natechols

6 ms·

1.
by natechols 6mo ago
"The Shockwave Runner" has aged vastly better than "Stand on Zanzibar", which I found unreadable. The first book predicts an early-21st century society full of smartphone users, ubiquitous privacy violations, and govern
2.
by natechols 2y ago
The paper by Paul Adams used an earlier version of AlphaFold that was publicly available, not AlphaFold 3 which is not.
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by natechols 2y ago
It's kind of amazing in retrospect that it was possible to (occasionally) produce very good predictions 20 years ago with at least an order of magnitude smaller training set. I'm very curious whether DeepMind has tried trimming t
4.
by natechols 2y ago
I also worked with the same people (and share most of the same biases) and that paper is about as close to a ringing endorsement of AlphaFold as you'll get.
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by natechols 2y ago
The DeepMind team was essentially forced to publish and release an earlier iteration of AlphaFold after the Rosetta team effectively duplicated their work and published a paper about it in Science. Meanwhile, the Rosetta team just publishe
6.
by natechols 2y ago
This must be some kind of sharp generational divide, right? I'm over 40 and I can't think of anything that has made me feel as old as I do reading the "green message shame" discourse.
7.
by natechols 2y ago
Seconded, and it touches on the key themes he developed later. I love how a throwaway plot element became a central part of an unrelated novel later, like he had more ideas than he had time to fully explain.
8.
by natechols 2y ago
I think it's also one of the best descriptions of living at the onset of massive, disruptive technological changes, and how disorienting (and occasionally terrifying) this would feel. The fundamental problem with that book, for me, is
9.
by natechols 2y ago
> Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible pri
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by natechols 2y ago
The goal of protein folding simulations like Folding@Home is not to predict 3D structures - it's to understand how folding actually works, and why it sometimes doesn't work. When FAH came out it was already very obvious that ther
11.
by natechols 3y ago
Don't forget, they also had to pass another remedial bill to add exemptions later!
12.
by natechols 3y ago
7) Mitochondria (and chloroplasts) have double membranes, exactly like they would if they were smaller cells engulfed by the host cell. 8) There are multiple examples of ongoing endosymbiosis where the engulfed cell remains a true symbiont,
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by natechols 3y ago
If you haven't already read "The Ungoverned" I recommend it as well - although much shorter it's effectively the second part in a trilogy, bridging the two novels and featuring the same main character as "Marooned i
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by natechols 3y ago
I had to read the book a couple of times before I completely understood this, but I'm pretty sure there's an implicit metaphor that ties the two plots together, and it's about the feedback between technological progress and i
15.
by natechols 3y ago
> What I think will happen will be extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, and those will put up sky-high walls (literal and figurative) to block out everyone else. That accurately describes the USA today (and has for many decad
16.
by natechols 3y ago
A public execution is ritual human sacrifice, the only difference is the label that Western cultures apply to it.
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by natechols 3y ago
Do you have a more recent example than Vioxx in mind where your approach might have made enough of a difference to be worth the longer review process?
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by natechols 3y ago
I helped with similar experiments at LCLS-I and the first half of this comment is correct. The chemical reaction is carefully timed on the order of milliseconds, so they get a series of snapshots of the reaction at a specific known state (
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by natechols 3y ago
Because raging against the spending habits of billionaires is always easier than self-examination and consideration of one's own wealth and privilege.
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by natechols 3y ago
It's weird to me that we've completely normalized having to present ID to buy any medicine at all, especially one that has an excellent safety and efficacy record that I was buying without an ID for a decade. Why should I have to
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by natechols 3y ago
> the relevant fields are controlled by different corporate interests As opposed to governments, which are famously cautious about deploying destructive technology, and scrupulously avoid civilian casualties.
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by natechols 3y ago
> People have been talking about the threat of automation since the very beginning of the industrial revolution. And the prediction that only the ownership class would benefit from technological improvements is at least as old as Marx.
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by natechols 3y ago
The only argument I'm making is that it's insane to draw sweeping geopolitical conclusions from the fact that Chinese scientists posted their attempts at reproducing a Korean lab's result on Twitter before the Americans did.
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by natechols 3y ago
One thing that has been constant for at least a decade or more is that every time a lab in China publishes even an incremental advance, a legion of internet commenters descends to declare the end of US hegemony because Americans didn't
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by natechols 3y ago
And have since before I was born - but what does this have to do with invading Ukraine now?
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by natechols 3y ago
> Would the United States welcome Chinese and Russian nuclear capable installations in Mexico or Cuba? Personally, it's none of my business what Mexico or Cuba do on their territory, but are you saying the US has nuclear installatio
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by natechols 3y ago
The first part of the book, describing the history of atomic theory and experimental physics, is still one of my favorite pieces of science writing ever.
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by natechols 3y ago
> The frequent (incredibly petty) fights I've seen over publication authorship order demonstrate otherwise. Likewise, and this is one of the many reasons I left academia. I feel like everyone who criticized your original comment is
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by natechols 3y ago
> Diphenhydramine as a first generation antihistamine acts on a large number of receptors and can even be used as a mild anxiolytic, so I'd guess it could very well have antidepressant effect. It does, and this observation led to th
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by natechols 4y ago
> The molecules are developed by research funding. Also incorrect. The underlying scientific knowledge driving new therapies is overwhelmingly academic in origin, but academic research does very little actual drug discovery. I think th

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