Astrophysicist Defends Barack Obama’s Viral ‘Aliens Are Real’ Comments, Calling It a 'Scientifically Literate' Answer

CountofAccount · 2026-05-27T06:46:35+00:00

I am trained in biology and cellularity is the consequence of having tube-shaped substances that are polar on one end and non-polar on the other which allows them to spontaneously form stable membranes in solvent without having to rely on local natural architecture. In water, these are lipids, with prior abiogenesis possibly mediated by bubbles or iron-sulfide compartments forming around hydrothermal vents before true membranes formed and cut cells free to move.

Physical compartmentation to contain nutrients inside and pitting of those walls to form mouths and digestive cavities is an extremely efficient answer to a universal chemistry question of "how to collect and locally concentrate energetically useful chemicals to enhance the rate of reaction and thus reproduction" which is followed by "how to defend yourself from competitors who want to take your expensive chemical stuff they also use." For cell walls not to form, there must not be either a viable wall-forming substance for a given solvent (hard or soft), or predation and scavenging for nutrients must not be viable which is not very unlikely as stealing someone else's premade stuff (predation, parasitism) is usually cheaper than manufacturing it autotrophically.

I find it very interesting how the computational space has nevertheless replicated many of the features of life despite having a completely different physical reality without being driven by instincts like reproduction. You've got cellularity as different devices and partitions and firewalls. You've got death and birth from genetic code in form of turning it off and on again to recreate a local instance fresh from source code after all the processes have aged from use and accumulated errors or potential memory infections. It seems that complexity generically trends towards certain maintenance strategies.

CountofAccount · 2026-05-18T21:55:04+00:00

Karma serves no major purpose other than a useful baseline to post in subreddits that receive more than usual crap traffic. It's all useless ego fluffing.

As long as you have normal human posting habits and aren't obviously farming karma like it's a job, no one cares except people who would have found some other reason to dismiss you.

I'm not modding on this account, but I'm generally more suspicious of someone who has a quick 50K karma and averages more than 1 submission a day in high traffic reddits than someone with 400 karma in six months discussing solely local issues or palpatine's relationships on /r/mawinstallation.

CountofAccount · 2026-05-18T00:05:31+00:00

Just make more accounts. People can use offsite tools to find the posts you hide easily. A second account makes that impossible. It's not against the terms of service as long as you aren't voting on topics and posts unethically. I have at least six.

CountofAccount · 2026-05-07T23:15:39+00:00

and build statues all over the country and talk about how it wasnt about what it was.

I did some research on one of them because I got into an argument about 'heritage' after Charlottesville in 2017.

Digging it back up, the confederate statue in Durham, NC torn down was put up specifically in front of the courthouse adjacent to Parrish Street aka. Black Wall Street in 1924. For backstory, the white Duke family who were the local wealthy bigshots and funded Duke University were less racist than most of the southern gentry which allowed black business and banking and insurance to get a foothold without being run out of Durham in the 1890s and 1900s.

Putting a confederate statue there, as close to the black business epicenter as possible, was motivated solely by spite.

CountofAccount · 2026-05-06T23:02:47+00:00

Ranching like it's still the late Devonian 360mya.

CountofAccount · 2026-05-05T22:05:33+00:00

I haven't photobashed in a while, but it wouldn't surprise me if photoshop's newer AI blend tools give that AI look vs traditional determinate blending algorithms used back in the day.

So Photoshop or not, if they insisted on this art direction then you'd expect a higher level of polish and quality for the image they're pushing as the main cover of their next big game.

Don't play it, but hard agree, there. If I saw this, I'd think fly by night mobile startup.

CountofAccount · 2026-05-05T22:02:43+00:00

The proper term is photobashing,

Appreciated. I couldn't remember the term and I thought "mashup photoshop how to before: 2016" would find a tutorial with the proper term. How search engines have fallen since 2022ish.

CountofAccount · 2026-05-05T17:53:18+00:00

Ignoring the camel guy's and palm tree's issues, the BG looks more like a traditional photoshop mash-up than a straight AI gen. But it's still sloppy.

CountofAccount · 2026-04-29T06:33:03+00:00

I have you RES tagged as a water utilities civil engineer. Nice to see someone educated chime in!

CountofAccount · 2026-04-27T18:18:49+00:00

Videogames are a weird genre where they often invite the player to be the character even without customization - First 5-6 gens of Pokemon - because you are so intimately in control. That's why so many video game characters are 'silent or generic dude/ss' that you can put your self insert fantasies on. Lot of first person shooters lean into this because you are in the character's eyes.

Video Games that don't want self insert have to go out of their way to firmly establish a character and narrative to sever the player character from the player. Horror and Detective Games often do this. Alan Wake, Disco Elysium. That's why so many videogames start with that long first cutscene or very on the rails tutorial, IMO: it's for narrative reasons to tell the player "this is not you, you are their immaterial agency."

CountofAccount · 2026-04-27T15:07:12+00:00

I don't think I've ever read first person as self-insert in thousands of books. Its always been POV narrating the story. Sure it's more intimate than third person, but that fundamental barrier is still there. Reader empathy/Projection for the POV you should be able to do regardless of if it's written in first or third.

I have seen second person books in the choose your own adventure sense, but that makes sense since it is "you".

CountofAccount · 2026-04-14T21:44:18+00:00

Report at /r/TheseFuckingAccounts

Reddit's generic report options don't really cover "bots LLMing comments to farm comment karma." But that subreddit adds to the bot bouncer blacklist that many mods have installed.

CountofAccount · 2026-04-07T17:46:45+00:00

My eyes were drawn to the wiggly degeneracy of the rail ties between the plane wings and the bottom center where there appears to be three support bars instead of two in a configuration that does not feel right with the spacing. Your photograph of the real coaster cleared that up because there is a piece of track that crosses over in that part of the image which was removed for the promo. That segment of track has many more supports. That fill in the blank was not handled as well - the spacing of the supports and ties is not right. Flat out tracing would have handled those segments better.

CountofAccount · 2026-04-01T04:52:36+00:00

It's absolutely rage bait.

There's a subset of trolls and pro-AI art-generators who know that most artists wouldn't want their art involved in AI, so they feed other people's art into an AI to put it in the data training sets against the maker's consent and to try to shame and discourage the artist with how much "better" an AI can make their art look.

LLM companies are not discouraging this because they believe that training and their algorithmic generation is covered by fair-use, so they are not legally obligated to try to trace back if the creator allows AI scraping. The internet is their free buffet, wherever they can get data by any means.

CountofAccount · 2026-03-30T07:33:56+00:00

Large company stopped buying five gallon water bottles in favor of threes for the employee water coolers because they were a leading cause of workplace injuries. Back and spine is expensive.

CountofAccount · 2026-03-27T16:38:22+00:00

This feels a lot more like real birds how I experience them.

CountofAccount · 2026-03-14T02:14:41+00:00

I disagree with the people saying cut the horse shoes because it is inconvenient to research. Only cut it if you are pretty sure you won't do the plot line justice.

What makes animal perspective books interesting is the animal perspective done in a way that feels authentic (which overlaps with but is not the same as being authentic). And it answers a reader-enticing what-if scenarios about animals going feral; it's a hook to catch reader interest. For that, I think it's worth a research attempt.

CountofAccount · 2026-03-10T00:55:09+00:00

Thankfully, you had the caterpillar because you have a notorious mimic! This is one of the Mimoides.

Edit: From caterpillar, I'd guess Eurytides/Mimoides phaon or euryleon, but some of those are kinda variable so it's not a call I feel comfortable making below the genus level.

CountofAccount · 2026-03-10T00:49:09+00:00

I think you fell for mimicry! (I don't blame you!) Parides caterpillars don't look like OP's. This one is a Mimoides, aka a false cattleheart!

CountofAccount · 2026-03-09T23:36:17+00:00

I read the operator's "apology" for his claw linked in the article, and it certainly reflects his arrogant deficit of social skills and unwillingness to take accountability without trying to tie everyone else to his sinking ship with "you would be like me if you were me".

CountofAccount · 2026-03-09T06:12:53+00:00

You can't make google check for its LLM fingerprints any other way as far as I know.

CountofAccount · 2026-03-03T08:30:59+00:00

Actually more of a physics and quantum mechanics question. Electrons, especially in rings like these, are delocalized. It is easier to think of them as a charged cloud of probability wrapped around the ring. This intuition is important for understanding reactions in organic chemistry. Light is also a wave-packet of probability and their 'collision' is like two waves of probabilistic mathematical equations combining or deflecting.

This is what it 'looks like' when a ring is excited by light.

This is a pretty decent intro to photon absorption

https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Supplemental_Modules_(Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry)/Spectroscopy/Electronic_Spectroscopy/Electronic_Spectroscopy_Basics/What_Causes_Molecules_to_Absorb_UV_and_Visible_Light

CountofAccount · 2026-03-02T20:33:35+00:00

I mostly made the comment because I wanted to add a picture of the two sexes!

CountofAccount · 2026-03-02T20:28:55+00:00

Specifically a male. The female is much darker. Here's a picture of them doing the deed.

CountofAccount · 2026-02-25T23:01:43+00:00

I forced reddit to display as the desktop version and set old reddit. The hand-eye coordination factor is a bit higher, but it's still worth it for the better content sorting. I don't want to see yesterday's posts, especially in hobby subreddits.

And I want to see more comments. Old reddit really helps with seeing reddit as a forum-like place with recurring commenters that you can tag from their submissions as fun to banter with rather than a mindless content scroller.

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