DNA animation

[Clifford Heath]

On 15/5/19 12:59 am, Rick C wrote:

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 9:07:35 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 13/05/2019 14:37, Rick C wrote:
On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 5:48:57 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
In a strict sense they don't fit the usual definition of "Life".

I think you are being rather arbitrary about judging viruses. There
are numerous bacteria which do very little or nothing at all in a
spore state. It is only when they are in a hospitable environment
that they "come alive" and begin to reproduce. Same with many plant
seeds.

The difference is that whereas a virus absolutely depends on its target
host for replication the bacteria and archaea are fully self contained.

An arbitrary distinction. You want to "see" the virus as the object that carries the seed of viral life then I get that. But I look at the life cycle and a virus has one, so clearly it is alive. The fact that it has cast off loaded it's excess baggage and uses the nest of another like a Cuckoo doesn't mean it isn't alive.

Well, all life relies on its environment - at the very least an energy
source. The question is at what level of development is the specific
environment. Humans need plants - and we rely on some chemicals they
make (essential amino acids) but don't directly use any of their
high-level machinery. Viruses do - but it's just a question of level.

As I said elsewhere: life is a quine, that also outputs its own machine.
The machine must operate on "ambient factors" so we're down to deciding
on the allowed sophistication of those factors. I think it's fair to say
that it's only "life" if the required factors are *less* sophisticated
than the life form that requires them.

That would disqualify viruses, which are clearly less sophisticated than
their required medium.

Clifford Heath

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 12:26:00 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 8:53:04 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 13 May 2019 15:31:25 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

DNA can be used to store books and videos, by building it without
'cellular machinery', i.e. in a laboratory.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram

That's Intelligent Design.

By that, do you mean the theory that life on Earth (human life included)
derives from an intelligence, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

I mean that one might well find some intelligence at Harvard.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[whit3rd]

On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 4:32:47 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:

> Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

Huh? Science is NOT blind to possibilities, those discoveries are
the result of planning and careful work.

I was very surprised when it came out that flight navigation was
possible by means of interpretive dance, but the scientist who
was studying those bees recognized it with no trouble; the
scientist SAW THE POSSIBILITY, it's everyone else who
was blind to it.

Everyone who notices something new, is doing science; that
observation isn't just a feature of 'science', it's the definition of it.
Astounded, occasionally. Blindsided, no.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 2:00:11 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:27:30 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:00, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 14 May 2019 10:23:34 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Evolution is still going on. We are top dog for the moment but if we
screw it up and render the planet into a scorched nuclear wasteland then
insects will get their chance. Copper based blood is much more resistant
to radiation damage and an exoskeleton helps stop alpha particles.

I think that the self-building DNA structure had to exist before it
could exist. That's kind of a paradox.

What you think about it is totally irrelevant.
It is what the laws of nature permit to happen that matters.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

Since no biochemist has synthesized a self-replicating RNA molecule
that can reproduce and become DNA, they should work backwards. Just
take some simple organism, e coli or something, and start
removing/breaking things a step at a time to get simpler mechanisms
that still work. Reverse evolution. Find out which if any parts can be
removed and still have a functional reproducing cell.

I wonder if anyone has done this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter#Synthetic_Genomics

Page down to "Synthetic Genomics".

"On March 25, 2016 Venter reported the creation of Syn 3.0, a synthetic genome having the fewest genes of any freely living organism (473 genes). Their aim was to strip away all nonessential genes, leaving only the minimal set necessary to support life."

Google is helpful if you know what you are looking for.

So, my most-likely opinion is that our DNA-based life form could not
have been created by evolution, but was designed to evolve.

That should make everyone happy.

It still leaves you with the big problem of "who designed the designer".

Of course it's a big problem. Big problems need big ideas.

In this what is required is to recognise that you are asking the wrong question. Barking up the wrong tree isn't a useful activity.

> Does anyone here ever do anything with ideas but attack them?

Some of us have seen the good ideas patented. There are lots more bad ideas than good ideas, and people who come up with lots of ideas get good at throwing out the duds, and equally good at separating bad ideas from good ideas that other people have come up with.

"Not invented here" is problem, but less so for people who have come up with at least a few good ideas.

Your problem is that you seem to have a lot more bad ideas than good ones (which is pretty common), aren't much good at separating them for yourself (which is a weakness), and take it hard when other people do it for you (which is an unattractive character trait).

Science progresses by experimentation, observing and understanding the
world around us. Conjecture is all very well but to be a scientific
theory it *has* to make testable predictions about reality.

The soup conjecture is untested but widely accepted. Other ideas are
untested but mocked.

That's the difference between plausible and implausible ideas. You should try to develop your capacity to differentiate between them.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 12:01:56 PM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 12:26:00 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 8:53:04 PM UTC-7, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 13 May 2019 15:31:25 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

DNA can be used to store books and videos, by building it without
'cellular machinery', i.e. in a laboratory.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram

That's Intelligent Design.

By that, do you mean the theory that life on Earth (human life included)
derives from an intelligence, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

I mean that one might well find some intelligence at Harvard.

But then again there's Dan, who seems to think that having gone through Harvard absolves him from having to exhibit actual intelligence.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 9:32:47 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:25:46 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe
has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background
radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

Name one.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 8:33:05 AM UTC+10, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 15/5/19 1:28 am, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
Rick C wrote:
[...]

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000
years.  Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? [...]

I wonder. If you see how much we changed some animals and
many plants, what might happen if we start applying those
methods to ourselves? And that doesn't even take direct
gene-editing into account.

A much more likely source of big change is the modified selection
pressure from the environment we have changed.

Probably untrue. Genetic engineering offers the possibility of intelligent design, letting us step over to some completely different local minimum say from retina at the back to retina at the front eye design.

I choose to believe we're on the eve of a revolution.

I know that our current ethical norms are against such
things, but those norms evolve, too.

I completely agree. I've progressed far enough in my thinking that I
believe we have a *moral imperative* to diversify our own germ line,
creating many sub-species of specialists and hybridising with animal
genetics.

Hybridising with animal genetics sound nuts. Pinching useful sequences from other species DNA may work, but they'd probably have to be reworked so extensively before they'd work in us that "hybridisation" isn't remotely the right word.

Yes, that's much more than just "a step too far" for most
folk, rather it transplants the dialog onto another planet. I've been
brewing up a novel about it for well over a decade now.

A little more background reading would seem to be in order.

I've read a lot of science-fiction - if you felt like e-mailing me a chunk of the text I might be able to give you comments.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 2:07:31 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:25:46 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe
has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background
radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

"There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible
things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why,
sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before
breakfast."

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was being satirical about a particularly Victorian mode of self-improvement. As a mathematician (an expert in symbolic logic) he had a better grasp than most of what "impossible" actually meant.

Do you think that human civilization will look the same in 1000,
or 100,000 years?

It might still be recognisable in another 1000 years. But in 100k
years humans could very well be back to the pathetic hand to mouth
existence of the Easter Islanders after they had destroyed their
very last tree.

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000 years.
Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? But it is a

Depends what you mean by significantly different. We are on average
about 4" taller than we were in the Victorian and Elizabethan era -
something I have to bear in mind when I visit older buildings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_height

That is down to better nutrition rather than genetics. Although the
proportion of overweight obese people has also increased as well.

pointless question for this conversation. JL is suggesting that
evolution will make major inroads into our existence while it was
highly improbable that the current DNA replication process could have
evolved in a billion years. Huh?

We are on the cusp of being able to rewrite the genome and edit out
certain really horrible inherited diseases. How we use that new
knowledge could radically alter future evolution for good or ill.

In other words, his mind is blown!

I think he might well have a point if ethics committees eventually
permit germ line editing for certain inherited conditions. Where it gets
very dodgy is when people start modifying to generate designer babies.

Dodgy! That's really funny.

It's an English usage. Lots of what Americans say strikes users of the English and Australian dialects of English as really funny. "Donald Trump is president of the United States" has a huge comic content. Of course, at the circus the clown car stays safely inside the tent.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 15/05/19 00:32, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:25:46 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe
has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background
radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

Not where discoveries /convince/ other people because
of their /evidence/.

That excludes many "discoveries" that turn out to have
no basis in fact, e.g. N-rays, phlogiston, and all the
free energy claims, etc, etc.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 15/05/2019 00:32, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:25:46 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe
has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background
radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

No it doesn't. Science will always adopt any new evidence that comes to
light and incorporate it into the established theories. It is the
scientists who are looking very carefully to see how nature works.

We are quite literally in a golden age of observational techniques today
with the ability to detect cosmic rays, neutrinos, gravitational waves
as well as imaging in almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Experiments or observations that seriously challenge the status quo are
the stuff of Nobel Prizes if they are reproducible and convincing.

The first inkling of radioactivity was a bit of a surprise to everyone
and the fact that multiple allotropes of carbon remained to be found
when I was still at school is a bit of a surprise too. But science
adopts and adapts anything new that comes along. Anyone could have
isolated the fullerenes from soot using benzene but no-one did and
anyone could have used Sellotape on graphite to get a monolayer.

The laws of physics and chemistry are determined by experiment and there
have been some very elegant experiments done to test and break the
existing paradigms. Scientists are human so there can be large egos
involved the Hoyle vs Ryle debacle over the Steady State vs Big Bang
cosmologies (a derisive name Hoyle coined for Einstein-de Sitter
expanding universes which stuck) was particularly bitter. The last guard
of the old paradigm sometimes never accept that they were wrong.

However, you are rather prone to picking up nonsensical gibberish and
trying to push it as a valid idea in what is nominally a science group.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 15/05/2019 00:36, krw@notreal.com wrote:

On Tue, 14 May 2019 21:45:36 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/19 17:00, John Larkin wrote:
Of course it's a big problem. Big problems need big ideas.

Big /solutions/ need falsifiable hypotheses and tests.

Exactly what problem are you trying to solve, with the origin of life?

How did it get started? Where should be be looking for other life?

We may even be able to use DNA or similar molecules to solve certain
combinatorial problems. There has been some interesting work done on
recasting certain problems into a form where they can be computed by
manipulating designer DNA sequences in wet chemistry. eg.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400727/dna-computing/

(So do small solutions)

We do a lot of small stuff every day.

There is an optimum size of difficulty of problems that can be tackled
with today's available resources. So long as Moore's Law holds you can
prove that for some hard computational problems the fastest way to the
solution is to go surfing on the beach for a couple of years and then
start building your hardware using the latest fastest CPUs and memory.

This may change now that we are getting awfully close to the limits of
what feature detail resolution you can sensibly etch into silicon and
still have it work. We must be close to the point where Moore's Law runs
into the buffers - at least for a while on limitations of atomic scale.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 15/5/19 2:00 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 8:33:05 AM UTC+10, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 15/5/19 1:28 am, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
Rick C wrote:
[...]

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000
years.  Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? [...]

I wonder. If you see how much we changed some animals and
many plants, what might happen if we start applying those
methods to ourselves? And that doesn't even take direct
gene-editing into account.

A much more likely source of big change is the modified selection
pressure from the environment we have changed.

Probably untrue. Genetic engineering offers the possibility of intelligent design, letting us step over to some completely different local minimum say from retina at the back to retina at the front eye design.

I choose to believe we're on the eve of a revolution.

I know that our current ethical norms are against such
things, but those norms evolve, too.

I completely agree. I've progressed far enough in my thinking that I
believe we have a *moral imperative* to diversify our own germ line,
creating many sub-species of specialists and hybridising with animal
genetics.

Hybridising with animal genetics sound nuts.

Perhaps the wrong word. Pinching genes is less than I mean; I mean
pinching phenotypic structures.

Yes, that's much more than just "a step too far" for most
folk, rather it transplants the dialog onto another planet. I've been
brewing up a novel about it for well over a decade now.

A little more background reading would seem to be in order.

Thanks for telling me that I'm not the person who knows the most about
what I have or haven't been reading

> I've read a lot of science-fiction - if you felt like e-mailing me a chunk of the text I might be able to give you comments.

I could share the plot outline. There are still some big "story-telling"
aspects that I haven't figured out how to do.

Basically it looks back two generations on the aftermath of an
accidental escape of a private experiment by an idealistic viro-ceutical
researcher.

Clifford Heath

 

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2019 23:32, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 15/5/19 1:28 am, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
Rick C wrote:
[...]

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000
years.  Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? [...]

I wonder. If you see how much we changed some animals and
many plants, what might happen if we start applying those
methods to ourselves? And that doesn't even take direct
gene-editing into account.

A much more likely source of big change is the modified selection
pressure from the environment we have changed.

Although the main environmental modifications at present seem to result
in a huge increase in weight, morbid obesity and type II diabetes.

I choose to believe we're on the eve of a revolution.

I know that our current ethical norms are against such
things, but those norms evolve, too.

I completely agree. I've progressed far enough in my thinking that I
believe we have a *moral imperative* to diversify our own germ line,
creating many sub-species of specialists and hybridising with animal
genetics. Yes, that's much more than just "a step too far" for most
folk, rather it transplants the dialog onto another planet. I've been
brewing up a novel about it for well over a decade now.

The most interesting one would be to see if we can generate the right
structures in a human to permit chloroplasts and photosynthesis. We
wouldn't need to eat quite so much if we could directly make sugars.

And green humans like the Treens in Dan Dare would be quite cool.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Joseph Gwinn]

On May 15, 2019, Bill Sloman wrote
(in article<8a31eb25-0236-4f8b-9143-e831f1bdc35d@googlegroups.com&gt:

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 9:32:47 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:25:46 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe
has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background
radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

Name one.

The classic examples have to be Relativity and Quantum Physics, and thus the
atom bomb.

In 1900, people though that Physics was pretty much settled, and that all
that remained was to tidy up a few constants, and figure outa few odd little
results like the photoelectric effect existed and why thermal radiation was
red, not blue (like the theory said). Little did they know....

Joe Gwinn

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 11:23:49 PM UTC+10, Clifford Heath wrote:

On 15/5/19 2:00 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 8:33:05 AM UTC+10, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 15/5/19 1:28 am, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
Rick C wrote:

<snip>

Hybridising with animal genetics sound nuts.

Perhaps the wrong word. Pinching genes is less than I mean; I mean
pinching phenotypic structures.

Yes, that's much more than just "a step too far" for most
folk, rather it transplants the dialog onto another planet. I've been
brewing up a novel about it for well over a decade now.

A little more background reading would seem to be in order.

Thanks for telling me that I'm not the person who knows the most about
what I have or haven't been reading

One doesn't have to know much about it to get the impression that you should have done more.

If " hybridising with animal genetics" isn't quite you had in mind, you clearly ought to have read enough to be able to express what you actually had in mind, with the subsidiary point that you probably didn't have a clear enough idea of what might be done to have had a idea that you could have expressed clearly.

I've read a lot of science-fiction - if you felt like e-mailing me a chunk of the text I might be able to give you comments.

I could share the plot outline. There are still some big "story-telling"
aspects that I haven't figured out how to do.

I know the feeling. Finding a narrative line isn't easy.

Basically it looks back two generations on the aftermath of an
accidental escape of a private experiment by an idealistic viro-ceutical
researcher.

Not a great starting point for a gripping narrative line.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 17:28:50 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

Rick C wrote:
[...]

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000
years. Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? [...]

I wonder. If you see how much we changed some animals and
many plants, what might happen if we start applying those
methods to ourselves? And that doesn't even take direct
gene-editing into account. We don't know much about how
DNA composition translates into traits, but we'll learn.
I choose to believe we're on the eve of a revolution.

I know that our current ethical norms are against such
things, but those norms evolve, too. Is it ethical to
allow a serious hereditary disease to persist in a lineage
if we know how to fix it? There will be accidents, but on
the whole, those who embrace these methods are likely to
ultimately out-compete those who don't. If we manage to
avoid blowing ourselves up before, that is.

Jeroen Belleman

At the rate we are progressing with CRISPR and such, we may live for
500 years and feel, and look, any way we want to.

Progress just keeps happening.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[John Larkin]

On Wed, 15 May 2019 09:06:27 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/05/2019 00:32, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:25:46 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe
has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background
radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

No it doesn't. Science will always adopt any new evidence that comes to
light and incorporate it into the established theories. It is the
scientists who are looking very carefully to see how nature works.

We are quite literally in a golden age of observational techniques today
with the ability to detect cosmic rays, neutrinos, gravitational waves
as well as imaging in almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Experiments or observations that seriously challenge the status quo are
the stuff of Nobel Prizes if they are reproducible and convincing.

The first inkling of radioactivity was a bit of a surprise to everyone
and the fact that multiple allotropes of carbon remained to be found
when I was still at school is a bit of a surprise too. But science
adopts and adapts anything new that comes along. Anyone could have
isolated the fullerenes from soot using benzene but no-one did and
anyone could have used Sellotape on graphite to get a monolayer.

The laws of physics and chemistry are determined by experiment and there
have been some very elegant experiments done to test and break the
existing paradigms. Scientists are human so there can be large egos
involved the Hoyle vs Ryle debacle over the Steady State vs Big Bang
cosmologies (a derisive name Hoyle coined for Einstein-de Sitter
expanding universes which stuck) was particularly bitter. The last guard
of the old paradigm sometimes never accept that they were wrong.

However, you are rather prone to picking up nonsensical gibberish and
trying to push it as a valid idea in what is nominally a science group.

I don't pick up nonsense, I invent it. For fun and profit.

I don't think we'll invite you to any of our brainstorming sessions.
Some people poison brainstorming.



A little nonsense now and then
Is cherished by the wisest men.

- Willy Wonka


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

[George Herold]

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 9:36:56 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:

On 14/05/2019 23:32, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 15/5/19 1:28 am, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
Rick C wrote:
[...]

Humans will not be different in any significant way in 1,000
years.  Are we any different than we were 1,000 years ago? [...]

I wonder. If you see how much we changed some animals and
many plants, what might happen if we start applying those
methods to ourselves? And that doesn't even take direct
gene-editing into account.

A much more likely source of big change is the modified selection
pressure from the environment we have changed.

Although the main environmental modifications at present seem to result
in a huge increase in weight, morbid obesity and type II diabetes.

I choose to believe we're on the eve of a revolution.

I know that our current ethical norms are against such
things, but those norms evolve, too.

I completely agree. I've progressed far enough in my thinking that I
believe we have a *moral imperative* to diversify our own germ line,
creating many sub-species of specialists and hybridising with animal
genetics. Yes, that's much more than just "a step too far" for most
folk, rather it transplants the dialog onto another planet. I've been
brewing up a novel about it for well over a decade now.

The most interesting one would be to see if we can generate the right
structures in a human to permit chloroplasts and photosynthesis. We
wouldn't need to eat quite so much if we could directly make sugars.

And green humans like the Treens in Dan Dare would be quite cool.

Without doing any numbers.. it seems like there would hardly be any gain.
(I'm lucky to get ~10 hours of full sun in a week.)
It takes a corn plant all summer to make a few ears of corn.
(I'm guessing I have about the same area as a corn plant.)

George H.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 15/05/2019 14:41, Joseph Gwinn wrote:

On May 15, 2019, Bill Sloman wrote
(in article<8a31eb25-0236-4f8b-9143-e831f1bdc35d@googlegroups.com&gt:

On Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 9:32:47 AM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 14 May 2019 16:25:46 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2019 15:50, Rick C wrote:
On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 7:04:31 AM UTC-4, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2019 04:50, John Larkin wrote:

The inventor critters could have evolved from inorganics in a
more reasonable incremental way than we are supposed to have.
They might have originated on a gas giant, or in superfluid
helium, or something.

They would have had to invent a time machine as well then. The universe
has only fairly recently become cool enough for the microwave background
radiation to permit superfluid helium to condense naturally.

You really do have absolutely no physical intuition whatsoever.

JL's talents include designing analog electronics at the board level,
drinking beer and eating burgers. He is largely ignorant of the
greater world and chooses to remain that way. Are you really
surprised at this point?

He is still a decent engineer and obviously intelligent. I cannot
understand why he has such a preference for "just so" stories.

Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

Name one.

The classic examples have to be Relativity and Quantum Physics, and thus the
atom bomb.

Relativity was already implied by Maxwell's equations derived in 1861
although it took Einstein to follow through all the implications of c
being a constant for all observers in an inertial reference frame.

The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 pretty much put the final nail
in the coffin of luminferous ether so things were ripe for a change.

In 1900, people though that Physics was pretty much settled, and that all
that remained was to tidy up a few constants, and figure outa few odd little
results like the photoelectric effect existed and why thermal radiation was
red, not blue (like the theory said). Little did they know....

The establishment is always a bit complacent when it looks like all that
is left to do is tidy up a few remaining loose ends. A major physicist
at the turn of the century famously said words to the effect of
"(Classical) physics will be solved within two decades and then we can
move onto solving chemistry.". I'm sure it is in A Random Walk in
Science somewhere but a quick flash read didn't find it just now.

Then someone devises and executes a cunning novel experiment that shows
something new. That "something new" if it is real and reproducible will
almost certainly gain the experimenter (or their boss) a Nobel Prize.

Likewise on the theory front. Newton and Leibnitz revolutionised
theoretical physics in the 17th century, Einstein in the 20th century so
we may be in for a long wait for the next big paradigm shift (or it
could be announced tomorrow that some a string theory really is it).

My money is on some variant of Clifford algebras but we will only know
the next great thing when we see it and it demonstrates its novel
predictive powers. What we have at the moment works pretty well even if
you do have to carefully subtract of the odd infinity here and there to
get the answer. This never really bothers practising physicists although
it appals those of a more purist mathematical persuasion.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

Martin Brown wrote:

On 14/05/2019 23:32, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 15/5/19 1:28 am, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
I know that our current ethical norms are against such
things, but those norms evolve, too.

I completely agree. I've progressed far enough in my thinking that I
believe we have a *moral imperative* to diversify our own germ line,
creating many sub-species of specialists and hybridising with animal
genetics. Yes, that's much more than just "a step too far" for most
folk, rather it transplants the dialog onto another planet. I've been
brewing up a novel about it for well over a decade now.

The most interesting one would be to see if we can generate the right
structures in a human to permit chloroplasts and photosynthesis. We
wouldn't need to eat quite so much if we could directly make sugars.

And green humans like the Treens in Dan Dare would be quite cool.

In a generation we've gone from reluctance to allow 13-year-olds to wear
makeup to allowing them to get tatoos, and ear piercings an inch wide
used to be found only in National Geographic pictures of African tribes.
So people will definitely lose their inhibitions about having 4 arms
eventually.

And they'll also fix themselves to make their mods inheritable. Improve
your eyes and pass them on to all your descendants. Some people won't
do it, and they won't be able to breed together or they'll make blind
kids. That might be a plot point in the sci-fi.