Okay, coffee ingested.

Goooood Day #qoto and #mastodon !

I hope you'll have a wonderful day today. It's another lovely day in Tel Aviv- the heat is finally starting to bleed off and it's super comfortable outside today. I'm feeling good, always a bonus.

So, #RandomQuestion for you find peoples today: Genetically Modified Organisms- specifically crop plants: What's your opinion?

@Surasanji I am a huge GMO supporter for all the good it has brought to starving people. The only legitimate risk I can see is if those species escape to the wild and out-compete native species. With that said for crops it is a non-issue since they rarely grow well in the wild.

@freemo @Surasanji

I more or less agree... I mean, GMOs could be a pretty good tool, but they have often been used in combination with fertilizers and pesticides which are harming the soil and making it a desert quite quick. Other issues seen have been that GMOs have been heavily implemented, leading to the loss of biodiversity, and at the same time a more frail crop.

But this are problems with the implementation, not with gmos themselves, which so far haven't shown a single health or ecological hazard, AFAIK. So i agree, just wanted to toss couple of consideration more =)

@arteteco @freemo @surasanji  the GMO may not kill ya, but the glyphosate might. Technological salvation is a faith based proposition. The burden of proof on safety of novel organisms are on those introducing it. Cannot decouple the test of time.

@js290 @freemo @Surasanji

glyphosate is not related to GMOs by themselves, I think this is getting a bit out of track.

As I stated before, main problem for me is soil degradation and loss. There is no GMO right now that helps the soil, and that means that is not sustainable or regenerative in any way, so I'd look elsewhere for solution, ATM. But excluding as a matter of principle a technology is something I wouldn't do.

Where do you see technological salvation in this exchange of ideas?

@arteteco @freemo @surasanji  Monsanto seeds are "Round-Up Ready" so glyphosate is very much in the mix. There have been reports that that GMO yields are not better. Soil degradation is what annual, monocropping agriculture does. GMO & workerless farms are the technological next steps in an unsustainable and non-regenerative process.

@js290

That is why I said "by themselves". It is a matter of a certain kind of GMOs right now present, it's not how GMO has to be, it's just an example of it.

There are reports of GMOs giving better crops, there are reports of GMOs giving worse crops. It highly depends on what the person doing the report considers "good", what data s/he has and how it is evaluated. There is no consensus on what is the "right" way of doing it, just saying "gmo is better" or "worse" doesn't say much.

Why toss the workerless farms in the conversation? Isn't it difficult and big enough as it is? =D

@freemo @Surasanji

@arteteco @freemo @surasanji  GMO tries to decouple time. As the best engineer I studied with said in grad school, "coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled." Everything in Nature is coupled to varying degrees & definitely to time. Decoupling of coupled systems amounts to alchemy. It's important to be able to discern when someone is trying to pull the wool over your eyes using terms like "science", "progress", "technology" etc.

The solution to these difficult problems may be orthogonal to the direction we're headed in now.

@js290

Sorry, I don't understand what you just wrote... what do you mean by "decouple time"? And by "orthogonal to the direction"?

I'm not native English, or I just may be too ignorant on the matter to understand you =)

@freemo @Surasanji

@arteteco @freemo @surasanji  Here is an example of a system of first order, linear differential equations.

x′1=x1+2x2
x′2=3x1+2x2

We call this kind of system a coupled system since knowledge of x2
is required in order to find x1 and likewise knowledge of x1 is required to find x2. We will worry about how to go about solving these later. http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/DE/SystemsDE.aspx

@js290 @freemo @Surasanji

Before calling myself out of the conversation, I'd like to at least understand the equation.

x'1 means x'*1? x1 is x*1? Why the *1?

@arteteco the equations are derivatives. FODE implies that the derrivative contains the original function. In this case the derivative of x1 on the left and x1 on the right. The notation he chose is a bit confusing though.

A good real world example where that would occur would be a tall tower or bucket with water draining with a hole at the bottom. The volumn of water can be represented as V, the rate of change of the volumn of water (its derivative) would be V', which represents the rate at which water is draining from the bucket.

Because of the weight of the water the more water there is the faster it drains. So the value of V' depends on the value of V. Thus it would be represented by a FODE.

@js290 @Surasanji