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cmpb

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I'm not familiar with Margaret Oakley Dayhoff, but I am aware that Rosalind Franklin [1] was extremely important for our understanding of DNA, comparable to Watson/Crick, with whom she co-discovered the structure of DNA. So it seems "Rosalind" is at least very appropriate as a name for a genomics tool such as this.

Not to say the other names mentioned aren't also deserving of similar honors

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

Space Elevator 9 months ago

Really great book (and series). Though it's not "hard sci-fi" by any means, the technology feels real enough to keep my brain from focusing on the holes and enjoy the fun philosophical and ethical problems that Scalzi comes up with

Cancer Alley 3 years ago

I'm from the area, so I feel I might be qualified to give you an answer. The short story is that some people here do still speak dialects of French [1]. The number of native speakers is rapidly declining (and will soon diminish completely), but many residents of Louisiana have grandparents or other family members who did grow up speaking it exclusively (or more commonly now, grew up speaking it with their exclusively-French-speaking parents/grandparents).

There are probably several reasons that it has held on for so long here, but predominantly it's because of multiple waves of influx of French-speakers (from when Louisiana was owned by the French, then from people of the Acadia region of Canada who were forced out of their region and migrated here in the mid-18th century) combined with persistent poverty resulting in poor education and low travel into and out of Louisiana (so not a lot of mixing with the rest of the US).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_French

Cancer Alley 3 years ago

Strange seeing not just my state, but my hometown, rising on HN. Sad, too.

Related: For those interested in point-and-click / text-based games, check out the game NORCO, which is about the city Norco (named for the refinery that graces its skyline), a suburb of New Orleans. It's actually an extremely accurate representation of the socioeconomics of the area (which is painful to admit), and has some truly gorgeous pixel art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norco_(video_game)

Obviously, we should try to figure it out and learn from our mistakes, increase security, etc., but what accountability can we really expect from knowing that the pandemic started due to a lab leak? Accountability is almost meaningless compared to the scale of the total global loss.

I'm reminded of a line from an episode of Star Trek TNG where a very powerful alien destroys an entire race by thinking them out of existence in a momentary lapse of judgement, and Picard simply says "We're not qualified to be your judges -- we have no law to fit your crime."

We removed 1.5 million plants at 21 events in seven state parks this year.

I have been involved in Ardisia and Tallow removal efforts here in the US south. When the infestation is this bad, you're not going to solve it with mechanical methods, no matter how hard you try and how many people you have doing it. Chemicals can definitely help, but they often have unexpected detrimental side effects to other native plants and animals (though sometimes they have unexpected beneficial effects on other native plants - I've seen rare prairie natives pop up in Louisiana after Triclopyr killed off overcrowded baccaris under power lines).

I wonder, could we develop a "gene drive" for plants?

And be prepared to interact with many other animals. This includes the ones we all seem to love, like birds and bees and fireflies, but also those that are typically considered vermin, like spiders, snakes, mice, wasps, roaches.

Not that there's anything really bad about that. It just requires a change to how you approach your outdoor spaces.

The article indicates that the bulk of the extinction of large mammals happened during the Quaternary Extinction[1], between 52kya and 9kya, so 100 years ago the damage was already done. It also makes the argument that the extinction events in each region coincided with the arrival of humans to that region, which would imply that these extinctions were not due to climatic changes.

I don't mean to imply that we're doing enough right now to keep our planet healthy. I agree with your sentiment and just wanted to provide a little context and clarification.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/mammals#quaternary-megafauna-exti...

We do get a lot of rain and there are a lot of low areas. It was mostly "bottomland" before the woods were cleared out. Back in 2016, it basically rained for 15 straight days and flooded huge portions of north and east Baton Rouge. The past couple of weeks (start of August) have also been relatively wet, so that's likely why you're seeing excess water right now.

From the article:

Arrest warrants can “go stale” due to the passage of time and changing circumstances, and one from 1955 almost certainly wouldn’t pass muster before a court, even if a sheriff agreed to serve it, said Ronald J. Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi.

But combined with any new evidence, the original arrest warrant “absolutely” could be an important stepping stone toward establishing probable cause for a new prosecution, he said.

The article mentions planting natives and leaving leaf litter for the insects to nest in. Anecdotally, that works extremely well. My neighbor always leaves his leaves under the trees (gums), and I'd noticed his yard always has a prolific firefly population. Two years ago, after I started to get interested in native plants, I started doing the same thing, and this year for the first time ever I have lightning bugs as well!

I've also seen a plethora of other native bugs that I've never seen before, but that could just be due to the fact that I wasn't really very interested in them before.

Ever since I was a kid, whenever I would read things like this or stuff about animals doing human-like things, I always wind up thinking "what would it be like to be <whatever animal> for a day?", and in particular, what exactly _are_ the similarities between human cognition and other animals'. Even as a thought experiment along the lines of "assume we had a machine that could swap brains", it's always seems reasonable to assume that there are certain faculties that we possess that would not translate and would render the experience uncomprehendable (i.e., as a bird, do I even have the ability to actively probe my consciousness, to conceive and remember higher-order thoughts? I've always assumed the answer is a hard no).

I find myself wondering more and more if we are more similar than I give animals credit for.

I was confused at first because the article mentions that "a spacecraft bound for the center of the solar system would need to slow itself down" and "engineers must take Parker past Venus seven times throughout the mission, so that the spacecraft can use that planet’s gravity as a brake", but you mention that PSP is traveling very fast (and indeed I've always understood that items orbiting closer to the center travel faster). Is this just a dumbing-down in the article's verbiage, or is it common to think of shrinking the perihelion as "braking"?

True, but odds are by 2050 we will not have this mostly solved and we will still be arguing with each other about what's important when it comes to preserving the current climate vs adapting to a changing climate. I think that on the short timeline it definitely makes sense to use progeny as a means to effect change according to ones own ideals.

I (30) also just sent this to my dad. It made him very happy as we reminisced about all the old machines we've gone through over the decades.

Thank you for spending such quality time with your son

In the US that would be a (search?) warrant which also comes from the judge during a police investigation and authorizes the police to get your phone's passcode under threat of prison time.

This particular case is different because the police did not get a warrant and instead just asked the guy to disclose (without a warrant), which he refused to do, then they tried to use that against the guy in court, which is a violation of the US constitution.

we Homo sapiens outcompeted them and made the world better (in someone’s point of view) for Homo sapiens

I think what's coming into focus for a lot of people nowadays (i.e. the last 50ish years w.r.t eco conservation) is the idea that we are actually making the world worse (for humans) - that actually making the world better for ourselves necessarily includes limiting or reversing our out-competition of other life. While it may not be noticeable to humans that a single species has been driven out (even just out of a region and not necessarily to full extinction) over the course of 10 or 50 or 500 years due to human activity, that does still represent a change to the established biodiversity, which (many people believe) is likely to be net-negative for humans.

Reasons for these beliefs likely vary according to people's experience and interaction with the physical world. Personally, I find great joy experiencing wildness and nature, and I worry that my daughter will not have that. Others might be concerned that the loss of species incurs the loss of some aspects of nature from which we might be able to learn - that there was an opportunity to better ourselves that is now gone forever.