maxander

I think it's really interesting how when we learn new things (such as this lesson about how the eye works) we often only learn them "halfway." E.g., obviously, you're not blind, and you see as far as you like- but your old sense of how sight works involved contact, and your new concept didn't fully rid you of the notion that contact was a limiting factor. Only because these two contradictory notions could coexist in your mind did you feel "blind."

Similarly, I've had people tell me that reading about the "microbiome" is really distressing, since afterwards they feel like they have some alien infestation in their bodies- as though they were full of bugs. On one level they learned a new thing, that healthy human bodies contain lots of various microorganisms, but some part of their psyche still maintained that any such creatures must be pathological. Their obvious health doesn't make them feel like microbiome theory is false, and nor does it fully convince them that their microbiome is benign.

There's probably a lot of more subtle examples of this, and it probably goes a long way to explain why so many people find science to be distressing or depressing.

All true, but why mot data mine too, while they’re at it?

If you’re not the customer you’re a product... but it doesn’t follow that, if you are the customer, you’re not also a product.

Skimming the paper, it looks like they predict pliocene/eocene climates primarily for equatorial zones, with polar and high-latitude regions less effected. Eocene climates were also more even, with less of a difference between polar and equatorial temperatures. So alligators in the arctic is not strictly being predicted (at least not on that timescale, and that's not to say the predictions aren't scary in plenty of other ways.)

> Both the emergence of geologically novel climates and the rapid reversion to Eocene-like climates may be outside the range of evolutionary adaptive capacity.

A lovely little sentence, elegantly understated and used as a seemingly off-handed conclusion to the abstract, which essentially means "the world may be about to end."

Also, NASA is hosting the full article: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201800...

Such as broadcasting his twitter handle, like they did right there?

> [...] had hacked into his Twitter account - @hesuoge - and [...]

> [...] said the engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of landing in deeper trouble with authorities.

Uh, what?

Edit: Even worse, it's the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-ce... .

I'm missing something regarding twitter handles and anonymity, right?

I would further generalize; if you want to find low-hanging fruit, know about relevant subjects that aren't presently very popular (such as the Knight-Darwin law) and find relations between disparate fields (such as evolutionary biology and graph theory) where few others are well-versed in both.

I recommend the ISS blog: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/

You assert that there's nothing immoral about weapons development, and go on to almost directly contradict this- noting that "force/battlefield superiority" tends to lead to the use of these weapons, killing people. I really don't see what your point is; are you trying to argue that an occupation that leads to unnecessary human deaths is moral?

Literate programming [0] is frequently re-invented, in various forms, because it is simply the right way to do things- and each iteration of it is almost immediately discarded, because we're all sinful and impatient creatures.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

My understanding of it is (although I'm not remotely an expert on cell culture) that stem cells can in general be made to divide in culture "indefinitely"; the Hayflick limit applies only to (non-stem) somatic cells. Stem cells use telomerase to maintain their telomeres, similar to how germ cells use telomerase to reset themselves to a "newborn" state.

Stem cells can progress from "universal progenitors," the stuff of the featureless blastocyst, to embryonic stem cells of various forms, to adult cells (both stem and somatic); this process has to do with changes in gene activation and cell morphology, not with telomeres. When the article notes that these cells can be "multiplied indefinitely," the point is that researchers can prevent them from differentiating into more-mature forms of cell when they divide.

Probably more harm than good- you probably don’t want ultrasonic waves shaking your neurons around without a good reason. This sounds like a “kick a TV and it works again” sort of technology.

Both. It really is a significant offense, but politicians on both sides are doing it almost constantly (for example, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/politics/private-email... ) and no fuss is raised.

I guess the “official” US gov email system is really just a huge pain to use.

Do we know what hardware each was using? Aside from time, s criticism of the previous AlphaZero/Stockfish match was that AlphaZero was using a tremendous amount of TPU power while Stockfish was running on, essentially, an average laptop.

Relatively negligible. I don’t know what the precise price point for biologics are, but equivalent techniques are routinely used in research; a bit of Googling found a lab services page pricing a an AAV (the kind of vector used in Glybera) batch at the neighborhood of $1k [1]. Would be much more for a medical-grade preparation, I’m sure, but not an appreciable fraction of a million.

[1] https://sites.duke.edu/dvvc/services/adeno-associated-vector...

Well, yes, that’s how supply and demand (supposedly) works. The “correct” price is where the demand, at that price, equals the available supply.

If the product is scarce, that can drive up the price, but only as far as demand is willing to follow- there’s no inherent value in being scarce. “Price” is a social thing, so of course it’s determibed by social forces.

The inherent cost of manufacturing the drug is relatively negligible. The problem is the cost of development and deployment, and the tiny customer (patient) population to spread that cost around to.

A gene therapy for a more prevalent disorder would not have the same problems, or at least not as badly.

I hope someone with authority over their company's office leasing/layout planning see's this and the various replies- th overwhelming sentiment is approximately "engineers hate dreary corporate office design to the point where they'll quit over it."

Set up an office in a nice building with high-quality architecture[1] and you'll be able to retain a much higher degree of engineer, per-dollar. Maybe the tradeoff doesn't work in SF's insane property market, but anywhere else it seems like a no-brainer.

[1] Which for some reason almost always means buildings that are more than half a century old- our culture has gone big into the dreary corporate office building thing.

If you're not limited by bulk unskilled labor you're limited by talented, skilled labor. A bunch of skilled labor is coming from elite families that have had expensive educations and white-collar jobs for generations, but a not inconsiderable portion is coming from skilled immigrants and the second- or third-generation upwardly mobile children of unskilled immigrants.

I'm currently in the middle of applying for graduate programs in [[Computational/Systems/Synthetic/Quantitative Biology]/Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering/Bioinformatics/Biotechnology] and, after working in related fields for years and having combed through dozens of relevant departments, I couldn't tell you what any of those terms mean relative to another (or rather, for any of those terms, I could show you two important universities that seem to use them very differently.) They all indicate overlapping areas of a very poorly-defined space in between "normal" biology, computer science, and physical engineering (as well as several other fields.)

Pragmatically, for a prospective student, it's a giant pain simply because it's hard to tell what a program bearing one of these names will actually teach you! Some "computational biology" programs will include wet-lab work, others will never let you near a pipette. Some bioengineering programs are almost purely physical-machines engineering; others use the word interchangeably with "bioinformatics." And so on.

But somewhere in that mess is the future of biology, medicine, and probably some other things as well.

If you actually read, e.g., Socrates, you’ll find that his idea of wisdom is actually pretty consistent with the typical Western view. There’s some discrepancies, but the overall shape is the same. Look to Eastern cultures and there’s far greater difference (and perhaps even less agreement on what words should be translated as “wisdom,”) but there’s an obviously parallel concept.

Further, wisdom (like related “social” concepts) points at some thing or pattern in the “objective” world. That thing/pattern/what-have-you is, at least putatively, there, and will be there as long as there are humans to be wise/unwise- even if our idea of it is lost, and even if the idea was an arbitrary division of the universe.

And even further, there’s nothing stopping these researchers from making an operational criterion that matches the arbitrary definition of wisdom we have right now and finding something out about it. Even if humanity decides tomorrow that wisdom should actually mean something entirely different, knowledge about today’s “wisdom” was learnt.

So they’ve figured out how to turn water (and ethanol and some reagents) into wine. Neat!

But I’ll believe that it’s good only after hearing about how it fares in blind taste tests.

The definition of “wort” includes “used in names of plants and herbs, especially those used, especially formerly, as food or medicinally, e.g., butterwort, woundwort” ... so it sounds likely that some English speaking culture already realized that liverwort had medicinal value. (C.f. St John’s Wort, an herb with some evidence of antidepressant effects.)

> Each contestant will need to submit a report of no more than 20 pages

> Reports should be in pdf form and use 12 point Times typestyle, 1” margins.

A 20-page report at 12-point font isn't very much- an average college student has likely prepared longer papers. It sounds implausible that one could pack enough detail into that to make a substantial and novel case for a Martian colony design.

I don't see your argument- you say 4% of the colony would be required for child-rearing duties (so, 40 people, which seems a bit high, but whatever) and posit that as a fundamental barrier? There's still 960 (adult) colonists left over, and it's hard to see how 960 is a less tenable number than 1000.

More generally- sure, there are well over a thousand specialist jobs that make our Earth-bound economy go. Probably more like millions. But that economy builds way more than is required for self-sustainability. The Martian lifestyle is necessarily going to be much more spare; so there's your "labor cuts."

Seconding the "learn a new expertise" bit. Many fields that aren't programming are full of untended problems that are ripe for automation; these opportunities stay un-taken because outsiders never realize they exist. Learn something new, the practice of some other profession or even hobby, and even if it looks cut-and-dry when you're starting out you'll find that there are complexities and difficulties that, potentially, could be calling for some new kind of service to fix them.

It doesn’t need to be enforceable, as far as the minimum wage class is concerned- if the spurious suit alone would have the defendant summoned to court multiple times over months, and likely unemployed during that time, it’s just as destructive as a real, successful suit would be for an ex-Googler, if not moreso. Without wages they can’t pay rent or feed their family (because this class is rarely able to accumulate savings.). If they can get a job before the suit resolves, having to move shifts around to get to court appointments could make them lose it again. And that’s assuming they have complete faith, somehow, that the law would rule in their favor- when they’re fighting a corporation, have minimal legal resources if their own, they would have to be very sure they live in a no-enforcement state- because a successful suit would end their financial life.

All of those skilled workers could have been building something useful, however. The waste of their time and skill is indeed burning resources, in an even more concrete sense than setting money on fire.

“Eating food you grew yourself” is a tax dodge? What about making your own improvements to your house? Cooking your own food? Doing your own laundry? You could pay for any number of services, with the associated tax. So you’re about as much of a tax dodge as these folks. But that’s a radical expansion of the notion of taxable economic activity. The IRS trying to get that notion accepted as law would be practically unthinkable.

There was a time, for that matter, where most of the U.S. economy was agrarian. The world still worked. There were fewer government services, to be sure- but if most people are members of semi-self-sufficient communities, fewer services would be needed.

The title is somewhat misleading; they looked for causal effects from subjective wellbeing to cardiometabolic health and vice-versa, but the only such effect that they found was in particular BMI-->subjective wellbeing (and with the sign you'd expect.)