subroutine

They said quantitatively not anecdotally.

Indeed, SVB is still standing while JP Morgan Chase got a $25 billion dollar bailout in 2008.

https://money.cnn.com/news/specials/storysupplement/bankbail...

How? I'm no banker, but to me their financial picture reads: married couple, both currently have nice salary working at companies X and Y, together have proven ability to raise millions in capital. I would say yes please take our refi loan, and do come back if you need anything else.

Why would rent go down if a large part of the market is owned by a monolith (banks/institutional investors) who can impose price control? This is already slowly happening. Also the median price of rent in a market is not so much a function of house ticket prices, but rather house affordability. A $400k house in a cash-only market is not more affordable than a $600k house in a market with loans. That is, in a cash market, few people will be able to say ya know, with these rent prices it actually makes more sense to buy than rent - let's go buy a house in full with cash.

That all said, I'm not trying to be a lending market lobbyist. I personally avoid borrowing whenever possible, and don't even have a credit card. My contention is simply that current lending practices are the cause a lot of societal issues, but if lending did not exist whatsoever things would be substantially worse.

Can't be cheaper than the materials and labor costs to build it. If house prices get too cheap house builders / contractors will stop building. This will pinch supply and keep house prices high enough that only cash rich (corps and banks) can afford them. Most people will have no choice but to rent indefinitely. Those who manage to save up some $400k may finally afford to buy a house just in time for retirement.

Interesting take on being impolite - making a basic statement using overtly pretensions and opaque language?

True. I should have said "if you are using a virus"

Are you making some sort of point, or just dumping content?

I suppose that's one way to interpret it. And this does happen in place where it makes biological sense. See Calyx of Held.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calyx_of_Held?wprov=sfti1

I am a neurobiologist and still don't understand the comment. The authors acknowledge biology in the first sentence.

wrt. claims in the full article however I have an issue with this observation...

> Another feature common to many biological and artificial communication systems is that they split a stream of information over multiple channels, i.e., they inverse multiplex. Often this occurs even when a single one of the channels could handle the entire communication load. For example, multiple synapses tend to connect adjacent neurons and multiple neuronal pathways tend to connect brain regions.

I dont see how a "single channel" i.e. a single synapse would suffice as the entire information output unit of a neuron. Making multiple synaptic connections is fundamental to the way neural networks perform computations.

The first point being only a concern if you are a virus. If instead you are engineering say, an rna vaccine, you could package your transcript into lipofectamine instead of a coronavirus envelope ;) but point taken, there's always an upper limit.

You are probably right, I'm not an expert on this process. But there's likely a difference between the innate eukaryotic cell polyadenylation process vs. how coronavirus accomplishes polyadenylation because coronavirus rna never enters the nucleus.

Socialites who "trafficked in Leonardo" back in the 90s likely pulled the reverse stunt (anyone in the know calls him Da Vinci) after a famous giant rat gave the name Leonardo to a mutant turtle ninja, as Leo was among the rats four favorite artists. TMNT was so popular in the 90s that if you said "I like Leonardo more than Michelangelo", and were not currently standing inside an art gallery, everyone would assume you were talking about Ninja Turtles. If you said "I like Da Vinci more than Michelangelo" people would understand you were saying I like the artist Leonardo Da Vinci more than the ninja turtle Michelangelo ;)

The polyA tail isn't even coded by the genome, it's added after transcription by a processive polyadenylation multiprotein complex with the final tally being the result of partially stochastic processes. So yeah, agreed, the number of adenines is variable.

The number of adenine repeats that confer functional properties is quite variable but it definitely needs to be more than "just 1". I've seen anywhere from 25-250 used in designed plasmids. The exact number people use in their engineered sequence is based on a number of factors, not all of them scientific in nature (e.g. companies charge per basepair synthesize a bespoke polypeptide; e.g. you copied the sequence from a previous clone into ApE and that sequence used 30 repeats and worked fine).

This is true, but perhaps worth noting the nuclear transport function of polyA tails don't come into play for coronavirus. The payload of coronavirus is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA. Which means it does not need to enter the nucleus for preprocessing and can basically just start replicating shortly after entering a cell. See diagram...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Coronavi...

There might be a software analog to another polyA tail feature: the provision of a 'shelf-life'. Each replication cycle removes a few adenosines, and at a certain point the tail sequence is too short to recruit protection and the RNA is ushered into the degradation pathway.

Adding a poly(A) tail when engineering rna plasmids is so common that it's part of the standard feature library of most plasmid editors.

Here I have a screenshot of the ApE editor displaying one plasmid I made for a neurobio experiment involving the overexpression of two chimeric proteins (actin and profilin, respectively linked to green and red fluorophores; note the editor has autotagged the polyA tail feature):

https://ibb.co/XSCSKC9

> In fact, we are looking for students, which is to say that when admitted to a Ph.D., students lack the skills necessary to undertake the work, and the expectation is that they will be trained as a matter of course.

Except you are not looking for students, you are looking for the top graduates in the field, and you are training them for a job that barely exists.

The only way to undo the culture of overwork for academic professors, is to increase bottleneck somewhere upstream (e.g. cut the number of PhD students in half). Any time you have a situation where 300 people are applying for the same job (as is common for ladder rank professorships at research universities), the people who end up getting those jobs will inevitably have been overworked. Imagine if less than 10% of people who went to med school ended up landing a job as a physician - that's basically the situation with professorships.

I mean, it's literally the first thing that shows up in his wikipedia article. If he truly wants anonymity I apologize.

qntm (Sam Hughes) is a great, and if you like this style also check out Greg Egan.

> The No Fly List is a small subset of the U.S. government Terrorist Screening Database (also known as the terrorist watchlist) that contains the identity information of known or suspected terrorists.

The TSA comment above is pretty straight forward but to be fair the wiki article is filled with instances of speculation.

Why do you think they put people on the no fly list?

What if you are a US citizen, and it has recently been discovered you have been secretly dealing arms to Russia against current sanctions. And while authorities do not currently know your location they suspect you will be flying to/from Russia very soon?

Should they let you know not to book a flight?

Hah, indeed. As a side note, foreign nationals can likely determine their no fly list status from the Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions programs list. I put together an excel workbook of that data (shared link below [0]); it contains OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals list (SDN), and non-SDN sanctions consolidated set. OFAC sanctions lists can be directly searched [1] and accessed via ftp [2]. In the excel workbook I shared below it's interesting to web search the entities listed as "CYBER" (see the sdn_cyber tab).

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1t7QPqgvkNp42zejlBBxi...

[1] https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov

[2] ftp://ofacftp.treas.gov

That's actually exactly what they do.

If you are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, and the TSC determines that you are on the No Fly List, DHS TRIP will send you a letter informing you of your status on the No Fly List and providing the option to submit and receive additional information.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-y...

If someone was on a no fly list and they wanted the general public to know, they could just put it out there themselves. No? This seems more likely to be used as a form of public shaming than a way to expose injustice.

I get the sentiment but linear algebra is a primary method used in certain in machine learning frameworks (e.g. training neural nets). Personally I think linear regression (which also relies on linear algebra) is erroneously considered machine learning. To me the distinction is whether you provided a series of labeled data to incrementally train and improve the model and work towards some minima (i.e. learning), or did you use a method that ingests all available data to derive a one-shot solution.

Due to a past experiment in my lab by a post doc, I'll be forever skeptical of putative treatments for complex human diseases that were identified using rodent models that target a narrowly defined set of behaviors or phenotypes.

The experiment was to test whether vitamin D supplements could attenuate behavioral problems associated with fetal alcohol syndrome. Our lab used a rat model of FAS. When the post doc told me about her experiment idea, I (as an undergrad at the time) told her it was interesting but couldn't be performed in a rat model because vitamin D was poison to rats. It calcifies their skin because they cant break D down like humans can. My warning was ignored, and the experiment was conducted anyway. She found that vitamin D treatment mitigated hyperactivity associated with FAS, and presented this finding at conferences. Well no shit this treatment would reduce activity in rats. If my skin was calcified I wouldn't want to move either.

The way I read it was the early spring thaw was to blame.

> The extra moisture and early spring thaw turned the Hungarian plains into marshes and swampland.

As in, they expected frozen ground not marshland that time of year. But reading the abstract of the original source, it seems like it was a combo.

> Documentary sources and tree-ring chronologies reveal warm and dry summers from 1238–1241, followed by cold and wet conditions in early-1242. Marshy terrain across the Hungarian plain most likely reduced pastureland and decreased mobility, as well as the military effectiveness of the Mongol cavalry