OT: How life came to Earth...

On 14/02/2022 05:35, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Monday, February 14, 2022 at 1:53:57 AM UTC+11, Martin Brown wrote:
On 13/02/2022 07:55, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sat, 12 Feb 2022 16:16:59 -0800 (PST)) it happened whit3rd <whi...@gmail.com> wrote in <69a7cfcf-5b4f-467f...@googlegroups.com

snip

Le Sage doesn\'t really work, but there is no point in arguing with you
about this since you don\'t actually understand relativity at all. That
seems to be a big failing in many electrical engineering courses.

And a remarkably comical one, since magnetism is just the consequence, of the relativistic interaction of moving charges.
Click to expand...

While that is true, it is - AFAIK - entirely useless if you merely need
to /use/ magnetism and magnetic effects. No one calculates impedance or
the strength of a motor by the use of special relativity.

Electronics and electrical engineering are applied fields. You don\'t
need to know /why/ things work the way they do, you need to know how to
use them in practice. A little bit of the \"why\" can be interesting, and
it is always useful to have a bit of knowledge beyond your field, but a
course on special relativity in an electrical engineering degree would
be a waste of time.
 
On 11/02/22 17:02, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 16:42:33 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/02/22 15:39, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 14:25:07 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Feb 2022 05:12:01 -0800) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
lonc0h1l5k6a9tbn00ib4u9fle8gd7nbvj@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.
And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.

The article describes how the basic chemicals needed for RNA an DNA could form in space.

If you say \'was designed\' you get into a loop,
start:
\'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...
goto start

It could have been designed by some intelligence that had a less
complex, more incremental evolutionary path. Something that evolved
billions of years before earth formed.

If you believe in evolution, you will give that a fair consideration.

OK.
0.1s interval
Jan has already addressed that, you\'ve ignored it or not
understood it, viz:
\'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...\'

If you believe in spontaneous generation and evolution, you might
consider that life should have evolved in billions of places in the
universe, billions of years ago.

Give that another 100 milliseconds of thought before you dismiss it.
Click to expand...

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe
or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke

My personal belief is that intelligent life has evolved many
times, but we haven\'t yet communicated with other examples.

Many people have indeed given that serious consideration,
famously Enrico Fermi\'s name and fellow physicists Edward Teller,
Herbert York and Emil Konopinski - back in 1950. FFI, see the
inconclusive musings about \"The Fermi Paradox\".
 
On 14/02/2022 00:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 13 Feb 2022 22:35:20 +0100, David Brown


Your daughter is humouring her old da\' and his semi-senile banter.
We\'re more honest in this group.

No, just more prissy.
Click to expand...

Enjoy your fantasy world.

Just don\'t let your daughter near s.e.d. - reading your posts would be
too embarrassing for her.
 
On 2022-02-11 19:12, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 11/02/22 17:02, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 16:42:33 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/02/22 15:39, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 14:25:07 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Feb 2022 05:12:01 -0800) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
lonc0h1l5k6a9tbn00ib4u9fle8gd7nbvj@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.
And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.

The article describes how the basic chemicals needed for RNA an DNA could form in space.

If you say \'was designed\' you get into a loop,
start:
\'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...
goto start

It could have been designed by some intelligence that had a less
complex, more incremental evolutionary path. Something that evolved
billions of years before earth formed.

If you believe in evolution, you will give that a fair consideration.

OK.
0.1s interval
Jan has already addressed that, you\'ve ignored it or not
understood it, viz:
\'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...\'

If you believe in spontaneous generation and evolution, you might
consider that life should have evolved in billions of places in the
universe, billions of years ago.

Give that another 100 milliseconds of thought before you dismiss it.

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe
or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke

My personal belief is that intelligent life has evolved many
times, but we haven\'t yet communicated with other examples.

Many people have indeed given that serious consideration,
famously Enrico Fermi\'s name and fellow physicists Edward Teller,
Herbert York and Emil Konopinski - back in 1950. FFI, see the
inconclusive musings about \"The Fermi Paradox\".
Click to expand...

I think intelligent life is unstable. By the time it has become
sufficiently powerful to communicate or travel over cosmic distances,
it also has become powerful enough to blow itself into oblivion,
and will, after a short while (on cosmic timescales).

Jeroen Belleman
 
On Friday, February 11, 2022 at 5:12:17 AM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

> Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.

False; no reason to find archaea in the depths of the earth if
there had been any modern form of life planted here. Archaea is
clearly well-suited to be ancestral, and hard to explain otherwise.
Our familiar life forms are all part of an ecology with dizzying complexity,
and evolution is the best explanation of that.

> And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.

Well, sure; all chemistry is quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics, as
a requirement for understanding, is nearly as ubiquitous as mathematics.
 
On Tuesday, February 15, 2022 at 6:07:39 AM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

I sometimes make suggestions about physical reality, with no personal
content, and get in response not serious criticism or alternate ideas,
but barrages of insults from admitted amateurs.
Click to expand...

What a crock! Suggestions about physical reality are everyone\'s business,
there can be no \'admitted amateurs\' on such topics.
 
On 2022-02-11 14:12, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.
Click to expand...

It\'s astoundingly complex now, yes, but it can\'t have been in the beginning.

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.
And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.
Click to expand...

Non sequitur.

Jeroen Belleman
 
On 14/02/2022 01:24, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:17:54 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 13/02/22 23:54, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:18:25 +1100, Clifford Heath
I\'m glad your daughter is polite to you, even though she must be aware
you\'re a lost cause.

She has ideas too. Must run in the family.

Ideas are easy and cheap.

Then why do so few people have them?
Click to expand...

/Everyone/ has ideas.

The only strange thing is that some people have this twisted concept
that /they/ are special in regard to ideas - that /their/ ideas are
somehow better than everyone else\'s, or that only /they/ have good ideas.

Maybe it is because in the past, you have had a couple of unusually good
ideas. It happens - people get lucky. If you also have some reasonable
skill in the relevant field, good connections with the right people, and
enough determination and courage to run with the idea, then you can
achieve success with it. That\'s great - it\'s good for the person, and
(often) good for others.

But you have got yourself into a kind of narcissism or megalomania where
you think /all/ your ideas are great, and other peoples\' are not.
Perhaps you\'ve had too many people around you - at home or at work - who
kept telling you your ideas are good and worth considering. If you were
into politics instead of electronics, maybe you\'d be at a podium telling
people your ideas of injecting bleach, nuking hurricanes, or shining
bright UV lights insight your body - they must be good ideas because you
are a \"very stable genius\". Fortunately for the world, you are just a
harmless electronics engineer.

Your ideas are like everyone else\'s. Mostly they are rubbish, mostly
derivative, mostly they don\'t stand up to scrutiny or fit with reality.
Most of the good ones have already been thought of by someone else.
Occasionally you\'ll have a truly terrible idea and not recognise it
before things go horribly wrong (we all do that sometimes), and
occasionally you\'ll have a really good idea.

However, your evaluation filters are broken. You don\'t realise that
most of your ideas are rubbish, so you don\'t filter them out yourself
before opening your mouth and proving yourself a fool. You don\'t
realise that everyone else has ideas just like you, and condemn them for
having better filters than you.

It\'s a shame. It makes you look /so/ stupid, so ignorant and
unthinking, and also so nasty and unpleasant. I am pretty sure that is
an unfair image of you, but it is the impression you give.
 
On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:04:03 +0000, Martin Brown
<\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 15/02/2022 13:43, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:51:29 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 13/02/2022 17:31, David Brown wrote:
On 13/02/2022 17:51, Martin Brown wrote:

You can haggle about whether or not they are truly alive because they
need to hijack a cell to replicate (at least all the ones I know of do).

There are some viruses that are so simple that they can\'t hijack a
cell\'s replication systems - they hijack another virus\'s hijacking! In
a sense, they are small viruses that infect other large viruses. Fun stuff.

And little fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite \'em.

Eventually in a quantised world they get too small to be viable.

Viral phages that attack bacteria are also quite interesting and some of
them may yet have therapeutic value. Progress in this field is slow but
steady as the various pieces are found and understood.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01880-6

The viruses that we see today have co-evolved with their hosts for many
billions of years. The earliest ones would have been much much simpler.

Is there evidence for that?

Synthetic RNA in the lab is getting close to understanding what the very
first self replicating RNA systems might have looked like. They have
made working examples that are capable of most of the required steps.

This article in Nature might clear up some of your misconceptions iff
you can be bothered to read it (free access).

https://www.nature.com/articles/35053176

Most of this detailed stuff is behind a paywall unless you have
university credentials or a subscription to nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/321089a0

The first self replicating molecule only really has to occur once to
take over a lot of territory if the raw materials are present. After
that competition for resources and the inaccuracy of RNA copying allows
it to evolve to respond to environmental constraints.

There are also surprisingly a few examples of likely throwbacks from the
late RNA world stage that include some extremely large complicated RNA
only viruses that mostly parasitise amoeba now but which were
misclassified for a long time as unculturable bacteria because they
couldn\'t get them to multiply in the lab (and they were \"obviously\" too
big to be viruses). Pithoviruses and Pandoravirus being examples:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140716-giant-viruses-science-life-evolution-origins

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130718-viruses-pandoraviruses-science-biology-evolution

They still have most of the bits present that would be needed in a fully
functioning RNA based cell independent of a host.

There may well be some more smoking guns for RNA world lying around.

Biologists have really only just begin to recognise them. They were only
noticed as something very unusual when a virus specialist looked at an
electron micrograph of an infected amoeba!
Click to expand...

The above articles are very interesting.

But I\'d suggest that everybody drop the ad hominem arguments and
passing digs - it prevents persuasion of both opponent and audience.
Not effective.

Joe Gwinn
 
On Friday, February 11, 2022 at 8:12:17 AM UTC-5, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?
The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.
And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.
Click to expand...

That opinion shows a limited imagination. The chemistry of DNA reproduction does not have to start all at once. Just as the watchmaker would not have been starting with a fully functional Swiss watch on day one. In this case there are theories of proteins reproducing with no nucleic acid blueprint to form basic encapsulated organisms with very few of the features of life as we know it.

But someone who can\'t envision the process of evolution is not likely to appreciate the many, many tiny steps that would be taken before a single eukaryotic cell was produced or even the first DNA molecule. Someone who can only see a creator, perhaps modeled after himself.

--

Rick C.

+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On Friday, February 11, 2022 at 9:29:54 AM UTC-5, David Brown wrote:
On 11/02/2022 08:53, Rick C wrote:
On Friday, February 11, 2022 at 1:54:57 AM UTC-5, Jan Panteltje
wrote:
How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

Not really \"life\" as such, but the most important and fundamental
building blocks of life. People think life is all about DNA or RNA,
but the reality is they are pointless without proteins. Peptides are
short proteins, or it is more common to consider proteins to be made
of multiple peptides, hence the term polypeptide. Proteins are the
functioning units of life. Virtually everything that happens in
living organisms involves proteins in some way. It is conceivable
that life started with proteins, without any nucleic acids. It is
not conceivable that life started with nucleic acids without
proteins. In fact, the purpose of nucleic acids is as a blueprint to
allow proteins to make other proteins.
That last bit is not accurate. While acting as a blueprint for proteins
is a major purpose of DNA, it is not the only purpose. For humans, only
about 1.5% of our DNA codes directly for proteins as \"blueprints\".
Other purposes include epigenetic control and structural support, but
there\'s a lot we simply do not yet understand. RNA also comes in many
types, with many purposes. In particular, several key jobs done by
proteins as enzymes and catalysts can be done by RNA molecules.
Click to expand...

I think you have gone off the deep end here. None of this is relevant to the origins of life. You are describing interactions that have happened long after life began. I like that you even describe \"a lot we simply do not yet understand\" as something that is outside the basic processing of DNA being the blueprint for proteins.


Thus there is the hypothesis called \"RNA world\" which supposes that RNA
was central to the earliest lifeforms, and came before the biological
use of proteins. It\'s a hypothesis - nothing is proven. But there\'s
enough justification and support for it that it is a serious research
topic. Certainly there is not enough supporting evidence to claim that
it is inconceivable that life started with nucleic acids without
proteins - abiogenesis researchers very actively conceive that idea.
(Equally, of course, they also consider proteins first, or combinations
of nucleic acids and proteins at a similar time, or other possibilities
- it\'s an open area of science.)
Click to expand...

Once you start talking about things needing to happen coincidentally, you get into an increasingly improbable region. But we don\'t know. However, since proteins can function in a life-like process without nucleic acid blueprints, there is no reason to think they must have been involved in the beginning.


So they are suggesting that the basic units of life, may have come
from space rather than for them to have been created on earth
initially. They are at least, leaving the door open for these units
to have been created in space.

Whether such \"basic units of life\" (including amino acids, peptides,
fatty acids, nucleic acids, organic molecules, complex carbohydrates,
etc.) first arrived from space or first came together on earth, is
unlikely ever to be fully established. However, the fact that we have
found many of them in space makes it clear that they can be produced by
relatively simple natural forces, breaking the chicken-and-egg cycle of
requiring lifeforms to make the building blocks of life.

It can also help to answer some of the /why/ questions - such as why all
known lifeforms use mostly the same chemical parts. Those are the parts
that were found lying around when the lifeforms first formed.
Click to expand...

Or that these are the \"parts\" that are possible given the raw materials available due to the basics of physics and chemistry.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On 13/02/2022 22:28, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 13/2/22 11:03 pm, Martin Brown wrote:
On 11/02/2022 22:40, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 11/02/22 18:35, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
I think intelligent life is unstable. By the time it has become
sufficiently powerful to communicate or travel over cosmic distances,
it also has become powerful enough to blow itself into oblivion,
and will, after a short while (on cosmic timescales).

They will probably be non-thermal radio bright for a century or so
before they blow themselves up with thermonuclear weapons (or worse)
if we are any guide. We have probably been visible to radio telescopes
since over the horizon radar, VHF radio and terrestrial TV. Our
signals will be much harder to decode now we have gone digital - the
analogue ones practically shout their frame rate at anyone who sees it.

Arecibo was pretty good at standing out when it was operating.
Anything in the beam when they were doing TDR imaging off near Earth
Asteroids would know about it if they had similar radio telescopes to us.

Even Arecibo\'s most powerful pulses would be invisible to equipment like
ours beyond about 10,000 light years. That\'s not very far in galactic
terms, and definitely not intergalactic.
Click to expand...

I agree. It is only about 1/400 th of the volume of our galaxy.

But there are a hell of a lot of stars within 10k ly even so. There are
133 within 10ly.

http://www.icc.dur.ac.uk/~tt/Lectures/Galaxies/LocalGroup/Back/50lys.html

So at that rough density you would expect 133M stars within 10k ly.

The milky way is densely populated with stars in the plane of the
galaxy. Aiming at the densest regions of stars like they did with M13
once probably isn\'t likely to yield results since the stars in globular
clusters are too close together for their own good (and get ever closer
by flinging unlucky ones off to infinity).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

They were also being a bit optimistic about the aliens having better
technology since that is ~25kly away. Naked eye object in a dark sky and
magical spherical dust of diamond like stars in a decent telescope.
Easily found in the summer skies a third the way down from Hercules
shoulder.

https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/m13-and-galaxies/


--
Regards,
Martin Brown
 
On Friday, February 11, 2022 at 10:39:48 AM UTC-5, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 14:25:07 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Feb 2022 05:12:01 -0800) it happened
jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
lonc0h1l5k6a9tbn0...@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.
And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.

The article describes how the basic chemicals needed for RNA an DNA could form in space.

If you say \'was designed\' you get into a loop,
start:
\'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...
goto start
It could have been designed by some intelligence that had a less
complex, more incremental evolutionary path. Something that evolved
billions of years before earth formed.

If you believe in evolution, you will give that a fair consideration.
Click to expand...

Yes, consider that if you examine the idea of preexisting life of a different form creating the life we know today, why is there no sign of such preexisting life? Why would there not be a signature deep inside a glacier in ancient Norway?


It seems likely that in the trillions of reactions somehow
some \'executable\' part was formed that was strong enough to maintain itself.
Polymerase chain reaction only needs some temperature cycling to make
copies of say DNA, and temperature cycling happens due to for example the day night changes on planets.
The big problem is DNA itself, which contains the recipes for the
thousands of incredibly complex mechanisms required to make a cell and
support and reproduce DNA. The problem isn\'t chemicals, it\'s
programming.
Click to expand...

So did Windows start as the massively complex organism that runs on our PCs today? No, it started in the simplest of machines, in a print statement, \"Hello, world\" or even blinking lights on a front panel somewhere. The programming initially only needed to reproduce itself using a process that could be much simpler that what happens today.


If there is an evolutionary, incremental path from thin primordial
soup to a living, reproducting cell, then someone should demonstrate
it how it could happen. Without intelligence.
Click to expand...

That is what people are working on. It\'s hard to find evidence of chemical reactions from billions of years ago.

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On 17/2/22 3:01 am, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 12:50:45 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 16/02/22 11:03, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/02/2022 16:05, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

The big failing in modern EE courses is too much easily-forgotten
mathematical rigor and too little development of electrical instincts.

I\'m not convinced that at least some of the mathematical rigour isn\'t necessary
if you are going to design things that will work well. I think much more
important is knowing when and how to make approximations that will be good
enough for engineering purposes. I have a small collection of very cute ones
that make otherwise intractable problems into something you can solve
approximately with at most a cubic equation.

You need sufficient rigour to understand the presumptions and
limitations. After that, the old saying applies: the best
result of mathematics is that you don\'t need to use it.

As for approximations, yes they are extremely valuable. You
can get considerable practical insight from them, even if
you resort to number crunching for detailed analysis.

That\'s another version of the old quip:
- when I was a schoolkid/undergrad I used a 12\" slide rule
- when I was a graduate I used a helical 13m slide rule
- when I was a professor I used a 6\" slide rule

Sloppy slide ruling slinging was great for plotting \"lab\" results with
a nice scatter of experimental error.

We went to afternoon EE lab.

Dr Seto, the lab instructor, left after 5 minutes

We left after 6 minutes

The night before all the lab results were due, we faked them.
Click to expand...

I sense a continued pattern here. Playing loose with facts is a lifelong
habit of yours.


> We and only we got all A\'s.

\"But then how many kids are getting EE degrees these days\"

Well, I dunno.

How many of the kids in your days got EE degrees without earning them?
 
On 14/02/22 05:16, Anthony William Sloman wrote:
On Monday, February 14, 2022 at 3:03:03 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
That provokes hostility. Perfectly normal.

We would be less hostile to speculations base rather less flamboyantly comprehensive ignorance.
Click to expand...

/Informed/ speculations are fun and more than acceptable.

My manager^2 in the bit of HPLabs that recruited me was
pretty laid back, but he had one rule: you must know
the literature.
 
On Thu, 17 Feb 2022 12:01:41 +1100, Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 17/2/22 3:01 am, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 16 Feb 2022 12:50:45 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 16/02/22 11:03, Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/02/2022 16:05, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

The big failing in modern EE courses is too much easily-forgotten
mathematical rigor and too little development of electrical instincts.

I\'m not convinced that at least some of the mathematical rigour isn\'t necessary
if you are going to design things that will work well. I think much more
important is knowing when and how to make approximations that will be good
enough for engineering purposes. I have a small collection of very cute ones
that make otherwise intractable problems into something you can solve
approximately with at most a cubic equation.

You need sufficient rigour to understand the presumptions and
limitations. After that, the old saying applies: the best
result of mathematics is that you don\'t need to use it.

As for approximations, yes they are extremely valuable. You
can get considerable practical insight from them, even if
you resort to number crunching for detailed analysis.

That\'s another version of the old quip:
- when I was a schoolkid/undergrad I used a 12\" slide rule
- when I was a graduate I used a helical 13m slide rule
- when I was a professor I used a 6\" slide rule

Sloppy slide ruling slinging was great for plotting \"lab\" results with
a nice scatter of experimental error.

We went to afternoon EE lab.

Dr Seto, the lab instructor, left after 5 minutes

We left after 6 minutes

The night before all the lab results were due, we faked them.


I sense a continued pattern here. Playing loose with facts is a lifelong
habit of yours.
Click to expand...

Getting stuff done, actually.

We and only we got all A\'s.

\"But then how many kids are getting EE degrees these days\"

Well, I dunno.

How many of the kids in your days got EE degrees without earning them?
Click to expand...

We earned ours. Faking the data required more understanding of the
circuits than taking actual data.

The lab equipment was terrible. The shared B+ power supply had 50
volts p-p ripple, which made for the other guys getting some
interesting frequency response graphs using their voltmeters.

I noticed the strange, flat amplifier frequency response immediately,
so checked it on an oscilloscope.

--

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts,
but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
 
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 18:12:33 +0000, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/02/22 17:02, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 16:42:33 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 11/02/22 15:39, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 14:25:07 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Feb 2022 05:12:01 -0800) it happened
jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in
lonc0h1l5k6a9tbn00ib4u9fle8gd7nbvj@4ax.com>:

On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.
And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.

The article describes how the basic chemicals needed for RNA an DNA could form in space.

If you say \'was designed\' you get into a loop,
start:
\'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...
goto start

It could have been designed by some intelligence that had a less
complex, more incremental evolutionary path. Something that evolved
billions of years before earth formed.

If you believe in evolution, you will give that a fair consideration.

OK.
0.1s interval
Jan has already addressed that, you\'ve ignored it or not
understood it, viz:
\'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...\'

If you believe in spontaneous generation and evolution, you might
consider that life should have evolved in billions of places in the
universe, billions of years ago.

Give that another 100 milliseconds of thought before you dismiss it.

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe
or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ? Arthur C. Clarke

My personal belief is that intelligent life has evolved many
times, but we haven\'t yet communicated with other examples.

Many people have indeed given that serious consideration,
famously Enrico Fermi\'s name and fellow physicists Edward Teller,
Herbert York and Emil Konopinski - back in 1950. FFI, see the
inconclusive musings about \"The Fermi Paradox\".
Click to expand...

F=MA was discovered a few hundred years ago. Electronics, about a
century ago. Imagine what a civilization could do in a few million
years.

Got another tenth of a second to spare?

--

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts,
but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
 
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 10:42:40 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Friday, February 11, 2022 at 5:12:17 AM UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth.

False; no reason to find archaea in the depths of the earth if
there had been any modern form of life planted here. Archaea is
clearly well-suited to be ancestral, and hard to explain otherwise.
Our familiar life forms are all part of an ecology with dizzying complexity,
and evolution is the best explanation of that.

And yes, it\'s quantum mechanical.

Well, sure; all chemistry is quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics, as
a requirement for understanding, is nearly as ubiquitous as mathematics.
Click to expand...

The giant leap is the first DNA-based reproducing cell. Evolution can
mostly take over from there.

--

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts,
but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
 
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 19:46:05 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 2022-02-11 14:12, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 06:54:29 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

How life came to Earth ?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220210125828.htm
quantum tunneling?

The problem of life isn\'t coming up with small molecular building
blocks, it\'s the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in
a cell and reproduces itself. It\'s not so much a chemistry problem as
a programming problem.


It\'s astoundingly complex now, yes, but it can\'t have been in the beginning.
Click to expand...

It had to be. DNA style reproduction is incredibly recursively
complex. Nobody has explained how that self-defining complexity could
have happened from a puddle of primordial soup. Lots of biologists
have calculated the probability as indistingishable from impossible.

Until someone does show how it could have happened, without
intelligent intervention, robots from outer space, or some master
designer, are as legit a theory as spontaneous generation.

--

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts,
but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Francis Bacon
 
On 13/02/2022 17:31, David Brown wrote:
On 13/02/2022 17:51, Martin Brown wrote:

You can haggle about whether or not they are truly alive because they
need to hijack a cell to replicate (at least all the ones I know of do).

There are some viruses that are so simple that they can\'t hijack a
cell\'s replication systems - they hijack another virus\'s hijacking! In
a sense, they are small viruses that infect other large viruses. Fun stuff.
Click to expand...

And little fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite \'em.

Eventually in a quantised world they get too small to be viable.

Viral phages that attack bacteria are also quite interesting and some of
them may yet have therapeutic value. Progress in this field is slow but
steady as the various pieces are found and understood.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01880-6

The viruses that we see today have co-evolved with their hosts for many
billions of years. The earliest ones would have been much much simpler.

Tardigrades only go back about about half a billion years. They haven\'t
changed all that much - they are good enough to beat most things in
terms of staying alive (if only just) in very hostile environments.

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/tardigrades

--
Regards,
Martin Brown
 
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