gilleain

Perhaps also vary the bird? Wikipedia tells me pelicans are in the order _Pelecaniformes_ so shoebills or herons might do.

Reminds me of an interview I saw at the height of the NFT/crypto craze, when the interviewee was challenged to come up with a use-case, and they threw out "buying a house".

So there is (AFAIK) just one part of the process to buy a house that blockchains could address, and that is transfer of ownership. The rest of the process is an estate agent (realtor) communicating between buyer/seller/legal/etc to make it all happen. A tiny proportion would be solved 'on-chain'.

Maybe shouldn't need to be said, but people really need to _actually_ understand a problem before proposing a solution!

A good music track does not _need_ a video, but some videos definitely can enhance the music or are just amazing by themselves.

'Sabotage' by the Beastie Boys (Spike Jones), 'Hunter' by Bjork (Paul White), 'Praise You' by Fatboy Slim (also Spike Jones), ... er Billie Eilish 'When The Party's Over', Apex Twin's Windowlicker (Chris Cunningam). There are so many great music videos that are more than just the song.

Of course, some are just the artist singing in front of a greenscreen, and that's fine I suppose. Still, they are fundamentally different to an excellent music video.

If I was feeling unfair I would say there is no difference! However, if a friend drew me an eye on A3 paper would I frame it? Probably yes...

Others have said this better, but art is an qualitative/emotional thing, not a simply measurable quantity of an object. We tend to use the effort put in as a proxy measure for quality, but when photocopiers and 3D printers and - yes - genAI get involved, that becomes harder or impossible.

Beating Guitar Hero is emotional, but not artistic. Photorealistic drawings could be emotional, and may or may not be artistic. Putting a text prompt into a generative model to make a (frankly terrible) music video for $100 is ... something else.

Interesting, so the 'pure vision' of the director can remain unsullied by the inept crew, huh? :)

More seriously, it reminds me of a video I was watching yesterday about a tabletop roleplay DM who was great at _telling_ stories but the players felt they were not included in the story. That is, the 'art' (if it is) of roleplay is collaborative between the storyteller and the players.

Are movies not usually a collaboration among a group of people (director, crew, etc) to produce a single work? Rather than liberating the vision, this process forces the visionary to engage with the constraints and limitations of the real world. Mabe why movies made on massive budgets by directors who have a string of recent successes can sometimes turn out terrible, as their ego outgrows the project?

I partly agree with you - I used to think of mechanical difficulty as a kind of 'proof of work' for art. Nowadays I am less interested in the idea of what counts as art or not.

However, consider works like photorealistic drawings of eyes (usually at a very large scale). A lot of people like these, and consider them to be fine art, while others (art critics?) consider them bland. Contrast that with a Picasso flamingo drawn with a single line.

There is artistic value in high-effort, low concept works as well as low-'effort', high-concept works and other combinations. Perhaps what we are all looking for is effort of some kind (I prefer human effort) whether that is conceptual effort or practice in drawing lines on paper.

The only solution? Answer the phone in an over the top comedy accent, such as Simpsons characters, or just whatever comes to mind.

Well, confusingly, the last picture on the blogpost look (to my untrained eye) to be tetrapods. Those are 'tetrahedral' (ish) shapes.

In contrast, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolos (plural 'Dolosse') are two tapering cylinders at right angles to each other. They have the same symmetry, but a different structure. Does that make any difference to how effective they are? No idea!

edit: When I said the "same symmetry" of course I should have said the dolos has some of the symmetries of the tetrapod (subgroup?).

Interesting point - usually people approach the question "who draws the tiger" from the other end. As in, the assumption is (not unreasonably!) the genAI is doing all the work and the AI 'artist' is doing nothing.

Of course, the more control you have - as you say - over the process, the more you are the artist.

I have to say, I'm not that interested in whether the output 'really' is art or not. I'm sympathetic to non-AI artists and I personally prefer art made by humans. However ... it is not impossible to make something that looks good or communicates an interesting idea with AI, but not trivially.

Of course, now the question the boy in the article asked - "where does the Tiger come from?" - could be answered with "the prompt".

The arguments today are whether a prompt like "draw a Tiger" are the same somehow to someone using a pencil or digital stylus or whatever to draw a tiger.

"But I do know that there’s no program that will draw one from scratch, any size or pose or color or style, like I want it, without an artist at the helm. And there’s no magic answer for us artists except that we are each unique. We are the only variable"

Not anymore! Now the only variable (for good or bad) is the prompt? Just add "super photorealistic, no bad anatomy" I suppose :)

I see that I was unclear - I did not mean "the law goes along with this, and I don't know why?" I meant "I do not understand why Sov. Cit. would believe that the law would agree to these ideas".

A very clear example of this is the 'Sovereign Citizen', who have bizarre beliefs around how to interact with courts. As far as I understand it, there are some 'cheat codes' people believe (incorrectly) are effective in literally getting you out of jail free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement

Another common belief among sovereign citizens is that they can opt out of the purported contract, making themselves immune from the laws they do not wish to follow, by declining to "consent": when confronted by police officers or other officials, sovereign citizens typically attempt to negate their authority by saying, "I do not consent"

Like, why would this be true, and if it was, why would law enforcement and courts go along with it? I find it very odd.

I suspect Sandi Toksvig, one of the hosts of QI. One of the 'success' messages is "quite interestng!".

No offence mean to anyone, but the whole exercise feels very QI : superficial 'understanding' of a large range of things (for example words) without much of a connection between these words.

That's actually a feature that washing machines have had for a while - "generative washing" - it is where the extra odd socks come from.

I recently bought the book 'Watch Repair for Beginners' for reference (a project I slightly unwisely agreed to do).

It has some great diagrams, but obviously nothing on these interactive animations (er, naturally, since it is a book).

However the author (Harold C. Kelley) has descriptions for the diagrams similar to a maths proof - like "Warning lever W is raised in position to engage the pin P ... The unlocking lever U lifts the drop lever D ..." - not easy to follow, but maybe if you have the mechanism in front of you!

I meant metallocenes in general:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallocene

A metal atom sandwiched between two Cp rings. You _can_ model this as 5 single bonds between each atom of a ring (so 10 total C-M bonds), or you have to have some kind of 'edge' (bond) between the ring as a whole and the metal.

The more general issue is that a graph model of a chemical assumes a 'bond' is between exactly two atoms. Three-center hydrogen bonds are another example where this model fails to capture the chemistry very well.

Of course, it's a tradeoff - you can model _most_ compounds with just graphs (plus atom type, charge, chirality) and the relatively few that do not quite fit are special cases.

There is a lot of graph theory in Chemistry - modelling chemicals as (vertex/edge coloured) graphs, reaction networks, etc.

Of course some molecules (eg aromatic systems, like ferrocene) are not naturally representable as graphs. I wonder if it is the same with synthesis - are there reactions hard to model as a graph (or petri net or whatever). One simple example I know is that you have to be careful with including a node for 'water' as it gets connected to everything else! Or at least in biochemistry it does.

You got me. Usually I read them.

edit: Huh. Actually not a bad read. It even mentions ' On Growth and Form' which is interesting, if outdated. There are more modern texts like 'Shapes', 'Flow', and 'Branches' by Philip J Ball.

Surface area to volume ratio?

A very reasonable question, that I don't have an immediate concrete answer to!

Apparently I upvoted this question in the past (found it by searching for an answer - no AI, like the good old days)

https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/2507/are-there-a...

One answer mentions actin and hexokinase. I'm not familiar with the actin fold, but looks like a bab sandwich of some kind.

Another commenter on this page mentioned the 'Rossman fold', another classic, and TIM barrels also occur to me. One caution is that some of these I would consider higher-level patterns - the 'Topology' level of CATH hierarchy.

Naturally, the more high-level (abstract) the fold pattern, the larger the sequence space it covers. It is less interesting to say that a helical bundle (for example) covers a lot of diverse sequences.

That would be difficult - a metabolic map is a diagram showing the known reactions. At any point in time, only a subset of these will be active. Like a road map - at midnight, only some roads will have traffic.

I think what you are looking for is more like a model of the metabolome, showing the flow through the network under certain conditions (steady-state, growth, cell stress, etc). Not sure if there is a readily available database of such models, or how easy it would be just to run them and get meaningful results.

add too numbers

Did you do this on purpose to anger both Mathematicians and keen spellers?

Heh, on my watchlist - ""The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Group Theory" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XsXRUsNEC4

Yes, I was watching a video about that the other day - the 'dark proteome' or the 'ghost proteome' or similar.

A random sequence may not fold at all! I seem to remember a paper that tried this, creating a bunch of random proteins, and checking how much structure they had - I think they were helical bundles, but don't quote me.

The nice thing about stable folds, is that 'nearby' sequences in sequence space - as in, point mutations - are the same fold. If each sequence had a completely different fold, then mutation would be much more destructive. Surprisingly, however, sequences that are far apart in sequence space can also adopt the same fold (convergent evolution).

I see. I meant 'energetically accessible', but you mean more like 'affordably accessible' (in the sense that the molecular toolkit of a cell is what can 'afford' certain structures, due to chaperones available and so on).

Who knows what might be possible if you designed a cell from scratch - perhaps you could rework all the machinery to access other parts of fold space. After all, there are some weird and wonderful machines out there like the 'Vault' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(organelle)) that can fit whole proteins inside them. Possibly a different cage-like structure could help fold designed proteins into as-before unseen structures.

This is about folds, not amino acids - even if you used a larger alphabet of residues, I somehow doubt that you would get many more folds.

Thinking more about the question of protein _length_ - I'm also not convinced that longer proteins (more than say 750aa) would produce more novel folds. Larger proteins tend to be multi-domain; that is, a longer chain will fold into multiple compact domains, each one a separate fold.

I suppose there could be 'megafolds' out there in fold space, beyond 1000aa - like a 12-bladed beta propeller, or a beta-helix with alpha helices on the outside or some other wacky thing. Whether that would substantially increase the numbers of total folds, I doubt, but that is of course a guess.

(ref - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10251718/ for protein lengths)

I understood it as metaphor - just that evolutionarily distant sequences can adopt the same (or very similar) folds because there are only a limited number of stable, accessible folds that are possible.

They found "several thousand" novel folds? I had remembered that there were around 1000:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7072414/

Oh ok, I misremembered:

"This review has focused only on small fragments of fold space with examples given for folds generated from a single secondary structure string consisting of around ten SSEs. Even in this small corner, the number of possible folds, under the current constraints, is of the order of 1000"

Ah FeMo-co! One of the cooler cofactors - iron-sulfur cluster, plus a molybdenum, and finally a bridging carbon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeMoco)

So yes, I can understand why it took so long to calculate the energetics of the system:

"This makes measuring FeMo-co’s ground-state energy extraordinarily complex. There are more than 78,000 plausible configurations the electrons might be in"