A friend of mine whose research group works on high throughout X-ray Crystallography had to learn C++ for his work, and he says that it was like "wrangling an unhappy horse".
I really enjoyed the characters. When I think about Mass Effect 3, for example, I think of how I felt when making peace between the Quarians and the Geth, because of how I had gotten to know the characters of Tali and Legion. Or Wrex enthusiastically greeting Shepard as an old friend, something that's only possible if you talk him down in the first game.
I was as disappointed as everyone else at the actual ending to Mass Effect 3, and I do think the plot goes a bit weird even before that (the ending boss fight of mass effect 2 is a bit weird, but again, I think more of the personal stakes that had been set up by good character writing (plus Jack Wall's "Suicide Mission" makes what could've been overly cheesy instead feel grand and epic)), but I found the smaller, interpersonal stories that Mass Effect tells to be quite compelling.
I read the book "A Libertarian Walked into a Bear" and I found the range of Libertarian attitudes interesting — there was at least one Libertarian in the book who explicitly identified as communist.
That's so pretty. What did you use to take the super zoomed in photo?
I live near a city and it makes me want to study enough botany to identify the various plants that spring forth in unexpected places. Some of them are quite beautiful and I find myself moved by their improbability.
As we saw with the COVID pandemic, even in "1st world countries", poorer people were disproportionately affected. Fewer humans won't help when the majority of harm to the Earth is perpetuated by a small fraction who would be disproportionately represented in a world where the majority of people died.
I sympathise with your sentiment, because it often does feel like humans are the problem, but the reality is that we're not. Although it can feel weirdly comforting to think of humans as inherently and innately destructive, thinking this way is a pipeline to eco-fascism, which doesn't offer productive ways forward.
You've bamboozled my attempt to make the same joke at your expense by only mentioning one number in your comment, giving me nothing to add to it. From this point on, I conclude we should only ever mention one number in each comment, for clarity.
It reminds me of how there is a gene that determines whether eating asparagus makes your pee stink, and there's a different gene that determines whether you can smell it. I had a friend who didn't have the stinky pee gene, but her boyfriend did, and she complained of the smell when she used the bathroom after him occasionally. He had the stinky pee gene, but not the gene to be able to smell the stink.
This came up in a random conversation with my friend, before she knew about the genes thing. I was so excited that I got to tell her about a cool science thing that I couldn't speak for a few moments.
In a genetic sense, it is a dysfunction of the gene that causes this. It's neat because we can actually trace the history of human migrations by looking at the distribution of this particular allele (version of a gene). We have analysed DNA from ancient remains of early Europeans and found that the A allele is absent. It appears like this version of the gene first emerged in an ancient East Asian population.
This gene also determines whether you have dry or sticky ear wax. It's a neat gene because it's uncommon for physical human traits to be controlled by one gene — most human characteristics are controlled by multiple genes (polygenic traits); ginger hair is another example of a monogenic trait. ABCC11 is neat because it affects multiple traits: sweat smell and earwax dryness.
It might also be implicated in breast cancer risk (I can't tell whether that's in an increased risk or decreased risk), but we don't really understand yet how that would work. From skimming the research, I would say we generally don't understand how this gene works at all. We do know some stuff about it and how/why it works, but we're still a decent way off of actually understanding its implications.
And you're not allowed to say something is a problem unless you know the solution. My comeback to this is about how you don't need to be a chef to have an opinion on whether food tastes bad or not.
It really is. Version control and branching is all over the place (many proteins with new functionality arise from a erroneous duplication event, which results in two copies of the same gene. This redundancy then allows mutations to accrue in one or both of these genes, as long as one is still functioning sufficiently)
A friend of mine whose research group works on high throughout X-ray Crystallography had to learn C++ for his work, and he says that it was like "wrangling an unhappy horse".