Drawing of a book with a desk printer on the cover with the title "The printer that simply worked and other fairy tales"

Encountering the fascists outside Waterloo It's clear now that we are in a battle of terrible proportions.

open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

By @iandunt.bsky.social

Israel has lost the West The moral identification that sustained support is breaking down in plain sight

www.jewishnews.co.uk/israel-has-l...

Who ever thought this was behaviour anyone would ever want from their phone? What circumstances produce this behaviour? It seems to be a rare random event. Is there a workaround when it happens?

What's that thing android phones sometimes do? It rings. You get red and green buttons. You hit the green button to answer and the buttons disappear from your phone never to reappear, but the call is not answered and the phone just goes on ringing, but because there are no buttons, you can't answer?

Im literally learning in real time and sharing it with everyone as im going through the journey.

This is literally what I do everyday.

It's a new rabbit hole I will never leave. Im just adding it to my network of holes

OTOH (and talking of giraffes) there would be huge benefits in rerouting the pharyngeal branch of the vagus nerve, but I can't see evolution finding a way to do that 🙂

You are free to hold whatever *opinions* you wish. Facts are a rather different matter.

Gosh! Well done Manchester! #UC

☹️

After all, information flow into proteins isn't like information flow into a black hole (though they keep changing their minds about that too :-).

I suspect that one aspect of intellectual investment in the CD is its (apparent) relevance to Lamarckism (tho I think I'd argue it's not that relevant)

Indeed. I mean there's no reason *in principle* why there couldn't be a general biochemical mechanism for reading amino acid sequences and generating nucleic acid sequences therefrom, though it would be tricky for obvious reasons - which may be why such a general mechanism never evolved.

Polyadenylation OTOH, only "breaks the CD" in a very vague sort of way in that the presence of certain proteins can effect the outcome; and how those proteins do their things is ultimately determined by the sequence of AAs they comprise. IOW, polyadenylation doesn't *really* break the CD.

Well yes. But if you read @philipcball.bsky.social's complete thread, that seems to be more or less what is going on here - albeit in a very primitive and limited way.

Indeed! I was quite happy for my kids to grow up w Tolkien (and will be perfectly sanguine about my grandkids doing the same) whereas I'd have been v disturbed if they'd taken to Rand :-); but I can see how certain aspects of Tolkien might appeal to Rand fans (in ways I'm sure he never foresaw).

It's a disturbing thought, but I suppose if Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Denisovans, and other hominins were still extant alongside modern humans, things would be a bit Tolkienesque in the real world. 🤔

Yeah but humanity is divided up into clearly delineated types each with their own physical and temperamental characteristics. Being baddies is an immutable, racially determined trait of the Orcs.

I don't suggest T really intended this aspect of his stories as allegory, but it's hard to ignore today

Here in Yorkshire Spring seems finally to have sprung 🌱 - which basically means that the rain is a bit warmer.

So did I as a kid, and even later. But it is all rather racist ( implicitly at least) if you think about it.

Rhubarb

You are talking to a man from the Rhubarb Triangle!

Today's crop:

(You have a point mind. You have to be into oxalates to enjoy it.)

vegetable garden

Brassicas (sort of) in: kale, rocket, mustard + lollo rossa and spinach. No point in trying to grow cabbage I've decided. The local lepidoptera eat them all before we get chance to.

Well yes ....... but the point is that there's no real correspondence twixt the botanical definitions of things like "fruit" or "nut" or "seed", and the everyday uses of these terms. 🙂

**ever ***aren't

I should never try to type on my phone.

Moreover, nobody every mentions that, not only is rhubarb not a fruit, apples and pears arn't either!

Funnily enough, I'm just *reading* @matthewcobb.bsky.social's excellent biography (though I *obtained* it on the day it came out 🙂) and was just thinking that it's kind of sad that Crick will never know about this, and we'll never know what he'd have made of it.

Ah! Caught up with it now thx. That really is quite an astonishing finding.

No he wasn't dogmatic at all and the "Dogma" wasn't a dogma. But Crick (and l for that matter 🙂) was pretty sure you couldn't get a nucleotide sequence from a protein template.

That, it would seem, really does contradict the Central Dogma. 🤔

Basically, if you think about cosmology too hard, you will go mad!

There again, there's a couple of problems with my suggestion: 1) the ppl who try to measure this stuff reckon our universe is (the 3D equivalent of) "flat"; 2) (more, fundamentally) it can be argued that the infinity/bounds problem simply re-emerges in 4D, & demands an infinite regress of dimensions