Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
#Tarbosaurus: "You look so yummy I could just eat you up! Be my valentine?"
#Deinocheirus: "No."
(art by Tuomas Koivurinne)
Real #wolves are fascinating, beautiful, awe-inspiring creatures. #Direwolves were pretty neat too. I really wish people could appreciate the actual animals without feeling the need to mythologize them.
One of my favorite concert memories is of being at an #Einstürzende #Neubauten show when some yob in the audience shouted "set shit on fire!" ... and #Blixa #Bargeld snapping back, "We do not need to set things on fire. We have #Rammstein to do that for us."
"For example, there’s a good argument to be made that #humans, #chimpanzees, and #bonobos all belong together in one #genus, either #Pan or #Homo. It’s only our desire to see ourselves as something special that causes us to put them in one genus and us in another. If #ravens—probably the smartest **living** #dinosaurs, although some #parrots give them a run for their money—were building a #taxonomy, they’d undoubtedly lump us together with our close relatives. But they might go to great lengths to separate themselves from #crows!"
I like to think I can still turn a nice phrase now and then.
https://dinosaursworld.quora.com/If-Troodon-was-not-real-then-which-dinosaur-was-the-smartest-2
It's been at least a decade since I thought, "I really need a #drink," and a good bit longer than that since the thought was followed immediately by the action. But it's been on my mind much more recently, for reasons it's not my place to discuss, and even if it weren't for those reasons I'm not sure it would ever quite go away. For everyone who will never stop #craving #alcohol or anything else: I will happily help you celebrate every inch of ground you take back and hold.
I get the appeal of climbing #Everest. It’s not something I’ll ever do myself, but if I were younger and richer, I might consider it as a goal. My beloved #mountains here in #Colorado can be plenty challenging, but they aren’t even #foothills to the #Himalayas—more like foothills to the foothills. So yes, I understand the draw.
#Snowboarding down? I don’t get that at all. It’s not #mountaineering, just pointless showboating. I won’t say I’m glad this guy perished in the attempt, but I’m not sorry about it either.
From a long-ago Facebook post: "#Pirates *generally* aren't scientists. But let's be honest here, what #scientist hasn't at least occasionally looked at the sad state of grant #funding and been tempted to run up the Jolly Roger?"
It might be the angle, but that looks kind of peaky and heavy-tailed to me. I suspect whoever designed the church adheres to the Leptokurtotic Heresy.
From a recent conversation elsenet:
"Not a fan of the whole #alpha / #beta / etc."
"Not a fan of reality eh?"
"Reality is much more complicated than labeling people by Greek letters. If you really think that kind of thing makes sense, well, have fun with it. Don't expect the grown-ups to play along."
I really need to stick to my vow to stop engaging with these clowns.
Nice overview here. I'm particularly pleased that they acknowledge the uncertainty about what #supercontinent will form next: too many stories present one of the possibilities (usually #Pangaea #Ultima) as a near-certainty. We know for sure that there is at least one more supercontinent in #Earth's future, and probably more, before plate #tectonics stop entirely in a billion years or so. Everything else is informed speculation at best. All this has happened before ...
Performative support for the #Israeli government does not provide cover for welcoming literal #Nazis into the ranks. There’s a lot more to the issue than that, and I do believe there is a significant and disturbing #antiSemitic* strain on the left. But it’s not the blue team that will bring the barbed wire and ovens.
*Everyone knows what “anti-Semitic” means, yes? Okay, good. Moving on.
I just encountered the phrase "#conservation of #worship" to describe the way #religious #fundamentalists assume everyone worships *something* just as fervently as they do, and that strikes me as brilliant.
The frantic need to deny that #racism exists in #Europe gets really old sometimes. Absolutely, positively, no doubt the #US is more racist than Europe on the whole. But it’s pretty telling that the only Europeans I’ve ever heard claim that racism isn’t a European problem are those with melanin content as low as mine.
It's a good time to be alive for those of us fascinated by things that no longer are. 🙂 Big #paleontology news today:
1. A new #Tyrannosaurus species. Unlike most of the other proposed new *T. whateveri* of the last few years, this one looks quite well-supported. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-47011-0
2. The earliest skin impressions ever found from any #amniote. Amniotes are #reptiles and #mammals, basically: animals which can lay eggs on land (or give live birth, in more derived forms) because the #embryo is protected from dessication. This is in contrast to #amphibians, the first #vertebrates to live on land, which absolutely require a long-term water source for reproduction. In that sense amniotes are the first **true** terrestrial vertebrates, and we wouldn't be here without those distant ancestors. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01663-9
The first will no doubt get about a million times more attention, because *Tyrannosaurus*, but the second is at least as big a deal IMO. Links via Thomas Holtz. I'll try to have my own relatively insignificant thoughts when I get time.
Posted for discussion, not for approval. The idea that the way to maintain critical old code is to feed it through an AI which is supposed to convert it to a newer language without any loss of functionality, and expecting it subsequently to be readable and maintainable, strikes me as literally insane.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
There needs to be one of those internet laws to the effect that whenever anyone leads with "technically" or "to be pedantic," whatever they say next will just be wrong.
Skynet has tested our defenses, decided that we're much more useful *without* nuclear extermination, and decided to let things go for now. Carry on.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
