jballanc

34 ms·

271.
by jballanc 11y ago
1. Mueller's ratchet is still a hypothesis. A well supported hypothesis, but there are cases that it doesn't yet explain (Bdelloid rotifers, for example). 2. Even accepting the premise, it doesn't explain why sexual reproduct
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by jballanc 11y ago
Correct. Sex is advantageous over the long term. This is not up for debate. The question is how to compensate for the considerable costs in the short term so that sexual organisms are not immediately outcompeted by asexual organisms.
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by jballanc 11y ago
Again, it's the exact opposite. In an asexual species, a disadvantageous mutation will be flushed from the population very quickly, as those without the mutation will outcompete those with. You'll never get an individual with ten
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by jballanc 11y ago
Absolute numbers don't matter, only frequency, as in evolution you have to assume that individuals are reproducing fast enough to exceed the carrying capacity of the environment. And yes, once you get to more mutations then sex is more
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by jballanc 11y ago
While it is definitely too soon to consider this hypothesis even close to settled, it's not as far out as it might seem at first glance. Indeed, what we evolutionary biologists have always said is that the cost of sex is compensated fo
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by jballanc 11y ago
You're misunderstanding how gene flow works. Consider one individual with one advantageous mutation that has 1000 offspring. In an asexual organism all 1000 will contain the mutation (minus any small frequency of the mutation spontaneo
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by jballanc 11y ago
Apple's target customer doesn't need a graphics card to do anything more demanding than video editing. It's been probably at least 7 years since you could get a Mac with anything like a top-of-the-line graphics card. Are ther
278.
by jballanc 11y ago
Does no one remember the Eee PC? The whole "netbook" craze? It was at least 2-3 years that each quarterly earnings call some analyst would ask, like clockwork, why Apple was letting the netbook market get away from them. Officia
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by jballanc 11y ago
I've used Vim exclusively for 12 years. Over those 12 years I tried switching to Emacs no fewer than 5 times. The longest it stuck was 3 months, and I still felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders when I switched back to Vim. 6 mon
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by jballanc 11y ago
D'oh, my mistake. The VM is, indeed, register-based. The C API is stack-based. But yes, a very lovely bit of code all together.
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by jballanc 11y ago
LuaJIT is, indeed, a genius masterwork, but it's also very intricate and complex. I'm not entirely sure anyone other than Mike Pall could understand it completely. On the other hand Lua (The Original™) is also a beautiful bit of
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by jballanc 11y ago
My intuition (and it's really only just that) is that Go space is large enough that AI would be able to outplay humans while still not even beginning to approach "perfect" play. If so, then I would also expect that humans sho
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by jballanc 11y ago
I doubt it's considering that directly. What I'm guessing (without having really studied the paper in depth) is that if you have two board positions which would score identically in the end, but where one has fewer remaining liber
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by jballanc 11y ago
Well, that's where AlphaGo and the progress in Go AI that it represents is so exciting ! The game of Go is so fluid with such a huge number of possible positions that players tend to adopt certain styles of play en masse . I'v
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by jballanc 11y ago
From my limited knowledge of the game, a few of the moves that Lee made before AlphaGo "lost its mind" were a tad on the aggressive side. The conventional wisdom in Go is to prefer more conservative moves (increasingly so as the g
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by jballanc 11y ago
So AlphaGo is just a bot after all... Toward the end AlphaGo was making moves that even I (as a double-digit kyu player) could recognize as really bad. However, one of the commentators made the observation that each time it did, the moves
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by jballanc 11y ago
This is old news for geneticists. Since Mendel and Punnet we've known that a.) traits don't average or "mix" from parent to child and b.) individual traits don't assort randomly. In a more modern context, the Human
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by jballanc 11y ago
I can't speak for the entire military[1], but I've known a few "brilliant military minds" and they rarely, if ever, talk in terms of killing. The military's goals are usually things like area denial, disrupting line
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by jballanc 11y ago
The Mosul dam is on the Tigris river which originates in the Taurus mountains of Turkey. We had a fairly regular winter as far as snowfall goes, but the spring has arrived very early this year.
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by jballanc 11y ago
Nice to see benchmarks reported using a modern, reliable benchmarking tool. Impressive numbers too!
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by jballanc 11y ago
Ah, ok...so modify the statement to "Every non-nuclear state that has attempted to gain nuclear capabilities has declared that they are doing so to protect against aggression by <fill-in-nuclear-state-here>." The bottom line
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by jballanc 11y ago
South Africa already had a nearly completed device by the time the rest of the world found out and, as a result, was gently nudged to "not do that". Israel is a nuclear state, as far as I know (not publicly acknowledged, yes, but
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by jballanc 11y ago
Every non-nuclear state that has attempted to gain nuclear capabilities has declared that they are doing so to protect against aggression by the US/the west (pick one). "We", of course, proclaim that this is nonsense , and t
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by jballanc 11y ago
It was mentioned during the press conference today that gravitational waves are not affected by interstellar/intergalactic dust the same way light is. In theory, once our detectors are good enough we should be able to use gravitational
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Coinami: A Cryptocurrency with DNA Sequence Alignment as Proof-Of-work(arxiv.org)
2 points by jballanc 11y ago|0 comments
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by jballanc 11y ago
Something like this: https://www.google.com.tr/search?tbm=isch&q=wildlife+overpas...
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by jballanc 11y ago
I think you only need to do a image search for "badger claws" to get your answer: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=badger+claws
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by jballanc 11y ago
This is very much what Lua has done. Major version switches not only don't retain backwards compatibility, but have in the past drastically changed the language. With v5.0 they finally seemed to hit on a good combination of features, s
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by jballanc 11y ago
It's a bit sad to think that the Apollo program might end up being something of a modern-day Roanoke Colony. I really hope that we manage to get back to the moon before the last of the original moon walkers leaves us.
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by jballanc 11y ago
Based on the fact that they are using ACE to edit code cells and MathJax to render Latex, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a large chunk of the app is written using web technologies, and porting to Windows/Linux should

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