uplifter

In his book Programming the Universe[0][1], quantum physicist Seth Lloyd calculates that if you had every atom in the universe computing for the age of the universe to generate strings of text randomly, it would not likely have written even the first line of Hamlet. His solution to how we managed to get the entirety of Hamlet plus the rest of Shakespeare's works given much less resources (i.e. evolution on one small planet culminating in one playwright) is that the monkeys/atoms are not typing text into typewriters but instead typing code into a computers.

[0]Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd, a great read about physics and computation: https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer...

[1]The book is accessible with free account at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/programmingunive00lloy/page/n13/...

[1]Interview with Lloyd where he also mentions this calculation (search for "hamlet"): https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/07/01/39028/qa-seth-ll...

> By Nietzsche's account it was the 1900s.

I’m confused by this because Nietzsche died in 1900. Was it a prophecy? Or did you mean the 1800s?

They paper says the English sample is from the United States of America, U.K. publications are presumably excluded.

Hawking radiation. A black hole emits hawking radiation at a wavelength about equal to its diameter, and with power (ie energy/time) inversely proportional to its diameter. So the smaller the black hole, the higher the energy of the photons it emits and also the more energy it emits per second. A black hole with the mass of Mount Everest (~10^14 kg) would, according to a hawking radiation calculator[0], have a schwarzschild radius of 10^-23m, and a proportional wavelength on the order of extremely intense gamma rays or cosmic rays, with a temperature of a billion degrees kelvin. Low-mass black holes aren't black at all.

[0] Online hawking radiation counter: https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiati...

How about this: what I claimed has absolutely nothing to do with a private language, but with the changing of the shared meaning of words over time.

Not the GP but maybe I can help elucidate the position they're representing. The GP advocates for what is known as the "metabolism-first" hypothesis in origins of life theory. The motivation of this theory that some chemists and biologists find it implausible that a self-catalyzing RNA based biological machinery would have formed spontaneously from a collection of basic precursor chemicals, even given very long spans of time and large volumes of precursors. They believe this because nucleic acids are very complex structures and themselves require very complex biologic machinery to assemble, and their understanding of the likelihood of chemical reactions suggests its unreasonable to expect them to form in geological time spans. They posit that instead its more likely that nucleic acid based systems were themselves preceded by system(s) composed of sets of simpler chemicals (ones which are likely to form spontaneously) which together catalyze each other's formation (a so-called "auto-catalytic set"), and that this era of simple metabolisms eventually produced a nucleic acid based system which completely overtook and replaced/assimilated the more primitive auto-catalytic set world.

Here's a primer on the metabolism-first hypothesis: https://www.statedclearly.com/videos/what-is-the-metabolism-...

You seem to already know this, but "Metabolism First" is the name used for the theory in biology that you just described[0]

The idea is that some self-catalyzing cycle(s) of reactions among chemicals structurally much simpler than nucleotides or even protein enzymes preceded the era of nucleic acid based biology, until being completely (or replaced) by said RNA/DNA based systems.

[0] Metabolism First primer: https://www.statedclearly.com/videos/what-is-the-metabolism-...

I trained as a biochemist and you nailed it. The submission title's claim is wildly more extraordinary than the actual result. It's like claiming "Lines of humans spontaneously appear on a hot tin roof" when what happened was "humans spontaneously link arms when placed upon a hot tin roof."

You may be right, I'm no expert on his work. Though one thing I do recall is that he had different professional periods, in which he had very different conceptions, or at least approaches, to philosophy; so perhaps that resolves the discrepancy?

This whole thread is a geolocation harvesting operation :)

Wittgenstein's had a poignant and simple conception of words as bags for meaning. We can put meaning into them, and take it out, and put different meanings instead, again and again. They've always been variable in meaning, and its difficult to say any two people, let alone cultures from different eras, will impart the same meaning to a term.

>We believe this movement of the stars can help to explain two puzzles: the similarity of Greek and Aboriginal stories about these stars, and the fact so many cultures call the cluster “seven sisters” even though we only see six stars today.

They only use that as an explanation for one of those two puzzles, and then by taking that explanation as a given, they formulate a second hypothesis for the other puzzle. That is, they posit the change in appearance of the star cluster as an explanation for why they story/myth has a hidden/lost seventh sister, and then use the timeline of that explanation to posit that, if this first explanation is true, then the commonality of the myth might be due to it dating from a common origin from when the star cluster looked like it had seven stars. But the first hypothesis being true doesn't imply the second hypothesis is true, because there are alternative explanations; e.g. that similar myths about the same changing star cluster were developed independently by different cultures, perhaps due to some common trends in human thinking and cultural conventions(which may themselves inherit from some prehistoric time, even if the myth doesn't).

Its an important distinction because claiming their observation about the stars explains two mysteries without recognizing this weak chaining of those explanations over-estimates the explanatory power of the hypothesis.

>Child funerary treatment provides important insights into who was considered a person and afforded the attributes of an individual self, moral agency, and eligibility for group membership. Neve shows that even the youngest females were recognized as full persons in her society.

Alternatively, it shows that ancient people were as terrified of baby ghost hauntings as we are today. Those baby ghosts need to be appeased, through costly ritual and material sacrifice, lest they return and torment the living.

I mean, it seems as valid an interpretation as the article authors' one, no?

From this article[0] which was on HN a few days ago:

>By June 2022, if all goes well, Webb will finally be ready for science.

[0]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03620-1

>this exact puzzle also came up in an episode of Stargate SG-1 season 2

Impossible, there's no such thing as 2

Sequencing nucleic acids (RNA, DNA) is more straightforward, though protein sequencing tech is fairly functional too, if more expensive and complicated, machinery wise.

I try to read journal papers every now and then, usually when investigating the source of some news story, or when digging down into the molecular details of a personal health interest. Somewhat contrary to the theme of TFA, I've found that my 20 year old training has provided good mileage in terms of understanding current research. Much of the overarching theory of molecular biology hasn't changed in that time, and a lot of the same techniques are still used, if often miniaturized and scaled, e.g. microarray methods for things I learned to do using blots. For when I find a gap in my knowledge, modern literature search tech facilitates digging down to find related papers that describe newer theories or ones that describe new methods. Often I'll find references to review papers which are essentially designed to get one up to speed on a topic. If anything papers are easier to access now than back when I was in university, wink wink.

Oh, and there are definitely quite a few bored biochemists contributing serious detail to select wikipedia articles. With grain of salt in hand, I've found some pretty high quality descriptions (in terms of detail and ease of understanding) of molecular pathways peppered throughout articles on various topics, which can serve as decent starting points for diving into the literature on those topics.

I'm a far cry from considering myself current on the latest research, but I feel not too far behind and that I can catch up quickly when needed.

You made me curious and some quick duckduckgo-ing led me to a biologists involved-if-not-comprehensive investigation of the origins of the term [0].

Long story short, it probably dates to late 1950s Cambridge and may have originated with Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Of relevance is that it preceded the discovery of mRNA, dating to a time when all RNA was thought to be ribosomal DNA. At that time the prevailing theory was that DNA codes for RNA that is incorporated into the ribosome (which then makes proteins). Because the amount of RNA code in the ribosome was clearly much less than the amount of DNA code in the genome, the implication was that much of the genome did not code anything, simply as a matter of mathematical difference. The term was controversial early on, and it might even have been coined to be so, though that's less clear.

[0] https://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/667709690372849664/the...

The trend of discovering biological purposes for what were once termed 'junk' DNA (which these RNA are transcribed from) continues.

In addition to the improved understanding of our physical nature, it will be exciting to see what applications are developed for targeting or tricking-out these novel cellular components for pharmaceutical and biotechnological purposes. They are sure to be significant, if our experience with the RNA tech employed in the modeRNA and Pfizer vaccines are any indication.

Personally, as someone who finished his biochemistry degree 2 decades ago (and has mostly worked on the software side of things since), I'm excited for what we'll be able to do with fuller understanding of this molecular machinery, and plan to pivot back into biotech over the next decade.

Reality varies. Its a truism in optimization that the only valid benchmark is the task you are trying to accomplish. These chips have been optimized for an average of the tasks run on AWS (which is entirely sensible for them), but that doesn't mean they'll be the best for your specific job.

Experimenters have been able to extend the lifespan of C-Elegans five-fold by modifying just a few genes[0], though its unlikely that research will translate well to humans. Even interventions in much more closely related mouse models frequently fail to translate to us, but must biologists will agree with you that those organisms are the place to start.

[0] https://www.buckinstitute.org/news/five-fold-lifespan-extens...

Point raised in the TFA is that one process unikernal has a much smaller attack surface than a linux instance running the process would have.

>A lunar cycle is 27 days plus a little less than 8 hours.

That is the lunar orbital period, but from earth it appears as though it takes ~29.5 days for the moon to cycle through its phases(this longer period is termed the 'lunation'). The difference is due to the earth-moon system orbiting around the sun, so by the time the moon has completed it's orbital period around the earth, the earth-moon system has rotated around the sun ~1/13 of its period, changing the angle at which the moon is illuminated, which is what determines the apparent phase of the moon as observed from earth. So the moon has to travel a bit further than its full orbit to appear as though its completed a cycle as viewed from earth.

And OLED screens power consumption is proportional to how much color/white is displayed, so black uses less power. Good for your battery, and the environment too.

In a dark room or outside at night, black on an OLED is truly black and everything else floats magically in the void, it's a wonderful effect.

I recall that even slashdot got slashdotted, which was itself incredible. The admins there at least had the sense to put up a static page with info about the attacks, which is where I first got some details about it after a fellow student in my theory of computation class first notified me (I think he had a pocket radio he was listening to in class).

For those too young to know, being slashdotted was a term for your website going offline due to too much traffic, named for (and primarily used on) the site slashdot.com. Slashdot was the preeminent popular tech/nerd discussion forum of the time, and being linked from a story on slashdot would often direct more attention to your server than it could handle.

In addition to overall fructose levels, its suggested that the ratio between glucose and fructose levels may be important for determining the changes to the nutrient absorption pattern.

Figure 1 of the linked article illustrates a model by the study authors concerning the effects of glucose vs fructose on gut morphology and nutrient absorption pattern. As described in the caption, fructose up-regulates (ie stimulates) a biochemical pathway that leads to changes in the gut which cause increased nutrient absorption and lipid (ie fat) synthesis, but glucose down-regulates that same pathway.

Put simply, fructose and glucose compete antagonistically to either promote higher nutrient absorption or lower it, respectively. One pushes the lever, the other pulls it, and the ratio will determine who wins. The linked summary article does not, however, state what the relationship between ratio and degree of effect is.