eggie

A gui installer would be fun, but an installation process that fixed all the weird quirks (like with LANG settings) by default would also go a long way to making it more approachable.

Guix is amazing, all the awkwardness aside.

There are plenty of viruses from animals known to infect humans

Yes, absolutely. AFAIK that's where almost all viruses that infect humans come from.

it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human

With extremely high efficiency, from the first appearance of the virus! If it were not already optimal, then the initial transmission rate would have been lower, and the genome would have had to rapidly change in the process of surviving. This was seen with SARS1. It's seen with other epidemics. The fact that it isn't seen here is very, very weird. Why did SARS2 not have to adapt to its new host?

The antibody tests do have a degree of cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses, but if this is reliable it's a fascinating finding.

Preface: This is rumor, although one that would require extreme cleverness and coordination to fake.

A US intelligence contractor that collects location data from apps on phones made a presentation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was shut down from October 7 to 24, 2019. This was reported in the popular US press [1]. You probably missed that in the nightmare flood of last year. I did when it was first reported...

Thus far, the earliest-detected SARS-CoV-2 in the EU has been in November. I would bet that no evidence is ever found for it globally before late October, 2019. We may look for a long time.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-sa...

While from a US political perspective, it may appear that the lab leak hypothesis began with the conspiracy theory that China created a weapon, this is not the dominant perspective among scientists who have expressed doubt publicly (and privately).

Our prior is that novel viruses come from zoonotic sources. We haven't ever experienced a pandemic derived from a laboratory leak. It seems fanciful, because it would be unprecedented. But, what would it look like if it did happen? How would it be any different than what we've seen?

Given the situation, yes, we cannot make any conclusions without evidence. And this implies a burden of proof on governments. The fact that this outbreak began in China is unfortunate, but it does not make it right for them to withhold information on the origins of the virus. They should share every scrap of information and evidence that they have, or expect exactly the kind of reaction that you are critiquing.

There is no fallacy of middle ground here. There is simply a lack of hard evidence to confirm a particular hypothesis about where this virus came from. And, there is an uncomfortable abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing in a highly unusual direction. This is not an issue that you can align with the US political spectrum. And it can be approached without needing to make any claims about how good or bad the Chinese government is. You cannot claim to know what this virus is without information that is not available.

Claims that it is zoonotic are unfortunately just as baseless as any conspiracy theories about weapon development that you've been hearing. The argument for zoonotic origin are based on a single piece of evidence that came out of the labs in the very city where the virus was first found: the sequence of a related SARS-like virus, and one with some very unusual sequence features and publication parameters. Doubt is reasonable. We should fully accept the possibility that humans were able to generate such a construct, and be ready for the next time it happens. The basic fact is that we know how to make such a virus, and that information is now out in the open whether or not this particular virus came from a lab.

The devices are conceptually great: just an android tablet with e-ink. The software is kind of low-quality. They're fun to use, and good for reducing eye strain while doing things that you'd typically do on a phone, laptop, or tablet, without limitations.

But... the devices are absolutely the most fragile electronics I've touched in 20 years. I've had two break on me in as many months, babying them and being incredibly careful.

The first one developed a line of stuck pixels within the first week of use. It happened while I was using it, which was surreal to watch. They replaced it, but I had to pay shipping, which wasn't cool.

The second locked up a few days ago. I rebooted it, thinking it'd be OK, but discovered that the capacitive touchscreen was not recognized. I'm not the only one. You can see dozens of people complaining about this here: http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/boox-note-pro-capacitive.... Now I have to use the pen, which doesn't work everywhere in the interface (e.g. for reading PDFs, it's impossible to turn pages) and the device locks up after ten minutes. So I'll be sending this one back too, because I'm outside of the limits for a full refund. Maybe the third one will last more than a month.

Their design and quality control are horrific. The high price of the device only makes sense from the perspective of them having to replace everyone's device three or four times.

I hope e-ink screen having android devices become commonplace and onyx gets competed out of existence.

A more hopeful interpretation. This can be a tool for good. It's not necessary for the state to have access. We already have access.

This capability is precisely what we need to generate data that can be used to resolve this crisis and allow us to safely exit from quarantine.

The GDPR allows individuals to request access to their own data.

They can voluntarily share this with their health systems, communities, and governments, such as when testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. This doesn't have to be open-ended, just for recent data that could help track transmission and find other contacts.

On the flip side, individuals who don't know if they're carriers can plug their own data into a system that relates it with the movements of affected people and warns them if they need to get tested.

The low mortality is likely due to the recent introduction of the virus into the community there. It takes weeks to go from infection to ICU.

If universities had to worry about students defaulting, they would get rid of bullshit degrees that don't result in an actual job and the prices would come done due to free market forces.

This is a hypothetical but classic example of how regulation is required to support a free market.

I conjecture if/when e-ink displays match conventional LCDs in response time and resolution there will be a movement towards “outdoor offices”.

I think you're right. Working outdoors with a laptop is already better than indoors. It'd be easier with e-ink.

It seems unlikely to me that biological systems wouldn't exploit digital (e.g. genomic/DNA/RNA) kinds of memory storage, given that the materials are there and the energy costs of maintaining and accessing that kind of storage can be fantastically low. Keeping memory alive in neural circuits would seem much more difficult. Surely that's happening to a large degree though. I'm just highlighting the possibility of an alternative basis for certain kinds of memory in the brain.

neurons appear to serve as both CPU and memory storage

I'm not sure this is really certain. But that uncertainty is more because it's hard to prove that there isn't another means of recording memory than something we know.

There has been speculation that there might be some genetic or biopolymer based system in the hippocampus, but I'm not familiar with anything more than speculation on that topic.

I know you're probably annoyed that I'm telling you that you're using ddg wrong. That's not exactly what I'm saying. It's more like: we're trained to expect certain things from the search engine, and so it's hard to switch.

Or consider how "elm dict" in Google takes me to https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/Dict (#1 result), but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=h_&ia=web in DDG doesn't (nowhere on page 1).

ddg gives me the source code to elm Dict (8th hit, so it's in the first page): https://github.com/ivanov/Elm/blob/master/libraries/Dict.elm

I assume it's the same because ddg is claiming not to affect search results by anything except time and user configuration.

Google's results (for me) are a full page of references to every different version of elm's documentation for dict. Not exactly a wide net, and frankly pretty redundant. To see anything else, I have to click at the bottom of the page. It doesn't show me the source code. I went through the first ten pages and didn't see any link to it.

For ddg, I just use the arrow key to scroll down, and I can press enter to follow the link I want, changing the meaning of "first search page" for me quite a bit.

DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results.

I have a completely different experience in italian. They're actually pretty good, which is surprising given the small audience.

For work, usually I directly search for documentation in reference systems (e.g. en.cppreference.com). Neither ddg or google will consistently direct me to the "best" documentation. YMMV.

And the chain. The chain has more pieces in it than the rest of the bicycle by a significant margin. A safety bicycle could never have been created with out modern precision mechanical engineering and production.

As WGS comes online for association studies it will both validate and more deeply explore the genetic nature of every disease. It is going to be mindblowing.

But there is another layer of confusion, because WGS implies resequencing, and resequencing is only as good as your reference genome, and will distort results when the genome you're inferring is to far from the reference (reference bias).

The real mind bend will come when we have thousands or millions of whole genome de novo assemblies and we compare these to each other to do our GWAS. Only then are we going to have a hope of knowing what is actually causal in a genomic sense. Until then we remain in the land of association.

In nature, most adaptive variation appears to be large and structural. All the recent studies that have used whole genome assemblies to look at this have found the same thing. I would be surprised if this isn't the case for humans too. If it is, then much of current perspective on GWAS (both based on chips and WGS) will need to be rewritten.

... if you're really paranoid about this then just take an algae supplement, which contains plenty of DHA. That's where fish get it. They don't make it themselves. And it doesn't come with all the pollutants you get from fish these days either.

The article does note that the bioavailability of this for humans may be very low. We are not fish. We did not evolve to eat algae. If you'd like to be as healthy as you can be, eat meat, sometimes, and don't ignore your body's cravings for fat.

They are touting it specifically in the context of the visualization of very large datasets.

The fact that their software exists is itself a breakthrough. It enabled me to do things that other equivalent tools (such as in statistical packages) could not allow. I would have been reduced to directly implementing my rendering pipelines, and I would also have had to make many of the same design decisions they made, such as doing things out of core.

So... like... what happened, exactly?

A group added a new DNA base pair ("X" and "Y") to a strain of E. coli.

In genes, codons are triplets of DNA letters that transcription and translation machinery converts into specific amino acids. The mechanisms by which this happens are complex, but well understood.

The new DNA letters were used to make new codons that could be translated to particular, novel, amino acids.

Does this mean that Talon is based on private APIs provided in OSX?

I agree. However, it can be hard to observe, even in the large, public sequencing data that is currently available. There is a large amount of mtDNA inserted into the nuclear genome, and this can make it appear that there is rampant heteroplasmy until you control for it. The actual contribution is extremely hard to observe.

undiscovered checksum scheme

I don't think checksum is a fair metaphor for anything happening in biological systems.

Most mtDNA between humans is the same

And most DNA is also the same. A percent difference is the kind of thing that would require millions of years of divergence to develop.

mtDNA is only 16,569 base pairs long

This is really not so precise. There will be a mixture of lengths due to insertions and deletions, even in the same individual, even in the same cell.

The differences between mother and child are almost always due to the father's contribution, and not to mutations.

Do you have a citation for this?

CRISPR in individual humans sounds potentially great

Nuclease based editing with CRISPR is only going to be able to disable things in somatic tissues. You need to include exogenous DNA template in order to evoke precise allele changes, and that's really only possible in vitro.

bioinformatic advances like automated cell detection for enhanced next-generation sequencing techniques

Do you have a citation for this advance?

That would be something to directly ask Prof. Bohr who's mentioned in the article.

but because it works without sacrificing realism, and thus demonstrates that the Cophenhagen interpretation (neither local nor real) claims strictly more about the nature of the universe than is required by the evidence we have

Nicely put!

Wave function collapse on measurement isn't weird anymore if the wave function represents your knowledge of the system.

To me it is intuitive if you consider that the wave function of the small entity is interacting with the much larger (and more specific) wave function of the observing apparatus. I never understood the mystical aspect with which this was treated in the typical explanations of the Copenhagen interpretation. And I would also appreciate the guidance of someone with a better understanding of the physical theories, if my stated perspective is confused.

I agree. Even in the big cities the level of english speaking is pretty low, and definitely lower than in Barcelona. But this shouldn't be a problem. Take the month or two of effort it takes to get started in the local language where you live, make an effort over time, and you'll find it to be no barrier.

Actually, you can get by pretty well in Napoli on english. Initially it was a struggle for me (native english speaker) to avoid using it all the time and learn the local languages.

It's true that it's not Berlin, but on the other hand it's not any harder to get around in english in southern italy than in portugal (the suggestion in the current top post in this thread).

It's true, this might be one of the optimal markets for this kind of farming. You're right about the other niches. There will be a few. Blueberries in Brooklyn. Us hipsters need our avocado toasts and rare fruit brunches in all seasons.

With unlimited power, everything changes. We get the incredible luxury of scientifically produced vegetables. They can be optimized to perfection in harmony with consumer tastes. Every season brings a new designer crop...

Well, maybe it could happen without unlimited power. We can dream.

This is another in a long, long series of breathlessly promoted "urban"/"vertical" farming concepts. In virtually every case the description is projection. The economies rarely work out except for leafy greens in extremely dense urban regions without reliable access to countryside or greenhouse options.

Are you affiliated with growcomputer.io? If not, how do you know what they are doing? The site is blank.