gort

11 ms·

61.
by gort 12y ago
> The only explanation that makes sense to me is that HIV has emerged previously, but only in dead-end strains that have very low infectivity, rather like the HIV-1 groups N and P mentioned in the article. Or that modern innovations like
62.
by gort 13y ago
> So you're entitled to that content for free? The web browser sends a request to the server requesting something, and the server can either say "200 OK" and send you the document, or it can do something else, such as refu
63.
by gort 13y ago
> As for questions of religious proof, existence, and so on... I'll get to them when I'm done with more important issues, which is basically everything else. But some of the prevailing religions of our time tell us that one&#x2
64.
by gort 14y ago
> A species which naturally reduces fertility in response to crowding If almost every member of a species is doing this, you need to explain what stops the rare mutant genes that don't give this behaviour from rapidly becoming more comm
65.
by gort 14y ago
Some combination of covert communications and/or trips to the toilet.
66.
by gort 14y ago
> Whenever someone tells me about the "right" to healthcare, I ask, "From whom? From me?" This question exposes this "right" for the robbery and slavery that it is. > If too many doctors quit, the government might try to make them w
67.
by gort 14y ago
I feel I'm given explicit authorisation to read the page when the server sends a "200 OK" response to my request to read it.
68.
by gort 14y ago
People can wake up from coma, I take it. But in cases where damage to the brain is so extensive that we can reasonably say all capacity for future thought has been lost, the primary worry really is just for the wishes of the family. The med
69.
by gort 14y ago
> For instance, could a person with Down's Syndrome be denied protection from murder? Since nobody seems to have given a straight answer to this, I will. Someone with Down's Syndrome easily counts as an intelligent being, and is not eve
70.
by gort 14y ago
Back of envelope calculation: A. Starting height = 39045 m B. Desired speed = 343 m/s C. Acceleration = 9.8 m/s/s D. Average speed while accelerating = 171 m/s (half of B) E. Time to reach desired speed = 35 s (B divided by C)
71.
by gort 14y ago
> Mutation happens randomly, then natural selection will sometimes prune out bad mutations. That's all. That is not all. Beneficial mutations sometimes occur; and because they provide a benefit they spread through the population [caveat
72.
by gort 14y ago
"point that was made in the essay, which is that there are no working Lamarckian mechanisms in biology" Fair enough - Pinker seems a bit too firm about that.
73.
by gort 14y ago
I'm not sure how it's relevant to the issue of group selection and altruism; but anyway such inheritance still seems to be relatively rare, as far as I know. It's interesting that you call it Lamarckian - the epigenetic inheritance system i
74.
by gort 14y ago
The difference between worker bees and cells in a body is that the cells in a body (call them "somatic cells") are 100% genetically identical to the cells that actually do the animal's reproduction - i.e. the cells that produce sperm or egg
75.
by gort 15y ago
Hmm. If anything I'd expect them to have evolved a lot of interesting deep-sea adaptations that should render them rather unlike our 500 MYA ancestors... remember they've had just as long to evolve to their peculiar environment as we have.
76.
by gort 15y ago
Another argument is this: The (wrong) graph has been drawn with 12 cycles, based on approximately 12 lunar months per year. But the result is obviously not to scale. If you try to draw it to scale, the truth jumps out at you; it can't have
77.
by gort 15y ago
If I recall correctly (it's been a while), the normal Mandelbrot works by treating each pixel as a complex number and seeing if it escapes to infinity or not when iterated through some formula... the Buddhabrot however plots which values ar
78.
by gort 15y ago
I have to speculate since the article is short on molecular details, but I would guess the mosquitoes carry simple knockout mutations which prevent them from manufacturing some essential compound, maybe an amino acid. Therefore, there's not
79.
by gort 15y ago
It's suggestive, it raises the possibility, but it's hardly proof as it stands.
80.
by gort 15y ago
This seems to be a freely available version: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf
81.
by gort 15y ago
I thought the idea was that if this decision had gone the other way then Microsoft wouldn't have achieved its current position.
82.
by gort 15y ago
"Species" is a vague and slightly philosophical concept, but I think an actual population of people with 44 chromosomes would have to become established before the term was applied. "A species" is typically defined as something like "a grou
83.
by gort 15y ago
Out of curiousity, how confident are you about the general idea of humanity surviving and in a good state? I know your work focuses on the idea that AI, poorly implemented, will probably destroy everything of value; so how confident are you
84.
by gort 15y ago
Odd. The filed legal paper says "iCloud Communications was formed in 2005".
85.
by gort 15y ago
That's true of overt ads; ads masquerading as reality have less need to worry about such things.
86.
by gort 15y ago
Perquisite, not prerequisite. Perquisite means something like "perk".
87.
by gort 15y ago
While many traits that help an individual also help its group, I take it that "group selection" refers to traits evolving that harm an individual for the benefit of the group. It's really difficult to get this to work, since the selection
88.
by gort 15y ago
The fundamental criticism seems to be that the authors take kin selection to be a fundamentally different sort of thing from "ordinary" natural selection. That is indeed a very strange view since the two are really tightly connected logical
89.
by gort 15y ago
"a way to count to 512" 1024 (or 1023), surely?
90.
by gort 15y ago
There must be shorter, easier Socratic dialogues one could read. Maybe Euthyphro, or something: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

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