fastaguy88

4 ms·

1.
by fastaguy88 21d ago
The idea that "courts" are equipped to address scientific questions is ridiculous. Perhaps French courts are better -- in the US, it is very much about decisions based on a confrontational presentation of "evidence", so
2.
by fastaguy88 1mo ago
There is a fixed (decreasing) budget for research. What should be the balance between repeating things that have already been done, and expanding knowledge?
3.
by fastaguy88 1mo ago
I suppose "totally unrelated" might mean not in the same genus to some set of taxonomists, but for the larger audience to which this essay was directed, unrelated might mean "is not related in any way" (as in, does not s
4.
by fastaguy88 1mo ago
Two nits to pick, one major, one minor: Major: "Common names simply don’t work on a large scale. One common name (ie “cedar”) can refer to 8 different totally unrelated plants, where as Cedrus refers specifically to the genus w
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by fastaguy88 2mo ago
Did I miss the part where you must be looking at your iPhone for it to work?
6.
by fastaguy88 3mo ago
Download for mac. Find out I need a different subscription. Cannot quit program (must force quit). Perhaps I need AI to use it.
7.
by fastaguy88 4mo ago
In 1998-1999, I was the organizer for a Bioinformatics course in Sao Paulo Brazil, funded in some indirect way by the National Academy of Sciences (as I recall). In addition to paying for the faculty (about 6 people) to spend a week teachi
8.
by fastaguy88 4mo ago
And yet, thousands and thousands of 'C' programs parse integers every hour successfully. Perhaps the right title should be "No way to parse pathological edge cases in 'C'" And then see how other languages do.
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by fastaguy88 4mo ago
While it is true that departments often fund their graduate students for the first year (or possibly 2) out of their own budgets, their budgets are largely determined by the generosity of their Deans (who got the money from indirect costs f
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by fastaguy88 4mo ago
This is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.
11.
by fastaguy88 4mo ago
There are no un-funded graduate (PhD) students in the sciences and engineering at MIT (or any other top-ranked graduate program). The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding. If the faculty
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by fastaguy88 5mo ago
Lugaru (??) emacs (epsilon) on CP/M in the early 1980’s
13.
by fastaguy88 5mo ago
BioBank claims (1) only de-identified data was available and (2) none of the data was actually sold before the datasets were taken down.
14.
by fastaguy88 5mo ago
Well, perhaps Orsen Scott Card does not need editors’ advice. But odds are you do.
15.
by fastaguy88 6mo ago
Amusingly, 15 min ago, the animation did not work on my MacOS Safari (Sequoia), but it was visible on Chrome. Now (1600 UTC-4), it is animated on Safari.
16.
by fastaguy88 6mo ago
Apple Keychain has a number of old bugs that have caused me to have to resort to this strategy several times. The most common problem is having a secure note that you can open, but then immediately disappears (closes). Copying over an old
17.
by fastaguy88 6mo ago
>>> If I buy a can of soup and find glass in it, I have a valid claim against the manufacturer. It's a matter of holding someone accountable for fraud or negligence, not a matter of regulation. The proper route is a court, no
18.
by fastaguy88 6mo ago
Re self-correcting science. In the area I am most familiar with (basic life sciences), correction happens pretty quickly. But I don’t worry about public policy much. But I’m comfortable arguing that where science intersects with policy, fr
19.
by fastaguy88 6mo ago
It is useful to distinguish between "effective" scientific fraud, where some set of fraudulent papers are published that drive a discipline in an unproductive direction, and "administrative" scientific fraud, where indiv
20.
by fastaguy88 6mo ago
It is perhaps worth noting that the 25,000 bit flips/out of 470,000 crashes (in a week) are probably not coming from all Firefox users. It would be useful to know how many of those crashes (and bit flips) are happening on the same mac
21.
by fastaguy88 9mo ago
Nice display, but it starts off with misleading measurements of DNA. The spacing between DNA base pairs is 0.34 nm, so the 10 base pairs pictured are in fact 3.4 nm. But the DNA in a single human cell is about 2 meters, and chromosome lengt
22.
by fastaguy88 10mo ago
Before Postscript, tektronix 4010 was the language of graphics, at least for biologists drawing phylogenetic trees or reassociation curves. The phylip phylogenetics package, introduced around 1980, still has the option to generate trees in
23.
by fastaguy88 10mo ago
You're kidding, right? (p++)[0] returns the contents of (p) before the ++. Its hard to imagine a more confusing juxtaposition.
24.
by fastaguy88 1y ago
When I think of things being in free-fall, I think of them going down. Not going up more slowly.
25.
by fastaguy88 1y ago
Sounds more like he was scammed by the dealer than a Tesla problem.
26.
by fastaguy88 1y ago
It really depends. Working on genome analysis, I once encountered/interrupted (by rebooting after a software update) a student who had been running an analysis for more than a week, because they had not pre-sorted the data. With pre-
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by fastaguy88 1y ago
Really not a libertarian, but why shouldn’t Netflix have the right to choose who they distribute content to? They negotiated conditions with the creators, why shouldn’t they be able to specify the DRM? No one is forcing you to subscribe t
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by fastaguy88 1y ago
This is an interesting insight. The OP's constraint that no two adjacent squares are the same color ensures non-randomness. (Which reminds us why people are so bad at producing "random" sequences.)
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by fastaguy88 1y ago
PG is an excellent writer, but this essay seems remarkably misleading. The unstated premise seems to be that well-educated adults already know everything they want/need to know about everything, which is silly. I'm older than PG
30.
by fastaguy88 1y ago
In the protein annotation world, which is largely driven by inferring common ancestry between a protein of unknown function and one of known function, common error thresholds range from FDR of 0.001 to 10^-6. Even a 1% error rate would be

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