What's an obelisk, anyway? | Hacker News Reader

What's an obelisk, anyway?

science.org

190 pointsherodotus45 comments

If this turns out to be true, it's one of the most exciting basic biology findings in years. To discover a new type of organism, which seems to infect humans, or at least infects things that infect humans -- it's just amazing. How many mysterious diseases are caused by these things?

If you like that, then you will love gypsy transposons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTR_retrotransposon

Every time I read about genetics I wonder "How can this work?! Why don't we have cancer all the time?". Then I remember we do have cancer all the time, our immune system is just pretty good at catching it before it becomes an issue. Then I stop thinking about the complexity horror that is biology and look at something simple, like a modern CPU.

To be fair, both of your examples are incredibly complex systems of relatively simple components.

One just has the added bonus of throwing our mortality back in our faces, so the needed distraction is understandable.

Where are the TEM images of the proposed structures?

Considering it's predicted shape is that of obelisk ("rod") one is left to imagine that this finding has only metagenomics behind it.

Not the author of this paper but am current PhD student focused on viroid discovery. There's no TEM but there are good methods such as RNAfold [0] for predicting their structures. In the case of rod-shaped RNAs, the prediction methods are quite good since it basically comes down to looking for substrings of reverse complement sequences within the circular RNA.

[0]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1748-7188-6-26

The actual item is required to understand where it occurs and if these sequences have other explanations.

The big question in my head is whether they are capable of causing disease. Sounds like a fascinating area of research regardless of the terrifying sublime.

Alternately, is their absence/imbalance a cause of disease. Are they simply part of the "biome"?

Yep, that's a great point. The reason I would assume disease-causing is due to their comparisons to viroids which cause disease in plants.

sounds pretty believable imo

we would likely have the same kind of complicated relationship with obelisks that we have with gut microbiomes, and an ingestion of a ~1kb piece of rna into your stomach would be a pretty simple pro-biotic-like fix to gut-biome related problem and the life changes that can be made by altering it

other than that hep d example it looks like they don't pose too much of a direct threat to us, they're probably not complex enough to.

super interesting find

[stub for offtopicness]

I honestly thought this was going to be a discussion of the Washington Monument.

It's a big French native from a tribe opposing the rule of Julius Caesar of course

Celt. Franks came later from germany

Are Gaul and Celt the same? In any case, he also fell in the magic potion when he was a kid. Loves wild boars.

Yes - The Celts were the people spreading throughout Europe during the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. They spoke the Celtic language and shared cultural and religious practices and beliefs. The Gauls were the Celtic tribes that settled in what the Romans called Gaul.

I did not know that, thanks. And cool!

That explains why they had some typical celtic things like druids.

Sorta kinda; "Celt"/"Celtic" is a broad term that's been applied to a lot of different peoples, languages, and cultures. The history blog ACOUP has a good post on it [1]; it's long, but only the first part is really relevant to what you're asking (up through the table comparing different regions).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2023/05/12/collections-who-were-the-celts...

The etymology of the word "gaul" is fascinating.

It's an exonym, i.e. it's not how the celts living in Gaul would call themselves.

There are two origins of the word that are likely to cave coexisted in a "convergent etymology"

1. The name of an ancient Celtic tribe (one of many) sounded like "galatai" to ancient Greeks and it sounded about right because of the the white skin (either fair skin or white paint). So in this case it ultimately stems from a Celtic word.

2. The old Germanic word "walhaz" meant something like "foreign" or "Roman". That originated many names for former roman territories when Germanic people encountered them. (Similar word for Slavic). That left a lot of names like "Wales/welch", "Wallachia", "vlachi". This word went through a sound change when adopted in romance languages similar to how other words like "werra" - > "g(u)err(a|e)", "Ward" - "g(u)ard" ...

The regular sound changes in languages betray the coexistence of these two etymologies at different times and phases of the Evolution of the romance languages and french in particular.

The latin "g" sound evolved into "j" (gamba -> jambe) so one our think that if the word "Gallia" was available from the latin substrate it would have transformed into "Jallia" and in fact it was! As attested by place names like La Jaille-Yvon and Saint-Mars-la-Jaille.

This reveals how the modern french name "gaule" likely stems from the second etymology (the German origin).

That said, languages are rarely let evolve naturally. There is plenty of people who studied languages and kept latin alive for centuries and it's also quite possible that the version with the "g" sound has been also kept reinforced because of the relationship with the classic texts (Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres)

OMG don't tell the French they have German heritage. You will not survive it.

Or the Germans that their ancestors also settled in the Frankenreich and they should of course be on good terms with them!

Or Franken (i.e. parts of Bavaria) that they're Bavarian.

Or English that many of them are part French nowadays (think Normans).

Or ...

History is messy. People are messy. Mostly vengefully so unfortunately. This is why we can't have nice things.

The people most likely to threaten your borders are also the people you’re most likely to share culture and genes with. So minor differences in language, culture, and geography become important signs of essential distinction from your historical enemy.

Freud called this the “narcissism of small differences” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differen...).

The French are largely of Celtic descent, with some Frankish admixture in some regions, in others, practically none. Except in Gascony and the Pyrenees where they're Basque in descent, Gascon being of the same etymology as Basque.

People of Frankish descent are mainly found in the Rhinelands, which does include a bit of France, but is mostly located in modern Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks

Yes, genetically and linguistically the Germanic rulers haven't tipped the scale to their side in France.

But OTOH the name "France" is unequivocally Frankish (Germanic) and thus not something that Obelix, a Gaul from ~2070 years, ago would identify with.

As it happens, that fact is how I learned the word Gaul in the first place.

That's Obelix.

An obelisk is a type of pillar from Ancient Egypt.

I know. I was joking of course :)

But Asterix and Obelix are of course named after asterisks and obelisks. It's part of the joke.

It makes me sad that you had to explain it. :(

An example of how some people on this site are about as rigid as obelisks (lowercase) when it comes to understanding even very obvious jokes...

Or *friend, to put it briefly.

No, that's obelix. Obelisk is is a type of storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square plastic enclosure.

No, that's a floppy disk. An obelisk is a mythological snake that will turn you to stone if you look at it.

Nope that is a Basilisk. An obelisk is like a wildcard for coding in regular expressions.

No, that's an Asterix.

It's an ancient Egyptian deity whose essence was trapped inside a trading card, but not before driving the card's initial artist to suicide[0].

https://youtu.be/-nab64DWEh8?t=268

Growing up in another language than English an Obelisk was the NOD's main defensive structure.

No, it's Gallente freighter from Eve Online.

comparably desirable to a Tesla coil

4000~ year old phallic stone monument uprooted from Egypt and dispersed across the world?

(I always found that cool)

wrong thread ?

I think the person was referring to a different, more common meaning of "obelisk". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk

The companion of Asterisk.

the friend of asterisk

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