Theoretical biologist here. I consider viruses to define the lower edge of what I’d consider “alive.” I similarly consider prions to be “not alive,” but to define a position towards the upper limit of complex, self-reproducing chemistry. There’s some research going on here to better understand how replication reactions (maybe encased in a lipid bubble to keep the reaction free from the environment) may lead to increasing complexity and proto-cells. That’s not what prions are, but the idea is that a property like replication is necessary but not sufficient and to build from what we know regarding the environment and possible chemicals.

I consider a virus to be alive because they rise to the level of complexity and adaptive dynamics I feel should be associated with living systems. I’ll paint with a broad brush here, but they have genes, a division between genotype and phenotype, the populations evolve as part of an ecosystem with all of the associated dynamics of adaptation and speciation, and they have relatively complex structures consisting of multiple distinct elements. “Alive,” to me, shouldn’t be approached as a binary concept - I’m not sure what it conceptually adds to the discussion. Instead, I think it should be approached as a gradient of properties any one of which may be more or less present. I feel the same about intelligence, theory of mind, and animal communication.

The thing to remember when thinking about questions like this is that when science (or history or literature…) is taught as a beginner’s subject (primary and secondary school), it’s often approached in a highly simplified manner - simplified to the point of inaccuracy sometimes. Many instructors will take the approach of having students memorize lists for regurgitation on exams - the seven properties of life, a gene is a length of dna that encodes for a protein, the definition of a species, and so on. I don’t really like that approach, and to be honest I was never any good at it myself.

I’m a theoretical biologist.

The best book I read on multilevel selection theory was actually written by a professor of philosophy. The author broke down the individual concepts, as they do, so that anyone reading it knew exactly what each technical term referred to. Biology is my favorite subject because there’s so much that we’re still figuring out and it’s just ridiculously complex.

I might have had a similar hot take as an undergrad when everyone has an ego based on their major - and I was even a computer engineering student for awhile, and engineers tend to be even worse at that sort of thing.

I cannot accept this spider as payment because it only has seven legs.

If he goes to the hotel, though, he will get to hear a great story from the owner of the hotel about a once beautiful but now decaying resort that includes a sweeping adventure involving a not-exactly-straight con man, an art theft that was not a theft, Willem Dafoe, and Tilda Swinton.

Cool! There’s probably a small factor differentiating the two, but it’s not that noticeable.

I did a research project looking at (iirc) kinase cascades, in which we were using a molecule-by-molecule simulation to look at cascading signals in hypothetical signaling networks, and varied the levels of phosphorylation required for activation required at each tier, and showed how the different topologies/rules governed the relationship between input and output signals, and their relationship to noise tolerance (since chemical networks can be quite noisy). It was very abstract in that we weren’t reconstructing known networks, but rather using sandbox physics to explore the idea.

Exactly. For me, it’s been about creating mathematical and computational models of biological and ecological dynamics. There’s a researcher in what we could safely call computational sociology, which similarly tries to create a working model of social dynamics that exhibit/explore social processes (eg, altruism and contagion models). I e done a lot of work in that field too, because a lot of the math and systems theory is the same behind both.

I was in a freshman bio lab where an unbalanced centrifuge using glass test tubes sent blood and broken glass spraying over half the lab.

I hated lab courses so much I ended up just going into theoretical biology.

In the books, Isildur turned invisible by putting on the ring, and dove into a river to escape a band of orcs. The ring, under its own will, slipped from his finger and he was spotted by orcish archers, who killed him.

I’ve always thought that the “invisibility” aspect of the ring was that it shifted the wearer into the shadow realm. The Nine were invisible without their cloaks, but were visible when the ring was worn. It also made the wearer more visible to Sauron, iirc.

If that’s the case, then the power granted by the ring might mean that magic users (such as Gandalf or Galadriel) would more easily draw on power from the other realm into this one.

This is how biologists reproduce.

Here’s the thing. You said a “jackdaw is a crow.” Is it in the same family? Yes. No one’s arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be “specific” like you said, then you shouldn’t either. They’re not the same thing. If you’re saying “crow family” you’re referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people “call the black ones crows?” Let’s get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It’s not one or the other, that’s not how taxonomy works. They’re both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that’s not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you’d call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don’t. It’s okay to just admit you’re wrong, you know?

A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

It sounds like someone made a wish to a genie and it was granted in the worst possible way.

I am going to try this, but I’d really like to know why it works. Someone else suggested cold water on the knife. Do the irritant molecules from the onion react with the water on your hands/wrists/knife before getting up in your eyes?

I am especially sensitive to this. I’ve found that using a very, very sharp knife can help, but some onions are especially strong. At that point I’m breaking out the swimming goggles.

Also the ability to burrow under the sand for protection from predators and the elements.

I’m know I’m going to get downvoted for this, and a witch will put her curse on me, but here it goes.

I actually like audible. The subscription runs me somewhere around $12-13 per month, and includes one credit that can be used for any book. You can also buy extra credits for about the same price, and you can give audiobooks as gifts. My partner also has a subscription and I’ll frequently steal unused credits. I used to try to game the system and get the longest or most expensive audiobooks I could find with my credits. It was fun to get a 40 hour long $45 audiobook for $12. Now that I have an audible library that’s starting to rival my Steam library in terms of unplayed content, I’ll just grab whatever has caught my eye and pay cash for anything under $12. They have a lot of sales. They also have free content, but it rotates and sometimes they’ll pull the free books after a while.

Being Amazon, it’s pretty platform universal. Their apps are pretty much everywhere, like with kindle. They also have a very large library with a number of books labeled as exclusive to audible. These include full cast productions, which can be really fun.

All of that gushing aside, their software is fucking horrid. Every few months they’ll do an update that breaks something. It doesn’t make the app unusable, but it’ll change the invisible hit box size for the buttons or screw up the logic somehow. I currently have negative 56 minutes in the book I’m listening to, and although I can go back and forth using the +- 60s buttons, the scrubber/progress bar isn’t working. I suspect they have major QA issues at Amazon, like a lot of the big companies do.

Anyway, between the ubiquity, the prices, the free content, and almost seamlessness of the experience, that’s the service I use. I listen to audiobooks every night while falling asleep as well as when I’m working around the house or whatever. I listen to the point of having two pairs of AirPods so I can swap them when the batteries die after 4 hours. Plus, depending on the book, the kindle edition and the audible edition can stay in sync. Sometimes that’s helpful, sometimes very much not.

I know there’s more open source options out there. I had to do that to get Cory Doctorow’s new book since he refuses to publish via Amazon, but it was a much bigger pain in the ass than I’d prefer. At this point in my life I really want something that just (mostly) works and requires zero attention. I’m mid to late stage career in science/tech and I want to dedicate exactly zero brain cycles to listening to an audiobook. Audible does that. Plus, like I said, they have Amazon money so they have a number of exclusives and freebies and sales.

I might have recommendations as far as books go if I knew your or your daughter’s tastes in literature, but as far as the base app, I’m sticking with audible.

What an absolutely believable conclusion announced by an absolutely credible organization that has no motivation except to publish the unvarnished truth.

Is it $20 or $20k?

I’m pretty sure the penalty on withdrawal is a percentage of the amount withdrawn, so if you’re using tax prep software I’d just enter it as written and see how much it changes your taxes. It’s probably not even going to be a rounding error compared to your overall tax bill.

Both the title and the text of this article are painting with far too broad of a brush.

The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle.

This was one study done on the remains of 24 people from one place. It’s only towards the last paragraphs that the author points that out, and even then it’s both soft-pedaled and linked in with western male biases.

While we still have a lot to learn about the vast varieties of human civilizations from 10k years ago, and while there are always massive cultural biases that need to be criticized and overcome, this is an example of the worst of scientific journalism. They take what’s an interesting study in a very narrow niche field, and instead of communicating it as such or saying how the work could be expanded, they write about it as if the author has managed to flip archeology on its head.

Just for starters, there’s almost never a single paper that changes everything. Science is a process of incremental progress with plenty of false starts and which undergoes constant revision. There’s a reason why it takes decades for a Nobel prize to be awarded - and those researchers are the ones who define and revolutionize their fields. The first author on this paper is a PhD student. I have no reason to question the soundness of their work, but the enthusiasm of the Guardian author (and the student’s advisor) is in excess of the meaningfulness of the study in a way that is frankly gravely concerning.

Some societies were primarily hunters. Some were gatherers. Many never became agricultural societies. Many did. Rather than throwing out every anthropology textbook because of a single paper written by a student from the University of Wyoming based on an analysis of 24 remains from a specific region of the Andes, it would be better to say “Hmm, that’s interesting - I wonder if that applied more broadly to the region,” or even “I wonder how many other regions depended largely on wild tubers.”

For better and for worse, humans (and I mean that term to be inclusive of species other than H sapiens as well) populated almost every ecosystem across the planet. They hunted and gathered and planted and raised livestock. There are fascinating interactions between the modes of subsistence of a culture and cultural norms from family relations to trade and war. In many cases the ecosystems they lived in don’t resemble what we see in those regions today, from weather patterns to flora and fauna. There’s less than no reason to think that populations living in wildly different ecosystems would resemble one another - they simply did not.

I’m very happy that these folks ate a lot of potatoes, and I agree with the more general observation that conventional wisdom is mostly wrong about many things, ranging from evolutionary biology to theoretical physics. I just wouldn’t ride too far on this particular horse.

I have read about individuals doing this, but to my knowledge it has never happened in any sufficient numbers to tilt a primary in any state.

Some states run open primaries, so that any person can vote in any (but only one) primary. Other states run closed primaries, such that any voter who has registered as a member of that party can vote in that particular party’s primary. Yet others (eg, California last time I checked) have mixed modes. I believe the CA GOP primary is closed by the Democratic primary is open.

You can tell relatively easily by the number of votes in any given primary election whether they’re consistent in terms of turnout with previous years. As far as I’ve ever read, they tend to be year over year consistent. The one trend that has been noted in recent years is a small but as far as I know steady increase in independent voters (who as stated may or may not be able to vote in primaries depending on their state, but based on number of votes cast do not seem to have been a deciding factor in primary votes).

I generally have suspected that the idea of people switching parties to act as primary spoilers is largely just projection, as we tend to expect malfeasance of the Other, but the hard truth is that you can barely get large numbers of people to vote in actual elections, much less in something like a primary.