mtdewcmu

10 ms·

61.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
Doctors should be more skeptical of pharma companies' marketing claims, right? Who believes everything they read? There's probably a case to be made that the FDA should have been more involved, too. The data on how fast OC release
62.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
The really broad, overarching point of the article is that a treatment facility was getting good results in children previously considered hopeless. The novel technique is using positive, rather than negative, reinforcement. It seems kind o
63.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
>> Sympathetic nerves are damaged by over-release of noradrenaline, which causes them to withdraw from the immune cells that they should be moderating. As the disease progresses, these nerves advance back into the tissues that they ab
64.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I don't think it's ever a binary question of can versus can't. I think that the disease manifests as a source of internal distractions that are hard to ignore. Think of pain. Imagine trying to take a test while someone was j
65.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I think of ADD as Amphetamine Deficit Disorder. In a practical sense, "ADD" is the disorder that afflicts people who function better when given amphetamines. Personally, I feel that anyone who wants to take amphetamines should be
66.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
And it's more portable than a piano. That seems like the killer feature in that scenario, no? You can compose songs anywhere.
67.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
Music is not my area of expertise, but 1. It looks like there are limitless possibilities in that area of technology. 2. Magic Mode reminds me of Omnichord. It looked like with the Omnichord, you could do certain things more easily than wit
68.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
Maybe I was reading into it, but I got the impression that the end product here was something more of an artistic nature rather than a website. If the end product is something that is basically a computer program, like a website, then I exp
69.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
It sounds like one of the core issues is dimensionality reduction. I would suggest reducing everything to text. Text is one-dimensional. In this case: >> Like any other map, we can add textual labels — street signs if you will. This a
70.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
Point taken. I think the kind of bias that is most insidious is bias that is not easily recognized and affects hard news. The most important issue is "can I trust what I read here?" The most dangerous kind of bias would be bias th
71.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
Do you find that his writing is very hard to follow? He makes sense to me, but I've been reading his writing for about 15 years now. He has always seemed to me to be significantly underappreciated. Maybe it's because people can&#x
72.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
The examples of bad predictions that you mentioned are outside his area of expertise. I usually skip those columns. He has to write two columns a week and I think he runs out of topics. His on-topic columns can be repetitive, too. The solut
73.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I think Krugman undercuts his credibility somewhat by being explicitly partisan. It makes it easier to dismiss his point of view, if you don't read his arguments carefully. Besides the fact that he writes lucidly about economics, what
74.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
You seem to be missing the nuance. Krugman's over-arching point was that cutting taxes on the rich doesn't boost the economy. His point about Clinton wasn't to say that raising taxes boosted the economy. All else being equal,
75.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
>> Some will say mainstream press is biased and has an agenda The people that say that are generally conservatives (or a subset of conservatives). Liberals generally don't complain about the mainstream media being biased. I'
76.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
This doesn't seem like a new concept at all. The New York Times* strives to be even-handed and report only credible information. I consider the New York Times trustworthy. This seems to want to be just another news outlet, except with
77.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I would describe this as "fact-based" economics. Paul Krugman had a good column yesterday[1] pertaining to the other kind of economics, which tends to exacerbate the problems. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/
78.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
My proposal is basically that the proto-organism has to learn to eat before it can do anything else. The processes that you have described could still have important roles to play.
79.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I wrote out the mechanism that I'm proposing down lower, and I'm going to paste it again up here so that people see it. My idea of how Metabolism First would work is something like this: 1. You get a lot of weird chemistry happeni
80.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
It's hard to have an idea that's completely unique. It actually makes me feel better if there's a precedent, because that's an indication that the idea makes some sense. It's possible that I encountered the MF hypot
81.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
>> Going from a string of RNA to another string of RNA is no easy task. Additionally, going from RNA to a protein requires more than just energy. It requires a molecular factory which can commence protein synthesis. If you're sta
82.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I think the fundamental problem is that a strand of PNA floating in water is just a strand of PNA floating in water. It isn't an organism, because organisms do things, things that require inputs of energy. I don't see how this lon
83.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
Hmm. I could see the day-night cycle as creating the large molecules of organic junk that the life, or proto-life, springs from and eventually eats. It seems like having big molecules of junk lying around would set the stage for self-replic
84.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I don't see self-replication as being the hard part. Once you have enough complex chemistry going on, self-replicating processes will appear spontaneously like contagious diseases. I'm thinking of, e.g., prions, which self-replica
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by mtdewcmu 9y ago
>> One of my points is that replication does not require a separate energy source, in the right environment. RNA is highly reactive given the right temperature and conditions, I actually don't know what a flask full of RNA will d
86.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
I went through several different ways to approach responding to your comment before writing this version. I think this is most succinct. Self-replication can itself be viewed as a metabolic process. You really can't have replication be
87.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
Life seems like a very inefficient way to dissipate energy. And that's kind of the point, you need to hang onto the energy long enough to do something with it before it dissipates. The most efficient way of dissipating energy seems lik
88.
by mtdewcmu 9y ago
The hypothesis that goes something like RNA bases -> RNA -> proteins -> life seems to sidestep the issue of metabolism, i.e. what did the first organism eat? What was its energy source? When I picture life arising from nothing, the
89.
by mtdewcmu 10y ago
I was always suspicious of the diet/lifestyle explanation for diabetes. It's conveniently unfalsifiable, and it's obnoxiously paternalistic and moralizing.
90.
by mtdewcmu 10y ago
There is hard evidence here[1]. Less than 5% of people reported euphoria in clinical studies of OxyContin. [1] http://www.rxlist.com/oxycontin-drug/side-effects-interactio...

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