bglazer

9 ms·

91.
by bglazer 2y ago
How do you prevent being traced? I believe the answer is you shoot at them with automatic weapons.
92.
by bglazer 2y ago
Protein A binds to DNA at a specific spot near Gene B and allows the cell to make more Protein B (which is the product of Gene B). Protein B then binds near Gene A and prevents Protein A from being produced. This causes oscillations as th
93.
by bglazer 2y ago
A person at high risk of dying from a respiratory virus ignored public health warnings then got a respiratory virus and died. I think the surgeon general should consider this as a terrible object lesson in the value of protecting vulnerable
94.
by bglazer 2y ago
The surgeon general of Louisiana was formerly a U.S. House Representative. Luke Letlow was his campaign chairman and his chief of staff, almost certainly one of the Surgeon General's closest and most trusted colleagues. Luke Letlow die
95.
by bglazer 2y ago
As another commenter mentioned, this is more like a physical limit for efficiency of light capture. However they also follow a scaling law of angular resolution versus diffraction. Smaller lenses means more blur from diffraction but smaller
96.
by bglazer 2y ago
Fun fact about eye evolution, the dark spot you see on a dragonfly’s eye is not a pupil following you, or even a change in the eye itself. You’re actually just looking directly down into the columns of the dragonfly’s eye. They capture ligh
97.
by bglazer 2y ago
No, data centers require very minimal staffing. Like a few dozen people to staff a data center serving hundreds of millions of users
98.
by bglazer 2y ago
Games seem like a really under-explored source of data. It’s an area where humans have an intrinsic motivation to interact with others in dialogue, they can be almost arbitrarily open ended, and there tends to be the kind of clean success&#
99.
by bglazer 2y ago
This is an excellent explanation of the flaws inherent in the rationalist philosophy. I’m not deeply involved in the community but it seems like there’s very little appreciation of the limits of first principles based reasoning. To put it s
100.
by bglazer 2y ago
Nice article about artifacts that make the past more immediate, that allow us to connect our experiences to people hundreds or thousands of years ago. My favorite example is the writings of Onfim, who was a little boy in the 1200s in presen
101.
by bglazer 2y ago
A decade ago, I saw an image that showed the amount of table sugar in a can of Coke and I haven't willingly drank one since.
102.
by bglazer 2y ago
“In mice” is a very important lesson to learn about scientific reporting, but it’s also a very simple and reductive lesson. Most experimental results don’t translate to human studies. That’s it, thats the lesson to learn. So, maybe someone
103.
by bglazer 2y ago
What do you mean by dualism? From the article, emphasis mine: "But we should not be looking for a homunculus in physical systems to serve as a subject. *The subject is the whole system*, or better, is associated with the system in the
104.
by bglazer 2y ago
Yeah it seems pretty harmless. I like the comparison to the Santa Fe precursors, and I definitely agree that a certain degree of more or less sanctioned weirdness is good for the environment. I think what I was trying to convey (a bit hars
105.
by bglazer 2y ago
I'm having a really hard time making sense of the whole enterprise of Qualia Computing/Qualia Research Institute. Like this particular subject (the nature of conciousness!) is rife with cranks, so they're starting at a disadv
106.
by bglazer 2y ago
The twist probably does induce the kind of tangling that you mentioned. But, there’s a class of proteins called topoisomerases that allow the DNA to unwind itself via some very beautiful mechanisms.
107.
by bglazer 2y ago
Interesting stuff, I studied a disease called Cornelia de Lange syndrome, which is caused by mutations in these “molecular machines”. Basically these machines (SMC proteins), grab the DNA then pinch two strands together to make a loop. This
108.
by bglazer 2y ago
The DNA strand is a double helix, but it also “supercoils”. Imagine a rope thats stretched taught. Even the straight rope has twisted braids. Thats akin to the DNA double helix. Then imagine twisting the rope until it starts to bunch and tw
109.
by bglazer 2y ago
Here are some examples. Looks like a simplified framework for writing physical and electrical system simulations. https://mbe.modelica.university/
110.
by bglazer 2y ago
Clever bit of molecular design! It’s a DNA hook that folds and binds to itself. It also has a site for binding to a partner. If you pull gently on the partner it just unzips from the hook and easily detaches. But, if you pull harder the ho
111.
by bglazer 2y ago
Imagine a creator who could design a universe that evolves over 13 billion years and countless trillions of living creatures to generate you and me and the rest of humanity. To me, thats much more amazing than a designer who builds life lik
112.
by bglazer 2y ago
The weird thing is that some of these lncRNA don’t seem to be under super strong selection pressure, at least at the level of individual nucleotides. Their promoter regions are conserved, which indicates that the cell really does need to pr
113.
by bglazer 2y ago
I mean you're getting the mRNA in your body one way or the other. One choice is to inhale someone else's cough droplets, then the self-replicating nano-machines inside the sputum drops take over the cells in your lungs, explode t
114.
by bglazer 2y ago
lncRNA are very weird and I think they challenge some of the common, traditional assumptions about how cells work. Basically, the traditional view of RNA was that it's a messenger between the DNA and proteins. That is, it just functi
115.
by bglazer 2y ago
Totally off topic, but is your name a reference to the Cossatot River in Arkansas? If so, fantastic choice.
116.
by bglazer 2y ago
Chemical space is very very large. Like we can say for certain that only a very tiny percentage of all possible synthesizable organic molecules have ever existed in our universe. The combinatoric explosion is just so enormous that I think i
117.
by bglazer 2y ago
For the second part, we’d be able to do biochemical assays like mass spectrometry and discover immediately that the “alien” life was made of the same proteins as Earth life. Gene sequencing would then confirm a match to a known microbe, or
118.
Prompting Considered Harmful(deepmind.google)
2 points by bglazer 2y ago|1 comments
119.
by bglazer 2y ago
Cheers! I hope your son enjoys learning about genetics, sometimes the introductory classes neglect be really weird beautiful fascinating parts in favor of easily tested concepts.
120.
by bglazer 2y ago
This process is called genome alignment. It’s actually quite a fascinating computer science problem that has received a ton of study over the years. I think the classical techniques treat it as a dynamic programming problem but I’m not sure

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