gomijacogeo

12 ms·

61.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
My own tin-hat theory on that is DNA probably co-evolved with RNA pretty quickly. The main difference between RNA and DNA is that a single RNA strand can fold up and bond with itself to make interesting( ) 3d shapes while DNA can't se
62.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
And yet we have no more mastodons, dinosaurs, trilobites, ... Stuff still goes extinct, it's just a lot slower with cows than with molecules. I think you're just failing to grasp the sheer numbers involved here: there are probabl
63.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
No, it really doesn't; it took a few generations of stars exploding and slamming into each other to make all those heavy elements we kinda consider important. You might be able to move it back another 3-4 billion years, which is adm
64.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
There's a tiny bit of variation across the tree-of-life, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#Alternative_genet... But the variation is in the one place you could possibly have it - by changing the inter
65.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#Alternative_genet... Although most (all?) of the variability is in the one place you can make it without almost-certainly killing your host organism - in repurposing the
66.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
Most precursor molecules (e.g. CH4, NH2, etc) aren't chiral, so differently-chiral'd proto-life would still compete for the basic building blocks. Each time one set of complexes managed to get more efficient at something, it prob
67.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
I think the most likely reason is simply that they were first. And whatever managed to close some metabolic or reproductive cycle first got, and I mean this quite literally, an exponential boost over everything else. So think of early p
68.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
The simplest reason is that the ribosome evolved very early on (and is probably the best preserved remnant of whatever the earlier "RNA world" looked like) and it was always easier to leverage that machinery than to evolve anoth
69.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
There was one nifty thing that fell out from having delay slots - you could write a threading library without having to burn a register on the ABI. When you changed context to a different thread, you'd load in all the registers for the
70.
by gomijacogeo 7y ago
The Felisa Wolfe-Simon / NASA debacle from 2010 was trying to claim that GFAJ was using Arsenic in place of Phosphorus in biomolecules (especially the DNA backbone). This was quickly debunked. The paper (indirectly) cited here is clai
71.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
This is an idiotic article. First, to suggest that padding comes at the expense of operational improvement is wrong; well-applied padding is operational improvement. Second, some of those time losses are due to the move from turbojets (wh
72.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
Dell UltraSharp U3011. It's about 7 years old, but the backlight and image quality are still good, but technology has moved on.
73.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
I used to run 2x 24" monitors in portrait mode (2400x1920) which was pretty nice. I upgraded to 27" monitors, but portrait mode (2880x2560) involved too much head tilting so I ultimately went landscape (5120x1440), which was both
74.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
As this was where you made you question, I'll stick with you here in the ruthlessly utilitarian minefield (i.e. people and $$$'s are fungible). First, a clarification, it's 30 pack-years. There are lots of ways to get to tha
75.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
Another thing we know now about MCAS is that it's locked out for 5 seconds after each trim switch operation. So, if you never have stab trim engaged for longer than 5 seconds a shot, you should be able to trim up the plane.
76.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
It's a shame that MCAS behavior wasn't fully explained after the first crash. If it had, they might have remembered that flaps disable MCAS. If I had to go "off checklist", I'd go: stab trim off -> flaps 1st de
77.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
The report is now available at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5793877-Preliminary-... Flaps-up was commanded about a minute after take-off, which seems about right. The AGL altitude of the plane is hard to de
78.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
Slight correction, they turned off the stab trim and tried to manually re-trim the plane, but the aerodynamic loading on the stabilizer was so great that they couldn't turn the trim wheel by hand. So, sadly, they re-engaged the stab t
79.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
Although a stuck AoA sensor is also going to have a very characteristic signature - no change in reported AoA. A working AoA sensor will always have some noise in the signal as the air buffets the plane. Similarly, if you maneuver the pla
80.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
Do we know, exactly, how much of the 737 Max 8's flight envelope was lost compared to earlier models? I'm getting the feeling that the instability happens far closer to the regular maneuvering envelope than is being alluded to in
81.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
It's now being reported there were no survivors.
82.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
It could definitely have been a "bump" (a manufactured 'accidental' introduction). If you work in a sensitive field, I'd definitely report it. If you hold a clearance, you should have already reported it. I wouldn
83.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
Next from Boeing: a car where, if you unlatch your seatbelt before the engine stops, the airbags deploy.
84.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.324_1254 In short, sexual reproduction is very old (> 1 billion years ago) and first appeared in an ancestor of all eukaryotic cells and long predates multicellular life. So, all
85.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
If you rolled back the clock a decade or so, every 'weak' technology listed could have been presented as a 'strong' technology with another, earlier technology as the 'weak' one. E.g. Private intranets <- de
86.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
I think there's a spectrum of behaviors that range from legitimate news gathering to something very much like espionage. Scenario 1: Leaker: Hi, I'm XXX, I work for YYY and I'm witness to event ZZZ that I think must be expose
87.
by gomijacogeo 8y ago
The request to minimize frequency changes was to lessen their workload in the cockpit and was probably also meant to convey that they were still a bit busy flying the plane. It's not an unreasonable request.
88.
by gomijacogeo 9y ago
Ask them to sign NDAs.
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by gomijacogeo 9y ago
In one way, the last draft is more canonical than the official spec - if you are talking chapter and verse to another person about the spec, odds are good that they are referring to the last public draft also.
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by gomijacogeo 9y ago
Two words: Norman Wildberger.

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