrible because it doesn't benefit from having an intelligently designed layout.
> Can you give an example of a freely available Epub with proper image placement?
My telepathy isn't so good today, so I'm still not getting the signal on what ‘proper’ means here, and thus the example isn't coming. Maybe tomorrow, I guess, if the chakras clean up or something.
Functional and aesthetically pleasing? It's one of those "you'll know it when you see it" things, but grab any decently typeset book or paper.
The illustrations, diagrams, and tables are the right size and shape to ensure the details are legible, without wasting a ton of space. They are placed at pertinent locations in the text, usually near the first or major mention of related topic. There's a nice boundary between the text and illustration, so you can tell which is which (again, without wasting a ton of space). If there are multiple illustrations, they're laid out in a sensible way so that one or two lines of text don't appear--and get lost--between them.
I was hoping to see an example that is a problem for HTML. What you list, I see on most decent websites—and these features depend on the author and designer's sense, not on the possibilities of PDF. In fact, I encounter more issues when people are trying to be too clever, e.g. by floating images to sides; and no issues when images are kept like paragraphs of text, in the main flow—the one which is reformatted to the screens of different devices.
The most difficult of your criteria is ‘the right size’, mostly because of varying screen dimensions and viewing distances. It's not a problem on desktop, though, and having this issue on a phone is possible only because HTML is reflowable to the screen size in the first place. Moreover, HTML can do things that are verboten and unthinkable in PDF: having an individual image zoomed in and panned without the rest of the page moving away (most sites stop at screen-size ‘lightboxes’ so far, but I'm thinking of slapping together an extension that would instead do the full zoom-around thing on any page).
Overall, it sounds like the same old tradeoff of whether you want to do glamour-magazine-style fancy hijinks with your images, or you want to be able to read the documents on smaller screens and devices. And I know which one I choose.
As an engineer, I am totally willing to believe that the EPub format itself is capable of producing gorgeous, reflowable documents that would knock Edward Tufte's socks off with their design. As a reader though, I've also been disappointed. I don't really care that a book could have been authored better. I want nicely rendered math and I don't want random
line brea
ks
and other ug-li-ness that makes me squint and scroll.
One reliable way to avoid that is to just get a PDF instead. This may be a historical accident. The PDF formatting is probably closer to the print layout, which is most publishers' core competency. Maybe the tools are better, or the layout staff are just better trained on them. Maybe it's the reader, rather than the document. Regardless, I'm going to be reading it on something paper-shaped (and often, sized) so it's barely even a tradeoff.
I'm thinking technically because I want PDF out and HTML/epub in. If authors or publishers have trouble with producing HTML/epub, I'd like to hear about that too. Ironically, when I had surprises with amateur-made epubs of e.g. SICP, alternative releases in actual HTML were better.
(Btw, I'm told that PDFs of Tufte suck and the only way to read him is on paper.)
> I'm going to be reading it on something paper-shaped (and often, sized) so it's barely even a tradeoff
Just as I wrote at the beginning of the thread: “buy a special device to read this format”.
You're clearly either not interested in or not capable of taking part in a conversation where you aren't needlessly condescending so tomorrow you can save yourself the effort.
I read a fuckton of papers and non-fiction literature with images. ePub simply isn't useable in these cases. If I'm reading something with no images or graphs or anything, then fine. I'll use ePub, otherwise, no.
It does, actually. No ePub I've seen places the images in between text in a satisfying way. PDF's are designed in a certain layout to account for images and keep that design no matter what I'm viewing it on.
They can waste a couple of minutes wondering that. Then they can get on with reading the document in the form in which it’s available or creating a document in the form mandated by the publisher or editor.
If it's financial rock bottom as in that you need to make ends meet, to sustain yourself and your family, it's mostly the environment that dictates what can be done. If the situation seems absolute, as in that no suitable jobs are available, securing land and growing food yourself etc. can go a long way.
Emotional rock bottom: probably goes in hand with the former. Anyway, don't blame yourself. I dunno who made the call and on what grounds they made it. That kind of stuff eats you, especially if you don't know.
In any case I urge you to keep going and wish you all the best. Much to wonder, and live for.
Beside the heavy-ness, I've found the site unusable with mobile browsers because it constantly nags you in various different ways to "try out" their app.
Indeed configuring Wine to run something can involve a lot from installing different depedencies to .dll overrides. Different configs for different applications are also a bit painful.
While this is about the best size for a phone, I want to point out that making a device for the user and maximizing corporate profit seem to be incompatible goals.
Smartphones are no exception in this - the vendors are mostly interested in making not-the-best phone that'll only last a couple of years so that they can then sell you another one and profit.
Certainly if we hold these kind of ethics we've got no excuses if an advanced alien race wants to use us in their medical experiments.