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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Ah, a definition of life in Namibia for a grade 12 course. Quite the scientific authority you have there.

    Here’s a short paper (Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 32, 387-393, 2002) that refutes your position that a single definition of life is definitively agreed upon.

    Here’s a paper (Synthese, 2012) on how a definition of life is impossible and pointless.

    There is a species of dog that infects other dogs as a parasite. There are viruses with larger genomes than some bacteria. Obligate parasites and endosymbiotes often lose large portions of their genome and depend on their hosts for their vital functions. Nature doesn’t care about are definitions, and biology hates hard cutoffs.


  • By that same logic, should president Truman have been ousted after WWII? Should the Canadian trucker convoy have torched parliament? Should all governments decend into chaos as soon as any group doesn’t like them?

    I’m not saying this specific turn of events shouldn’t be resisted, I’m looking for better logic, a reason why the rules shouldn’t apply here. Something like the overt and immediate threat to people’s wellbeing and freedom. It doesn’t matter how good or bad this administration is going to be according to an individual, it matters that they’re going to cause a lot of unnecessary harm to a lot of people. Subjective opinions are how we got here.

    Maybe we’re past the point of that mattering, perhaps a critical mass of people just want to cause harm and a lot of fucked up shit is inevitable, but I do hope to keep a sense of ethics and justice to rebuild when the fight for existence ends. I don’t want to become the uncritical extremists we’re fighting against.


  • Sure, I agree with most of that. Dwarf planets not being planets feels intentionally confusing though, and the definition is basically Major/Minor planet anyway. A planet having hydrostatic equilibrium is such an elegant and applicable limit, yet the current definition specifically counts only bodies that clear orbits (how is poorly defined) around this star. It’s a bad definition in several ways, and many astronomers have already complained about this. Many use planet anyway, particularly planetary scientists.

    It’s all about how useful the word is, and putting the limit at our star and a vague idea being the biggest thing in one general area feels more like it’s gatekeeping the word “planet” rather than facilitating understanding or discriminating something useful. Planets can change class simply by drifting closer or farther away from the sun, or even be temporarily demoted by a rogue planet.

    most would agree that the best definition would be the one that has the biggest consensus amongst biologists, and maybe more precisely microbiologists.

    This is precisely the part I disagree with. Consensus isn’t truth, and better definitions are likely possible. Not that consensus even exists here, the specific definition of life is controversial and several definitions are used in different areas. Homeostatic reproducers, replicators, entropy pumps, chemical system that evolve; it’s almost as bad as double-slit interpretations.

    And most such definitions you’d find would include “self-replication” as a necessary trait.

    Replication? Sure. Self-replication? That’s either an incredibly arbitrary limit seeminly designed to specifically exclude viruses, or isn’t applicable to anything except perhaps the entire tree of life as a whole. Where is the line of “self” drawn? As a human, you can’t replicate yourself, you need other organisms to collect energy for you and to make some proteins for you, and a sexual partner. Tapeworms need their hosts to digest food for them; cuckoos need other birds to feed and raise their chicks; E.coli needs other organisms to feed them and maintain a suitable environment; clonally transmissible dogs need another dog for all nutrients, and protection; and viruses need cells to provide the replication hardware. Some viruses even have some of the genes necessary for DNA copying and protein synthesis, and can be infected by smaller viruses themselves.


  • I’m 50-50 on this. Peaceful transition of power is about respecting the decision of the people. A reasonable reason to buck the peaceful transition would be if it didn’t align with the will of the people, but that will is so obfusicated and twisted that I can’t tell what it even is anymore. If you have an issue with the transition, you should have an issue with the process that got you there. Bucking only the transition isn’t attacking the issue, it’s throwing a tantrum because you lost.

    A miscarriage of justice isn’t solved with a pardon, it needs systemic changes. The rules are wrong, and ignoring them sometimes won’t make things right. What I would respect is rebuilding the system to be more representative and less able to be twisted. Gerrymandering, conflicts of interest, voting availability, lobbying, voter knowledge, even the journalism industry as a whole; there are lots of huge problems out there, ignoring those resorting to an armed “nuh uh” at the last moment is stupid.

    That said, installing a dictator has never gone well, and being petty and stupid is probably worth avoiding that. It’s probably worth quite a bit more really. So I wouldn’t like it, but I really couldn’t complain.



  • I disagree. At one time, consensus was the Earth was the center of the universe, that the world was just a few thousand years old, that life just sprung into being sometimes, that unwashed hands were perfectly fine to perform surgery with, that some peoples were much closer to other animals than some other peoples, that the universe was static, that light was continuous, and that Ceres was a planet.

    Consensus is nice, but usefulness is the gold standard. Is holding metabolism and a complex proteome as the limit of life --excluding viruses, preons, and mechanical reproducers-- useful to expanding our understanding of life and how it functions? Is taking replicators as the most important distinction a necessary step to understanding the origin of life and how we can engineer it ourselves? Will the ability to manipulate certain chemicals and not others help us describe the world? Are edge cases explained better with a genomic, proteomic, or metabolomic base?

    I do know that we have a lot left to learn, and I would be very surprised if our current definition of life is fully sufficient for the next century of life sciences.



  • And yet, that wasp will die out in a single generation if it’s host disappears. It does most of it’s own processing, but it’s existence is still contingent on a specific host species. Does that make parasites less alive than other life?

    Many insects go through a phase of their lives without a mouth or stomach. They can’t eat at all and quickly starve. Are they less alive?

    Most life would die out if the sun stopped shining. Does that make chemotrophic organisms more alive than phototrophic life?

    Chemotrophic life still needs chemicals to eat, and are completely useless without them. Does that make a Boltzmann Brain the most alive thing possible, coming into existence without any outside action whatsoever?

    Plants depend on the sun for energy, animals depend on plants for carbohydrates, we depend on animals and plants for carbs and proteins, mayflies depend on stored energy from their larval stage, parasites depend on other organisms for transportation, food, protection, parenting, and even homeostasis. Viruses depending on other cells for reproduction doesn’t seem out of place to me.


  • Complex organisms can also drastically change from point mutations, although such changes are more likely to kill the organism as they grow more complex. Viruses are so incredibly simple and make so many copies that this doesn’t matter.

    Many organisms can hybridize, which can make drastic changes with much less chance of fatal errors. Plants especially like this; see farmed maize vs wild maize or the entire brassica genus.

    Viruses also hybridize though, and can do so much more drastically. Most of the critical genes are in the host, so virus genomes are free to do whatever, and because they highjack other genomes a very small change can radically alter their behavior.


  • They had a huge amount of diversity between the Cambrian and the Carboniferous periods, then all but a single order (Nautilida) died out when land animals became a thing, and only a single genus survived the Triassic extinction. They went on to flurish globally until only 20 million years ago, when specifically seals appeared. Nautiloids went extinct everywhere seals existed, leaving the only living species in the Indo-Pacific.

    Their shells have a tendency to float huge distances, with some floating for over a decade. So not only are they a “living fossil”, their shells are found even when they are not.


  • I’d say a Control Panel, I miss the plethora of authoritive knowledge and settings for every program, device, driver, network, user, and a dozen more things besides, all findable by browsing and not remembering dozens of commands. Of course I’d miss that either way, because Control Panel has been gutted every new version of windows since XP, but it was once nice.

    The Start menu context menu, or SUPER+X, is still nice, although mostly for avoiding poor UI choices and slow menus. The fact that many useful options are guaranteed to be there on every windows machine is nice though.

    And I would also say Event Viewer, despite how incredibly clunky it is to use. Having one place to check all system logs and track crashes of all kinds was quite useful.

    Basically, windows at one point went out of it’s way to centralize settings and info, and that’s just not possible in Linux without a lot of setup.


  • I believe they’re talking about the W11 context menu, where most common options (like copy, paste, and delete) are replaced by icons that look almost identical to each other. They’re all soft rounded lines and have no defining features, which means you need to stop and parse the icon twice for every cut & paste. They also change position based on which options are available, so you can’t memorize the locations, and since delete is one of the options, I wouldn’t trust my memory.

    Most of the interesting options like edit, run as administrator, open file location, readable copy paste options, or installed options like Edit with Notepad++ or 7zip > are hidden behind a Show more Options option, which just opens the window 10 context menu. Same styling and everything.

    Basically, everything about the W11 context menu slows me down and nothing about it is more usable or helpful.