Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 2116-2120 (6-10 Feburary 2012) QC in SPAAAAAAACE! Week 3
Is it cold in here?:
Over on Tumblr, Jeph answered a question about AI therapists by saying "You'll see".
This should be good.
Welu:
I really like Dr. Case's design. She's got some jazzy hair.
Also interesting thing on Jeph's tumblr:
--- Quote --- Hannelore said that the AIs in orbit couldn’t provide useful therapy. Why aren’t there AI therapists that Hannerdad could have installed? We know AIs can empathize with humans, care about them, and might feel safer to talk to than would another human (cf. Eliza). Therapists also need skills, but if those skills can be taught to a human, why not to an AI?
You’ll see.
--- End quote ---
Edit: On quick reflection, that could just be referring to Dr. Case.
Double edit: I didn't read this thread right at all. People referring to things before me. Bleh.
LTK:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 06 Feb 2012, 09:47 ---
--- Quote from: Black Sword on 06 Feb 2012, 06:33 ---Related: I forget this part of my Space Lessons, but regardless of centripetal gravity, is it still a requirement to work out extensively to avoid significant body mass decay?
--- End quote ---
Well, that's true on Earth, so presumably it would be true under spin-simulated pseudogravity.
--- End quote ---
Depends on your definition of 'extensively'. If you're lying on your bed in a vegetative state, your muscles will probably atrophy just as fast on earth as in space, but those aren't normal operating conditions. Real gravity and pseudogravity are both sufficient to provide the opposing force that's necessary to maintain muscle strength and bone density. That's the real problem of zero gravity; your muscles and supportive tissues no longer have any work to do, so they downscale themselves to compensate. That has no chance of happening on earth, even if you never leave your house. But on a spinning space station, your heart and other muscles still have to work against the centrifugal force, so their integrity is maintained.
I still find it interesting that our muscles did not adapt to always work most efficiently at 1g, but that they adapt to changing circumstances, even though these particular circumstances haven't changed since our ancestral lungfish crawled out of the sea. It probably has to do with the overarching mechanism of muscles and bones growing in response to stress, in the same way lifting weights makes your biceps bigger, but it's still hard to believe that a colony of humans would easily adapt to a planet with 2g or 0,5g.
jwhouk:
By the way - I think we might have a general idea as to when Hanners left the station - about seven to eight years prior to today's comic.
It was her birthday way back during the Sven/Faye arc, and we'd have to assume she'd be around the gang for at least six-eight months. She stopped calling her dad "Science Daddy" at age 17, assumably when she left the station to go to school. (We never did get a college background for her - think she might have gotten an honorary degree or two from some colleges in the NE just because of who her dad was?) That's a gap of about five and a half years; if we assume that it's been a couple of years (at most) since Faye and Sven broke it off, that would mean Hannelore's been on Terra Firma for about seven and a half years (or so).
Near Lurker:
I figured this was the birthday immediately after her previous birthday. Time in this strip moves extremely slowly - I pretty much shat bricks when I realized this was Hannelore's second birthday in the strip.
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