jergosh

Hopefully far enough to illustrate that "altering brain structure changes personality" isn't the same as "different personalities have to have a basis in brain structure."

You can change the way a program executes by interfering with the hardware. You can also run different programs on the same hardware.

I happen to be an evolutionary biologist and I said nothing about reproductive strategies. You would first need to establish a link between reproductive strategy and psychology (evolutionary psychology is a bit of a joke science, I'm afraid) and then between psychology and brain structure.

Um, all the things that are not bodily fluids. And anyway you picked one particular bodily fluid, not even essential to the functioning of a body.

Why would this fact be particularly significant?

There are four copies of each part of the message so you can lose entire chunks and still be able to recover everything. As for subtitutions, unless you get the same error in 2 copies out of 4, there should be no problem.

The 739kb isn't a limit in any sense, the main limitation is that DNA synthesis is currently expensive.

You don't actually need to that much, as long as you can keep it dry and reasonably cool -- one idea we had kicking around was to use a cave of the sort that's used for long term seed storage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault)

In principle a few hours but currently you have to outsource synthesis (i.e. writing) to a company and its an expensive process. Sequencing (reading) can be done more easily and has been dropping in price faster than Moore's law predicts.

I wasn't directly involved but the research group I'm part of did some earlier work mentioned in this paper (ref. 10) and I would be happy to answer any questions people may have.

"Not that it really matters once the referendum comes up as the UK will likely be out of the EU after that."

That's actually highly unlikely. Much as the Brits value their independence, the economic cost would be too high.

terrible use of percentages.

> Modern classification schemes are so arbitrary and error-prone as to be essentially just a painful way to satisfy scientists' compulsion to shove things into neat little cubbies and has the negative side-effect of scaring students away from an otherwise fascinating subject.

What do you mean by "modern classification schemes"? If anything, molecular phylogenetics helped clarify earlier attempts at classification which used common morphological features.

R core developers are notoriously resistant to change. A number of glaring inefficiencies have gone unfixed for years, despite people submitting patches etc.

Neurons in AI are not supposed to exactly mimic the behaviour of 'real' neurons...

It's easy to talk about 'no-brainers' in the abstract. A different story if it's your own favourite bit.

It's a braver decision from someone who depends on their looks for livelihood. Also creates a mindset "if she could do it, then so could I"

Her going public about this has got a great potential to raise awareness and make other women more likely to consider this course of action. The sad reality is, however, most women won't be able to afford the reconstructive surgery (or to have it done to the standard Angelina Jolie has).

Same story in the UK http://www.davidarno.org/2008/09/15/fly-to-new-york-and-buy-... (2008)

A Moolb filter?

It has enjoyed relative political stability but it's not as safe as you think. My exes father lived there for many years. One night his compound was raided, his guard killed and he and his family were trapped in the house. In the morning the raiders left but he still shudders when he thinks about it.

That is great advice on how to hire mindreaders. While the first idea (explaining something concisely) is defensible, the second (testing if people will 'stay on topic' when deliberately asked about something else) is just crazy.

This is changing the subject slightly, but to be fair, it's the same statistical bias that's used to say that men earn more than women.

"May or may not" is the same as "on average, may or may not".

"Another feeling is the Google effect: I know that Europe cannot really maintain a talented team like the one Dom and Dinh Viet would need to take Sparrow to new heights. "

Is this a serious remark (honest question)?

Past participant of iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine, the competition mentioned in the article) here. Infuriatingly, this writeup fails to mention that the E. chromi (and all the other projects) was carried out by undergraduate students (this is the team: http://2009.igem.org/Team:Cambridge/Team), perhaps because it makes it sound less trustworthy and sellable. According to the same website, the "designer Daisy Ginsberg" was involved peripherally, at best.

As for replacing R, the whole problem is that no-one is really a fan of the syntax but there is an staggering number of packages ready to use. Bioconductor (tools for analysis of biological data: http://www.bioconductor.org/) alone is over 500 packages whose functionality is most likely not implemented for any other language/platform.

$15k / 250 business days, that would be $60 per day AND they would get the food at much lower prices then you do when you sit in a restaurant. Really? If it was a random company that kind of BS would put me off working there big time.

Only ships to the US? Lame.

Not sure what this proves.

WTH is this doing on HN?