grey413

As it happens, in humans there is a single gene on the Y chromosome, named SRY, that typically switches on male-linked traits.

But you're right, the full range of biological possibilities is very fuzzy . SRY itself a just a regulatory switch that other sex-linked traits are conditionally dependent on. If the switch gets broken, you develop as female. If genes that support the switch break, you might develop as female. If a sex-linked trait downstream from SRY mutates, then pretty much anything can happen. And other species do sex determination completely differently. Hell, a lot of bacterial sex basically involves throwing pseudo-viruses at each other.

Biology is often an intensely statistics-heavy field. A remarkably large part of statistics was developed to study issues in biology, particularly dealing with evolution and ecology.

You'd be amazed how easy it is to take down a janky decades old LAMP stack.

It's the web-scrapers. I run a tiny little mom and pop website, and the bots were consistently using up all of my servers' resources. Cloudfare more or less instantly resolved it.

Looking at these bulletins, they appear to be quick summaries of pretty much any nuclear related incident that happens in the US, no matter how minor. I would assume that these are mostly intended for public transparency, and as for a quick reference point for regulatory action. Introductory slide on a PowerPoint sort of material.

In that context, I'd guess that the 300 CPM figure is just a signpost that says "we measured the worker to make sure that he was safe to release to a hospital."

As I understand it, English at it's core is a Germanic language that underwent significant creolization with scandinavian sources. That core then acquired a significant amount of Old French and latin vocabulary, particularly in upper class terminology.

The creolization is why English has a relatively simple grammar, and all the word sources is why we have like 16-20 vowel sounds trying to cram into latin characters.

Finding local players is always an issue, but there's tons of folks who prefer the more classic style of D&D. Take a look into Dungeon Crawl Classic and OSR takes on D&D like the Black Hack. Those tend to put dungeon crawling front and center. Finding a group usually involves trawling OSR discords or GMing your own local playgroup, but sometimes you can luck out at your local game store.

There's a consistent effort to make all the SI metric units based off of discreet measurements of physical constants. The speed of light is a constant, and the SI second is "defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom, to be 9,192,631,770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s^–1"

Two dashes are fine, the other options have different literary functions than em dashes, and shouldn't generally be used as replacements.

Most people don't use em dashes... apart from professional and skilled writers, who use them regularly.

It's a bit of a problem that the same character is both a mark of LLMs and skilled writing.

Em dashes are very similar to semicolons. You use em dashes if your related sentence is in the middle of another sentence, and semicolons if it's at the end.

They're frequently used in skilled and professional grade writing.

En dashes, I'll grant you, are pointless. Those can go away.

However, em dashes are a different case. The main reason why it's desirable to use em dashes (beside convention) is for clarity of purpose. The hyphen is already a very overloaded character; they're extensively used to denote ranges and link compound words. Importantly, both of those usages do not correspond to pauses in spoken language. If you're voicing a hyphen you're supposed to barrel on through it. An em dash is much closer to a parenthesis, comma, or semicolon. It's a meaningful break in the sentence, in the way that a hyphen isn't.

Now, if it were up to me I'd choose a different character to replace em dashes (maybe underscores), but that's a separate argument.

I imagine it would have been up to the typesetter to make the call. The conventions for dash usage are fairly straightforward. You use em-dashes for asides, en dashes for ranges, and hyphens for most other cases. Its easy to figure out the right character from context (apart from en ranges vs hyphen ranges).

It's infuriating that people are drawing this conclusion. LLMs pick up on em dash usage because professional and skilled writers use em dashes. They're a consistently useful, if niche, part of the literary toolkit.

But, no, now it's a problem because the majority of people's experience with writing is graded essays. And because LLMs emulate professionals, it's now a red flag if students write too much like professionals. What a joke.

A ping pong ball would be roughly 2 trillion trillion atoms, for reference

Yep, that was also my takeaway. In addition, the population of mitochondria regulates the proportion of their specializations via fission and fusion among themselves.

I wonder if there are any disorders related to disregulation in the process.

The fourth amendment requires them for search and seizures.

Well, the writer is the community manager, so at the minimum they are reading the CoC. That in itself shapes their moderation, which shapes the community.

However, in my experience core community members will read things like this CoC, at least partially. They also be fairly involved with discussions about it, which go a long way to shape a community.

Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.

I agree. For reference, the underlying cause of the Darwin and Wallace coincidence was the establishment of modern geology by Hutton (which established the earth was old and naturally mutable), along with the large-scale collection of biological observations by naturalists such as Darwin and Wallace.

Fun unrelated Darwin fact: he's the person who figured out the geology of how and why coral reefs and atolls form where they do.

It's worth emphasizing that part of the reason why publishers are happy to work with providing libraries with ebooks is that libraries are extremely good customers. There's something like 100,000 libraries in the US alone. A single organization like the Internet Archive just simply doesn't have the purchasing power to make publishers willing to give up any ground.

If the IA is creating their own digital copies of physical books, it could be argued that that the IA is creating and distributing derivative works. I'm not certain, but my impression is that derivative works have little in the way of legal protection.

That's very interesting. Just goes to show that there's plenty to be learned. Thanks for sharing.

Well, worry not! Research suggests that the human body can produce up to a quintillion unique antibodies! A vaccine is a drop in a solar-system.

https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2019/2019...

Also very true! Blunting logarithmic growth is a huge net positive.

You're being overly proscriptive about vaccines. Vaccines have multiple layers of effect because our immune systems have multiple layers of effect. You don't neglect the seatbelts just because the car is more likely to crash in the first place.

Something that following the progress of COVID vaccines really taught me is that vaccines have an important role in reducing the severity of a disease in addition to stopping them outright. I'd much rather get a mild flu than a moderate flu, let alone a severe one.

This seems to be particularly true for fast-acting viral respiratory diseases. Our immune systems seem to have soft biological limits on how well they can prevent them.

It seems like you got it in your head that the COVID vaccines would be a able to stop infection entirely, and were disappointed when it didn't for your family. It's not surprising that you did: a lot of the messaging at the time really counted their chickens before they hatched and painted it as a miracle prophylactic. In the real world, vaccines are a population-level tool with a range of outcomes. It's annoyingly hard to communicate that to the masses.

In practice, it turns out that fighting fast-mutating viral respiratory infections is hard to do. Our immune just aren't that great at it, and vaccines can only stack the deck there so much in our favor. I believe that the (observational, hard to rely on) evidence suggests that the covid vaccine reduced the incidence of infection, but only by about 25-50%. And that's good! That doesn't even cover the much more substantial reduction in serious outcomes! A world with the vaccines is unarguably less hostile than that without. But it's not a miracle, and it's always aggravating when people engage in the nirvana fallacy about it.

"When it comes down to it am I more concerned about the disease or the vaccine?"

The disease. You should really be concerned about the disease, not the mild immune system trainers.

Flight plans for Musk's jets are public information.