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Theorising that high carbon steel can form by mistake in some scenarios is no where even remotely close to the information management necessary to spontaneously create a tesla.

And even a Tesla is no where remotely close to the organic cell. The smallest known functional, and most importantly, stable biological unit.

Even if rna is formed, what will read it?


> Even if rna is formed, what will read it?

That's the interesting part of RNA. You don't need a reader!

RNA can act like an enzyme. They can fold and form strange shapes and have some "sticky" parts, so they can replace the activity of enzymes. Enzymes made of proteins are more efficient, so now most(all?) enzymes are made of proteins. But in the initial form of life perhaps enzymes were just a short RNA strip.

RNA can be copied. They can be in a single strain, and they can collect the parts [1] and make an inverse copy, and then separate. DNA is better with a lot of helper enzymes is much better, but in the initial form of life perhaps RNA is good enough.

None of these steps need a reader, so perhaps they can form an initial and very inefficient life(almost-life) form.

[1] the parts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside_triphosphate


Thats fascinating and I appreciate knowing that.

About this:

> None of these steps need a reader, so perhaps they can form an initial and very inefficient life(almost-life) form.

May I ask, have you ever considered if any of these systems that you're researching or investigating are the product of deliberate engineering rather than random chance?


Those are good questions, but having questions doesn't decrease my interest, it just gives it context.


A really good book about circadian rhythms called "Life Time" was just released. Fascinating read if you're interested in it and it goes into details about the way we got to the western model of sleep. And challenges some of the assumptions that sleep must be continuous throughout the night to be good sleep.

Was interesting to read that in the middle ages their literature and records referenced a "first sleep" and "second sleep" in which it was common for people to sleep after dinner, get up again, do some things, and then sleep till morning!


> tooling

Neither did you.


Azure terrafy


If you deleted a resource block from a previously applied terraform declaration and reapplied it, how would the provider know that the resource in the environment needed to be deleted verses accepting it as an object not managed by terraform?

Where would it store it's history to make the diff against it?


Care to share?


-VS Code -Xcode -CodeRunner


Public tax funds academia through the govt grants that funds the research.


The NWT renders Heb 11:1 as "Faith is the assured expectation of what is hoped for, the evident demonstration* of realities that are not seen."

(*Or “convincing evidence.”)

Those with faith have proof or evidence that can be used to demonstrate or to back up that faith. It's not blind.


>Undoubtedly much of it could be pruned out with no undesirable result

Such hubris as this is what led us to:

- define DNA we didn't and still don't understand as useless "junk"

- call the appendix a useless vestigial organ

- declared "silenced" b-cells useless

The list goes on and on and on... When will somebody compile a list of how often science is wrong just to slap the arrogance out of people before they cost more time and lives with such reckless and impatient reasoning?


There is a very large difference between "much of" and "all". And we have at this time no way to distinguish which bits are in the "much of" and which the rest.

There is so very much of it that even were the actually-junk just 5% of that, it would still qualify as "much of".


It is way more than that. Among all vertebrates the puffer fish has a famously small genome of only about 342 million basepairs (Mb) (x2). Compare that of human at 3200 Mb (x2).

Now you might claim humans are more complex than pufferfish but that is mainly human hubris at work and would be exceedingly hard to prove in a court of law.

Fish genomes range “in size from 342 Mb of Tetraodon nigroviridis to 2967 Mb of Salmo salar” (from https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...).

Do you think all of that difference between two teleosts is functional?


Is is not arrogant to think that DNA code should be perfectly functional down to the last nucleotide?

Show me 100 million lines of human computer code.


This perspective is true to some extent, but it’s counter-productive to think of science as being wrong.

You should think of science as the “least wrong” set of beliefs we have at any point in time. It will never be perfectly right, and every day it’s less and less wrong. The reason it’s so reliable is because it embraces (and doesn’t dismiss) this uncertainty.


Rather, scientists are wrong.

Terribly often, science grinds to a dead halt on some range of subject matter until certain scientists retire or die. It is easy to list remarkably recent cases where they did finally die and work could proceed, and many others where they have not died yet and the field is still stuck fast.

Science will always be incomplete. It has nothing to say yet about most possible questions. What it does pronounce upon should be reliably correct, but that is often not true, traceably to those individuals who maintain falsehoods. Sometimes the falsehoods become doctrine and hang on even after the offenders have obliged by dying.


I don't think it's counter productive at all. There was a period of time, when the appendix was (absurdly) considered vestigial, that surgeons would remove the appendix as a side quest if they happened to have the area opened for some other purpose.

That was a terrible idea, but one that was supported by science at the time. There are practical reasons to be skeptical about scientific assumptions.

Science becomes less wrong faster if we allow history to remind us that a lot of what we believe will likely turn out to be wrong.


A better example would be irradiating thymus glands.

Appendices are still removed, to this day, and people lacking them make do without. A thymus gland is harder to dispense with.


I’m happier without mine. It was causing me no end of digestion issues culminating with an attempt on my life.


It's interesting how the pendulum of ideas swings back and forth over history, similar problems arise and similar solutions to them resurface also. It would be great to see that on some kind go graph or timeline.


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