@CowperKettle That's one other thing about mental issues. They come with the whole package

> Nothing—really, absolutely nothing—says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century’s most daring and iconic building [The Crystal Palace] was entrusted to a gardener. —Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

@M.A.R. not me. I am the emergent atmosphere of incorporeal electrons

The book strongly influenced the prominent physician William Osler in his early years. Osler, who is considered the "father of modern medicine", is said to have learned it by heart.

It's the first book in English in which Zoroastrianism is mentioned, though briefly.

Insider editor Roman Dobrokhotov’s apartment was raided by Putin's police this morning, along with the apartment of his elderly parents. Insider is a media that investigated Putin's attempt to poison Navalny.

Roman was scheduled to fly abroad today.

It was inconsiderate of him to actually sleep this night in his apartment, where Putin's goons could find him.

He should have fled the country in some inconspicuous way, maybe secretly.

Born on this day in 1635 - Robert Hooke, philosopher, architect, astronomer, polymath and author of 'Micrographia', the first major work on microscopy

Ivan Dorofeyev and Anton Surin have been held in a police station since yesterday, for arranging a meeting between a State Duma deputy and his electorate

Ah. Not since yesterday. Since July 26th.

The Russian law stipulates that any person who has not been charged must go free in 24 hours.

Northern English verbal mannerisms being lost

> "In about 1900, almost everybody said 'thawing' pronounced 'thaw-wing', but the majority of people now pronounce the word 'thawing' with an intrusive 'r', which means it sounds like 'thaw-ring'. Our model predicts this change happened over about 25 years," he said.

Thoring

One letter short of horing

I receive my insulin pens for free from the state

I have a surplus actually

@Robusto

Robot has finished a 5K for the first time in history.

Max van der Werff.. probably another of Putin's useful idiots in the West

Word of the day: acorn woodpecker

Simone Biles suddenly started thinking when she should have been spinning

> When gymnasts have the “twisties,” they lose control of their bodies as they spin through the air. Sometimes they twist when they hadn’t planned to. Other times they stop midway through, as Biles did. And after experiencing the twisties once, it’s very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.

@CowperKettle That seems surprising, given all that robots are able to do now.

I was 72 kg, and today I'm 68.8 kg. Losing 3 kg has increased my pace from 05:20/km to 04:50/km

According to online BMI calculators, my normal weight is below 71 kg.

Above 71 kg, I'm "overweight", since my height is only 168 cm

I see a squirrel in a tree snacking on something, right at the end of a branch amid a clump of leaves. If I were a hawk or some other predator I would notice the non-wind-like shaking of the branch and the tiniest tuft of the squirrel's gray ear hair showing. But my inner jackass just wants to throw a water balloon at it.

> In a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Finkelstein and company detail their new error correction method, which they tested out on a classic novel. They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz, translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We're on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.

They encoded a book in DNA

@CowperKettle This is the plot to some sci-fi story like HGttG. The creators of the universe encode the instructions on how to create the universe into the junk DNA of some proto-ape and then some day a million years later a family is crying outside the surgery where a kid is having a tumor removed and the surgeon pulls out a solved Rubik's cube with one corner cubie twisted.

@Mitch Nice plot

@CowperKettle it's not over yet

A helmet decreaed the tumor by 30%

@CowperKettle Not exactly a thorough scientific study.

Yes

And then the Rubik's cube starts playing in a tinny electronic sound Beethoven's Ode to Joy (muffled by body goo, of course, because this is realism) also tiny, but you get it, and then it pops open with a glitter bomb.

Now that's it.

the plot is done

And the code for creating the Universe is not revealed?

@Robusto But it's a helmet. What more do you want?

"Uh, excuse me, but are you using those DNA strands just now? Google wants to use them for data storage."

@Mitch I want science, dammit!

@Robusto That tech youtube channel is pretty good. all that physics that I never really learned from high school and it's useful. Like why refrigerators get frost. Or the magic of air conditioning.

What's the one thing you'd give to the ancient world if you had a time machine? -air conditioning-

All the wars would stop, literacy of >99%, puppies and kittens for everyone.

@Mitch Air-conditioning didn't do anything to stop wars in the 20th century, did it? Neither did the free distribution of puppies and kittens, for that matter.

@Robusto "We need that DNA back. A cheek swab? Ha ha no."

@Robusto Oh Rob. They didn't do it right.

DNA is pretty miraculous, though. The complete plans for a human being, along with the mechanisms to build that being, all stored on microscopic filaments.

@Mitch Dogs and cats, left to their own devices, produce an enormous supply of puppies and kittens.

DNA doesn't do it all itself. It still needs all that extra machinery around it to interpret it just right.

@Mitch Yeah, but it knows how and when to do what and where.

I find it hard to believe that DNA is specifying -so- much. There are just too many details.

Or rather DNA is not just saying 'put this part here, this other part over there'

What else is there?

like most genes are really controlling many many different things.

@Robusto I don't know. maybe the existence of the chemical environment around the DNA is encoding some things.

like not just a compiler, but a compiler that has substantive contributions.

The point is, the DNA contains the instruction set. The whole set. Absent that, you have nothing.

but that instruction set isn't just a bunch of 'do this one specific thing'.

It's a bit random how the gametes get together to express the DNA, and which genes get chosen, which alleles are turned on or off, that sort of thing. But the instruction set is there.

or rather the 'one specific thing' is like a hundred different things that interact in the weirdest ways with another 'one specific thing'

@Mitch I never said it said to do "one specific thing" ... there is randomness involved, but at the end of the process you have a complete (mostly) being.

@Robusto I never said you said that. But then I don't claim that you are saying that I never said you said that. See what I mean?

I never said that you said that I said that, except where otherwise indicated.

@Robusto And you can tweak millions of codons without having the slightest change in phenotype, but change one specific one and you're Stephen Hawking.

But I don't want to be Stephen Hawking.

Bookprinting was invented in 1450. In the next 50 years, more books were created than during the previous 2000 years.

@CowperKettle Yeah. Human civilization could have ended much sooner if you could have given them those.

)))

@Robusto I deny having said that. I neither claim nor deny that. I neither claim nor deny that and actively renounce any overt or implied denial or claim. My lack of active denial or claim is no indication of my claim or denial, active passive or otherwise.

@CowperKettle The whole Protestant Reformation, with its attendant religious wars and whatnot, came about due to that advance.

Religions are always spoiling for a fight.

@Robusto Then stop changing that amino acid.

God, kids these days

@Mitch I can't help it.

@CowperKettle in 1450 more books were created than during the previous 4 billion years.

uh in Europe

@Robusto Yes! Just 67 years after the invention of bookprinting, reformation movements exploded.

China was probably doing it a few hundred years earlier only to shoot them on rockets to the moon.

@Mitch We can't tell for sure about 4 billion years. I have read that if a civilization existed, say 3 billion years ago, we could overlook its presence. Due to the subduction of plates into the magma layers below.

@Robusto They didn't have universal kitten/puppy distribution.

I rest my case

@CowperKettle The main point of contention was that Protestants wanted to be able to interpret the Bible non-vicariously, without "benefit" of clergy, now that those books were available and (relatively) cheap.

> Ultimately, tectonic plate subduction will melt all our remains into the mantle, leaving aliens to make up stories about what might have been

@Robusto Yes

@CowperKettle Really, dinosaurs had the behavioral complexity to, with some little extra evolutionary pressure, created civilization.

@Mitch It would take centuries for efficient puppy/kitten logistics to be effected. I think Bayes had something to do with that.

But any civilization before say 500 million years ago would have to have done it without fossilizable body features.

not that it's impossible. just... I feel like a hard body shell would really help.

@Robusto haha Bayes what a maroon.

Actually..

fair warning I'm gonna 'actually' here...

Um actually Bayes was a guy who while writing to someone else in an offhand manner said something that -might- be interpreted as tangentially about probabilities, and in no way stated anything near to Bayes theorem.

the theorem was named after Bayes purely as a way to suck up to Bayes in order to put off reconciling gambling debts.

Haters gonna hate.

Players only love you when they're playing

@Mitch So it is Rumoured.

Oh u.

I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax.

@CowperKettle The answer looks pretty stupid from a PEMDAS point of view.

Hey hi! I wanted to tell someone "no need to go ham" but I needed to specify "about this" but is it really about or over, on, with this or it's not used like that?

@escarlateadamantine What do you mean by "no need to go ham"?

The person was discussing a topic and going all in, guns blazing. I thought I could use going ham as some colorful intensifying expression for that...

Or did I mean awol?

I don't know what you meant.

Sounds like "No need to go all in" would be just fine.

@Robusto Well, I picked that up in the songification : youtube.com/watch?v=DcJFdCmN98s

At some point the cheese "is going ham".

Another time he's in the car and alludes to many cars passing bt and he says they're going ham over here.

Like "all over the place" I guess.

Yeah, I don't know what he means by that, but if it's a popular media item you could say "go ham" if your audience was familiar with it.

On the main site it's alluded to in the context of "going berzerk" but it's said to be BrE.

Whereas obviously here it's not in the clip.

My only guess is that "ham" might be a cute name for "hamburger" ...

It's said to be hard as a motherf.

As a possible origin.

@escarlateadamantine The person in the video is not British.

Indeed.

@escarlateadamantine You can say motherfucker in this room. Just don't aim it at anybody in anger.

Sorry I write like shit today.

What is your native language?

QC French.

Quebecois?

Yes.

Or should I say Canardien? ^_^

Just kidding.

lolll

Frog.

But yeah.

Anyway, if HAM is understood by your peers to mean "hard as a motherfucker" then yeah, go ham on them.

People say it should be HAAM if it were that. Anyways, I thought it was better known or more typical. It may not be.

Personally at first I thought the cheeseburger was going ham because there was bacon in it.

Like pork.

So that's why I was interested. Just an opportunity to learn some colloquial stuff.

@Robusto Anyways, thanks there!

@escarlateadamantine No problem.

@escarlateadamantine Articles are often dropped in initialisms and acronyms.