(biologist - artist - queer)
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You’re the only magician that could make a falling horse turn into thirteen gerbils
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- 3 yr. ago
- Posts
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- 3 yr. ago
Why post this summary article from an obscure news group when you could have posted the actual report from the former official?
It's written in accessible language, so it's not like it's too technical to understand or anything...
Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I think this (and the van gogh incident) is a great and appropriate protest.
It causes a knee-jerk reaction to be mad that they are harming a precious piece of history and culture, which is a perfect juxtaposition to how the climate change harms our precious natural resources and will harm ourselves, and
It achieves this without actually causing permanent damage to the subject artifact, and
It is incendiary enough to remain in our public consciousness long enough for it to affect the discourse.
I only wish there was a more direct way to protest the people most responsible for the worst effects (oil executives, politicians, etc.), but the truth is that the "average middle-class Westerner" (most of the people who have access to enjoy these particular cultural relics) is globally "one of the worst offenders". While I firmly believe that individuals have less power to enact change than corporations and policymakers, this protest does achieve the goal of causing reflection within people who have the power to make changes.
It must be different in different places. I went from a renter in one area, to an owner in the same area, to a renter again in a different area in the period of 5ish years (long story).
Rent in the first area was about the same cost for a two bedroom, two bath, 1000 sq ft apartment as the entire mortgage on a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1200 sq ft house, including principle, interest, and taxes. The only reason people would rent there is because they don't have the money for a down payment.
When we left that area, we could have become landlords and rented the house out. We could have easily gotten twice the entire mortgage in rental income, but we felt that being a landlord was unethical (especially since we were relatively wealthy for that area, although we made less than the US median family income). We sold the house and broke even.
Now, we live in a much higher COL area. It's true here that renting is much cheaper than buying, but that's because you can't get a SFH for less than about $1.5 million here. My rent on my 1 bed, 1 bath, 700 sq ft apartment is more than twice my mortgage in my previous area. Our incomes have increased, now we make slightly above the median family income. But our leftover at the end of the month honestly went down a ton. If we weren't here to get an education, we'd be gone by now.
Just saying.... As someone who has both rented and owned, I definitely feel more like I'm shoveling money into a fire as a renter. Owning was the best financial situation I'd ever been in.
Just curious, when you say "those products are still on the shelves", do you mean they're selling product from the lot numbers that were recalled?
You should be able to tell the grocery store employees and have them remove it if they're selling recalled products, but also I wouldn't be surprised if they're only selling products that are no longer part of those recalled lots
Edit: WAIT you said "still not on the shelves", sorry! Ignore my comment lol
shoulda said "yarrr, ye dumb bastard!"
awesome!! I'm psyched you caught it and enjoyed it :-)
it is definitely still a problem, the "naturalness" of the finish is irrelevant
even burning wood itself releases compounds that can be harmful (hence why we advise against breathing in smoke)
I second the idea from a separate poster that if you want to burn, seal, and add more burns-- just use a solvent to remove the seal before you do the second set of burns. Or burn it all at once before sealing
how reliable do you think herbs-info.com is?
(the answer is probably: not very)
that is pretty metal and sick, you're right
the tradeoff is that the ring of fire means you can't look directly at it even at peak totality...
but either is so friggin hype
pictures cannot capture the ephemeral, indescribable beauty of the moments of totality
total eclipse wins every time
get effin HYPE
You say you don't like poetry, yet you write a lovely free-form poem. Suspicious...
First, I want to fully admit I didn't watch the video. Apologies ahead of time if that causes me to be redundant or reductive.
Second, I'm also a biologist, although a molecular one.
Third, I agree with almost all of your premise and train of thought. We're certainly more likely to get the likes of "bacterial mats" than intelligent life anywhere, and especially within a distance that we will ever realistically encounter.
I do wonder, though, how you (or maybe the video guy, but obviously not enough to watch the source material before making an ass of myself...) conceptually reconcile the small sample number of known planets with life (n=1) with the mindblowingly impossible number of worlds.
You say that intelligent life evolving only once indicates that it is difficult for evolution to "discover", which is surely possible to be true. But given that we haven't seen the evolutionary conditions on other hypothetical worlds, from what we know, the evolution of intelligent life has a perfect 100% success rate of occurring on planets with life.
In fact, you mention the independent convergent evolution of eyes as an indication that eyes are a "good idea", and that they must be relatively easy for evolution to discover if they evolve independently, repeatedly. But evolution is subject to the whims of selective forces, so a different world would surely select for different traits. Eyes (or other extremely common evolutionary pathways... looking at you, crab body) might be less frequently selected for or be entirely useless, but intellegent decision making and tool use might evolve in ways we can't even conceptualize in our context.
This also extends to the claim of how our world is evolutionarily dynamic (which you point out is hard to quantify in context). We don't know the dynamics of evolution on other worlds, if it happens at all. Recombination could be a unique characteristic of DNA-based life on Earth or it could be extremely common. Other worlds might have longer or shorter evolutionary time lines, also, since our sun's "working life" is shorter than average due to its size and density. Without another example for reference, we don't know whether we're evolving quickly and with diversity or slowly and conservatively.
I guess, I don't think you are wrong, exactly. I just think you are necessarily making assumptions based on how things work here in order to extrapolate how things might work there-- one has to! But the whole discussion (which continues, like this, to this day) revolves around just too many unknowns. We just don't know, and can't know.
Climbing down from my high-horse, though, I have to admit I'm biased, since I have a pet-belief that life is basically guaranteed to exist elsewhere (how freakish would it be for it to only happen once out of so, so many chances?). I honestly feel like there's a good shot that it's incredibly common, at least in a basic form. In essence, I suspect that if we find bacterial mats (or soup) on Enceladus or Europa then it's basically certain that life is everywhere. But we won't even likely know that in my lifetime, so... I keep dreaming!
What organization are you researching with? Why is the submission via Gmail?
How are you handling participant data (mostly email addresses, it seems)? Can participants opt out and revoke access to the data after submission?
Do you have a conflict of interest? Do you or any of your colleagues have an affiliation with Dolby or other companies involved in the research?
Did this proposal pass IRB? I'm guessing it's exempt, so probably yes, but do you have the approval number?
What do you plan on doing with the model? Are these data for training the model or for testing it?
I know those questions sound a lil aggro, and to be clear, I don't think there are necessarily right answers. Maybe you're an undergraduate or hobbiest, like... I don't think IRB is super important for a cute cat study. But I do think this kind of info should be included in recruitment calls as a standard!
Cheers, seems cute and fun
This article is garbage but I'm a molecular biologist and the publication they're talking about is really neat.
The "ELI5 to the point of maybe reducing out the truth" way to explain it is that the researchers can add "flags" to proteins associated with immune responses that make cells pick them up and examine them. This is shown to work for allergins (so say, add a flag to peanut protein and the cells can look at it more closely, go "oh nvm this is fine" and stop freaking out about peanuts) as well as autoimmune diseases (where cells mistake other cells from the same body as potential threats).
It's not nearly to a treatment stage, but tbh this is one of the more exciting approaches I've seen, and I do similar research and thus read a lot of papers like this.
There's a lot of evidence that we are entering a biological "golden age" and we will discover a ton of amazing things very soon. It's worrysome that we still have to deal with instability in other parts of life (climate change, wealth inequality, political polarization) that might slow down the process of turning these discoveries into actual treatments we can use to make lives better...
Still, don't doubt everything you read! A lot of cool stuff is coming, the trick is getting it past the red tape
The fact this has 40 up votes right now makes me feel like lemmy is losing a diverse user base. Like, where are the women to down vote this obviously shitty take?
Let's list some reasons why these women could have done this that aren't "women are sluts for clown daddies":
Like, yeah, some of them might be individuals who have bad taste in men or are shitty people themselves. I'm even certain that some of them are! But damn, can we take the perspective of the woman for one second? It's not a good look to find yourself agreeing with incels on the internet