Blahah

51 ms·

571.
by Blahah 12y ago
Yes, I have some publications, and am familiar with the process. I was attacking a theoretical review to make a point I wanted to make. The blog post doesn't say the reviewer recommended rejection on the basis of implementation in Juli
572.
by Blahah 12y ago
Prior to those packages, R was the language in which most new statistical methods would be published. So it has had very good library support for statistics for a long time. Only more recently has it also gained excellent data manipulation
573.
by Blahah 12y ago
The correct response from the reviewer would have been "I am not capable of reviewing code written in Julia, therefore I must decline this review request" rather than "I am not capable of reviewing code written in Julia, ther
574.
by Blahah 12y ago
Freebie: this is broken... https://www.dropbox.com/s/wwlcyy559xpcxl7/Screenshot%202015-...
575.
by Blahah 12y ago
It actually kind of is. GNU logos are consistently incredibly ugly and show utter disdain for, or lack of awareness of, graphical design [0]. It could be almost like a philosophical point: "GNU software is utilitarian. We don't wa
576.
by Blahah 12y ago
A major use-case for Excel integration is in finance, where a vast number of analysts - not newbies in any meaningful sense - work in Excel. Giving them access to the power of R from within a familiar environment is a great thing. Recommend
577.
by Blahah 12y ago
> Though the site still loses money because of high development costs, it is booming, with gross merchandise sales reaching $1.93 billion last year. The fees Etsy collected on items listed and sold, as well as on services like the promo
578.
by Blahah 12y ago
Beautiful idea and execution. Seems to me that you could monetise this by selling to businesses. For example, you say in the comments that amazon still sells some toys that have been recalled. This is illegal and could land them in some tro
579.
by Blahah 12y ago
> Aging is the number one cause of suffering and death in old age Correction: aging is the only cause of old age.
580.
by Blahah 12y ago
I wouldn't bet on us mere proles not being the product - one promising route to rejuvenation is by transplanting tissue or tranfusing fluids from younger people into older people.
581.
by Blahah 12y ago
Honestly the competition is pathetic. Just got a new HP laptop for my mother - it has a trackpad of a similar size to the one on my Macbook, but the thing is almost unusable. Is anyone making good trackpads?
582.
by Blahah 12y ago
You can't steal a joke - it isn't property. You can plagiarize it, or infringe copyright. But the first isn't a crime, and the second requires litigation to pursue. So nobody cares because generally, these alleged infringemen
583.
by Blahah 12y ago
That would only be true if the food wasted would otherwise be going to the world's hungry. This is not the case. Most of the world's poor do not import food, they grow it in their immediate vicinity. Increased yields help them dir
584.
by Blahah 12y ago
The first two stages of the project have proceeded in parallel, so we've been doing gene discovery and stacking in rice at the same time. I think we're probably 3 years behind schedule - the gene discovery part of that original py
585.
by Blahah 12y ago
Well, with first-generation GMOs, a single gene was inserted into a crop. This is totally unlike all previous crop breeding, where changes were complex and no single gene was likely to control the trait. So before GMOs, there was basically
586.
by Blahah 12y ago
C3 is the ancestral system - 45 million years ago, all plants were C3. C4 is a relatively new evolutionary innovation. The evolutionary history goes something like this. 3.6 billion years ago, Earth's atmosphere was very rich in CO2 an
587.
by Blahah 12y ago
Those restrictions are pretty much exactly what is needed - the vast majority of malnourished asians grow their own food on very small plots. Golden rice would be available to them. It's not available for commercial exploitation by any
588.
by Blahah 12y ago
Food technology has, in the last 100 years, almost completely eradicated famine and has raised over a billion people out of severe nutritional deficit. I'm not saying don't try to fix other things. I'm saying do both.
589.
by Blahah 12y ago
You're absolutely right in the first part - a huge proportion of arable land is used to feed animals. However, this doesn't change the optimal strategy for feeding people in the medium term, for a bunch of reasons: 1. The arable l
590.
by Blahah 12y ago
> Are you talking about sequencing enough to get adequate coverage for reconstruction? Yes. Assembling a genome requires a lot of sequencing data or different kinds, and is expensive. Genomes (especially in plants) can be huge. We'r
591.
by Blahah 12y ago
Chances of pulling it off eventually are very high - I started my PhD with naive prior of around 0.5, and I'm converging on something like 0.9 now. The hardest thing is discovering how the system is fundamentally regulated, and we are
592.
by Blahah 12y ago
> it's highly unscientific to start feeding a large population with foods that haven't passed any testing It's not unscientific at all. Whether to perform extensive testing on foods is not a function of science but of publ
593.
by Blahah 12y ago
Fly-by comment: C4 is very similar to CAM, the scheme that cacti use. So the C4 rice project is essentially what you're thinking of, except that the reactions are separated spatially in C4 instead of temporally in CAM.
594.
by Blahah 12y ago
Well, the project is likely to take another 15 years until we have the system bred into local varieties. This gives us a lot of time for building confidence in what we're doing, and learning from previous failures. Part of the issue wi
595.
by Blahah 12y ago
Upland rice was bred using natural variation within rice populations. C4 rice will require much more complex targeted genetic design. However, we are also harnessing natural variation, and are doing massive-scale screens of natural cultivar
596.
by Blahah 12y ago
Most of asia uses rice as a staple, and it has a cultural history going back over 2000 years. Many governments and other groups have tried to explore encouraging dietary change away from rice as a staple, but it has so far not made any di
597.
by Blahah 12y ago
Many algae already use a carbon concentrating mechanism [0] similar to C4. It works in a similar way, by concentrating CO2 around RuBisCO, the key enzyme that creates sugar from CO2. In C4 plants, the RuBisCO is kept in a wax-enclosed cell,
598.
by Blahah 12y ago
PhD student working on the C4 rice project here. On the road right now but happy to answer questions when I can find a moment. I genuinely think C4 rice the best shot we've got at alleviating a huge chunk of world hunger in one (extrem
599.
by Blahah 12y ago
if it's an entirely computational experiment, which is not uncommon, then 'replicate the experiments' is correct.
600.
Easily ship Ruby apps to end users(phusion.github.io)
3 points by Blahah 12y ago|0 comments

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