AbouBenAdhem

joined 3 years ago
[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 23 points 19 hours ago (6 children)

Since Ben Garrison is the one human whose output most closely resembles AI, I imagine this is him having an existential crisis.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

“Pinkeye” has two definitions: bovine pinkeye is a specific bacterial disease that only affects cattle; otherwise, “pinkeye” is a generic synonym for conjunctivitis.

Dogs can’t get bovine pinkeye, but they can and do get other types of conjunctivitis. It may just be less noticeable in dogs because the white sclera of their eyes isn’t as prominent as humans’.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Wouldn’t being mixed-race imply that half their family is white, and the other half at least associates with white people?

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Over 50% of the U.S. population is white. That means that if everyone chooses a partner at random—or at least without bias due to race—people from all groups will end up with white partners most of the time. So that statistic means nothing with regard to your dating possibilities.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago

Maybe search for highest-altitude reservoirs instead of dams?

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

Chitosan is a real thing and sounds interesting, but the “Visual Nervous Processor System” is no part of the brain I’ve ever heard of.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Don’t get me wrong—most of your questions concern things that are worth questioning, they just seem to slightly skim past the real crux.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (7 children)

One pattern I’ve noticed with some of your posts is that you’ll ask a series of questions that all follow from the same flawed premise. Like, you see there’s an issue somewhere, but instead of backing up and re-thinking your assumptions you’re trying to patch up the resulting non-sequiturs.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Imagine you were making a ladder by sticking together a bunch of identical blocks, each of which was half a rung and the attached bit of rail. But imagine the rails aren’t perfectly straight—each one is a little bit skewed, so when you join the two halves of each rung the connected rails skew in opposite directions. When you add the next rung the skew of the rails will continue, but the rotational symmetry of the rung will keep it centered over the previous rung. The net result will be a skewed helix.

It might help to look at the actual structure of the molecule—you can see how the sides of the “ladder” are made of a lumpy sugar bit that has no reason to stack directly on top of itself. Also notice that the halves of the rungs vary in two ways: there are long and short pieces, and there are pieces that connect with two or three connections. These two variables give a total of four possible half-rung types, and each can joint with only one other type (long to short, short to long, two to two, and three to three).

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

Companies that are leading the market are already profiting from existing science, and new discoveries threaten to disrupt the market—it’s often in their interest to prevent new advances from coming to market even if they’d be the ones selling them. (Say, a cheap vaccine that prevents a disease they sell highly profitable drugs to treat.)

If they make these potentially disruptive advances privately, they can patent them to preemptively keep anyone else from introducing them. But if the advances were made using public funding, they have to make the case that whatever they do with it is in the public interest (which can conflict with their own).

The more important factor isn’t the funding or lack thereof, it’s the ability to control the results.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Because the US government is aligned with companies that exploit science for profit, and publicly-funded science is harder to exploit.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

why is DNA in a helix?

The nucleotides that make up DNA have a natural angle that they attach together at. So they will stack in a helix unless that angle is exactly 90 degrees, and why would it be?

how come we can’t gene edit?

Most traits are affected by many genes governed by complex gene regulatory networks; and likewise, most genes affect many traits at once. That makes it difficult or impossible to change an isolated trait by making a few point edits to the genome (the exceptions are traits that arose recently due to novel mutations that haven’t yet found their way into deeper GRNs).

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