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Pushing atoms around by mechanical means only seems plausible if you've never really studied molecular chemistry - see the Drexler/Smalley debate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate...


It’s a good debate. I tend to agree with Ray K’s commentary.


What's the current state of the art in terms of being able to regrow teeth/regenerate alveolar bone?


One thing is using rapamycin for bone and soft tissue regrowth. The FDA recently approved a human study after previous research showed success in mice.

https://dental.washington.edu/uw-periodontal-study-receives-...


For teeth? The https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7880588/ Anti-USAG-1 serum.

It's laboratory antibody serum from a specific human-sourced monoclonal cell line. Seems to work on all mammals (notably both nice and ferrets; I'm told their teeth system is widely different evolutionary and that humans are kinda in the middle).

A human study should be ongoing on some children in Japan that for genetic reasons are missing a few adult teeth (never grew).


This quote is great! Where is it from?


The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb, Introduction to Part 1


Do tell - what is the US-paid coronavirus?


Up until and just before lockdowns started the US was funding a lab in Wuhan, the WIV, which specializes in bat coronaviruses and has had a long history of failure to meet safety standards. We only stopped funding them in July 2020, meaning US money funded the very virus that killed ~0.0875% of the world population.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-halts-funding-access-wuhan-...


I guess this is a causation directionality error in your thinking? We were there because nasty viruses spread near there.


We were there before nasty viruses spread. We stopped funding them in July 2020, meaning we were funding it before lockdowns started and just as China was being affected. You truly need to work on your reading comprehension skills before attempting to suggest anyone has errors in anything.


I'm sorry which part of that article says that? That funding contributed to the outbreak somehow?


The only democratic president in the 2000s was Obama, and by the time he came into office the shit was already in the air heading towards the fan.


Yes, and as we all know Trump definitely caused COVID and the bird flu.

I think that was probably the point of the comment.


I think you mean they are fraudulent but look valid.


You realize Biden took office in Jan 2021? The money printing started way before during Trump's time in office due to the pandemic, so you can't really blame the previous administration for inflation (which happened everywhere around the world due to COVID-related stimulus).


It took about 150 years after invention before printing really took off in terms of how it changed the way people argued (which was critical to the early founders of the US - see "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change) - https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-printing-press-as-an-agent-...


This position underlies Trump's tariffs promise.


>> The Greek-lish interjection says approximately "that is going to bite me in the ass down the line". Because it will. The better I get with Prolog the more I worry nobody will be able to maintain my code but myself, and my future self will hate me with deep, burning passion.

Isn't that similar to the GPs "I'm not smart enough to make sense of my own Scheme meta-programming when I revisit it months later."? Commenting your prolog won't help?


It's similar. Commenting my code (which I do, almost religiously) helps. It still taxes my brain to follow it.

There's a certain kind of abstraction that is easier to write than read and understand. My current project is full of it, not least because a set of low-level predicates performing "primitive" operations on a foundational data structure are automatically generated and then everything else is built on top of them with a concentrated effort to avoid code duplication. There's a bunch of actions that move an agent around a map or look from the agent's position around the map, in discrete directions (currently) and the easiest way to implement these would be to implement one, say "step_north" or "look_north", and then copy/paste it with small changes however many times I need. Instead I opted to have parameterised "step" and "look" actions that I instantiate as I need. It's kind of the obvious thing to do, but starting from a "step" action, in my zeal to DRY (or NRM, I guess) I ended up creating a chain of predicates six or seven links deep that makes it harder to trace the execution of a top-level (step or look) action, just because I have to keep in mind each link in the chain and what exactly it does; and that's not obvious because some links compose new predicates from their arguments so I need to have a clear model of how that happens always in my mind. I could keep the chain shorter by using a higher level of abstraction but that would just make it even harder to debug.

Prolog makes it easy, even pleasant, to program like that, but it doesn't make it any easier to read and maintain that kind of code than any other language as far as I can tell.

Maybe the solution is not not do any metaprogramming and just copy/pasta and DRY and get it over with. But I find that this, too, makes it harder to debug because after a while all the instances of the copy/pasted code blur together into one smudgy fudge that has a downright hypnotic effect.


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