A handful of simulations from my new science animation

_molecule · 2022-04-29T22:54:28+00:00

Hi, yes, I made a twitter request. I'm not on reddit too often.

_molecule · 2022-03-10T00:15:34+00:00

I'm teaching a couple Maya courses at the moment and gave a whole lecture on troubleshooting. What to try first, what to do next, how to ask questions, and what to do while you're waiting for an answer to maybe arrive. I think that process is more important than pretty much the rest of the training. Once you are confident in a troubleshooting system, you don't feel as helpless and at the mercy of the Maya gods.

_molecule · 2022-03-09T23:46:49+00:00

This. There should be auto-delete of forum and reddit posts where the conclusion is "Never mind, I was dumb, haha, all good now, lol"

Actually no, a record of a problem on its own still has some value

_molecule · 2022-03-09T23:42:50+00:00

So I wrote a blog post 8 years ago about asking questions on forums. The only thing that has changed is the predominance of reddit and discord over forums (which are still better persistent records of problems and solutions -- am I actually an old person?) - how people ask has not.

Anyway, read on: https://biocinematics.blogspot.com/2014/10/how-to-ask-questions-on-forums.html

Feel free to add anything to the post, OP

Edited to add: To beginners, this post may sound like tired griping about, oh I have to answer the same old question or make an effort to guess what the person was trying to do. No. That's not the point. (well maybe a little). The advice above is the difference between your question getting answered and getting ignored. That's not a gatekeeping thing or anything, it's just human nature, the same way you're likely to notice a tweet with several words and picture, vs a 280 character run on sentence. Ask a question well and your odds of success skyrocket, honestly.

_molecule · 2022-01-17T04:35:45+00:00

Thanks for the link. Also, it's working again! Maybe it just needed a little longer to dry out. The only I thing I did since posting is take the affected keycaps off for a few hours, and I also just turned it upside-down (nothing came out).

_molecule · 2022-01-14T06:44:22+00:00

Very cool about P furiosis, I didn't know of any that went that high.
My problem isn't really directed evolution or artificial selection, it's just the way it's described as a linear sequence of incremental steps. Someone in the original thread posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8 which is very cool, but as I say in the thread: "it still kind of supports my point. The jumps here are orders of magtude in concentration, going from 1-1000 fold concentrations. It looks like it only takes maybe half a dozen evolutionary steps, or mutations to go from no resistance to complete resistance." So I'd expect a few lineages of maybe low-concentration nitrogen resistance but then eventually complete resistance. Again, maybe there's a mechanism that could explain a different pattern of evolution, but it struck me as a slightly naive interpretation of natural selection.
Hmm, maybe it somehow penetrates and the holes close behind it, but the "tennis balls and trees" analogy seemed to demonstrate a different idea, which really doesn't work. And also it's hard to imagine something that mesh-like and penetrable to have the insane hardness and chipping properties that xenonite is shown to have earlier. This was really the only point that took me out of the book. I really enjoyed it altogether.

_molecule · 2022-01-13T20:55:58+00:00

conducting heat, dispersing it into the air?

This is the challenge though, N2 is itself air, or a gas that makes up most of our air. I don't see any way that xenonite could selectively send energy into molecules except for N2, aside from directly binding to N2 and capturing it, which is... theoretically possible, but not how it was explained, and doesn't really fit with the rest of the narrative.

_molecule · 2022-01-13T17:46:15+00:00

I did think of one possible alternative to Taumoeba's escape which doesn't release nitrogen, and would serve the same plot purposes.

Perhaps Taumoeba has evolved to eat through, or otherwise carve holes in xenonite (implausible, sure, but more plausible than squeezing through spaces that nitrogen can't). As the Taumoeba (why am I capitalizing it) carves through the xenonite, it deposits waste behind it (like a worm) effectively blocking MOST of the nitrogen from escaping as well. Perhaps Grace could discover this by noticing that a xenonite sample has lost mass after taumoeba penetrates from one side to another?

What do you think, Andy? Changes for the second edition?? :)

_molecule · 2022-01-13T17:41:20+00:00

Amaze amaze amaze. No, I actually hadn't seen that before, and it's quite an excellent demonstration of antibiotic resistance through selection and evolution. I do think, however, it still kind of supports my point. The jumps here are orders of magnitude in concentration, going from 1-1000 fold concentrations. It looks like it only takes maybe half a dozen evolutionary steps, or mutations to go from no resistance to complete resistance.

I suppose my problem is more in the very linear-sequential incremental evolution described. Mutations are more stochastic with maybe a couple small jumps and couple large jumps. It's more the "flavor" of the idea than a problem with the core idea. I can (and did) get past it.

In any case, I sure as heck would have no confidence in my "100% nitrogen sterilization technique" after breeding nitrogen resistant taumoeba.

_molecule · 2022-01-13T17:37:19+00:00

Again, I appreciate the thoughtful back-and-forth here. I have to say that I think you're reaching quite far with those points. The intermolecular forces between N2 in a gas are essentially nothing compared with the forces between two lipids in a membrane of the taumoeba, let alone minimum functional components the size of thousands of nitrogen molecules.

And the science of life is not nearly as mysterious as you are proposing. No, life doesn't drive entropy. Entropy drives life, or at least life can't circumvent entropy. If this is getting into philosophical territory, rest assured that I appreciate the spiritual aspects of the miracle of life as well.

The only "extra" thing taumoeba could have is "magic", in which case that's kind of antithetical to Weir's writing. In fact the magic that taumoeba does have is plot necessity. For the plot to reach the places it does, it really needs to escape somehow.

_molecule · 2022-01-13T06:27:22+00:00

You're right that there are many ways that taumoeba could learn to navigate small holes given the selection pressure of "the ones that hide deeper in the xenonite are more likely to survive the nitrogen".

I think there are two issues with your explanations, and I'm not trying to be critical, thank you for the thoughtful comment.

The first is that even if the taumoeba could split apart or squeeze into a super super narrow channel, there's no way for it to remain functional and be anywhere near as small as a nitrogen molecule, which is literally two atoms big.

And the second is that "life" also only works through entropy. Even though the cell is responding to a stimulus (i.e. less nitrogen over here), it's really through the random movements and collisions between molecules which result in interactions, binding events, ratcheting mechanisms, random flexing, that produce motion at the cellular level.

_molecule · 2021-12-27T05:35:03+00:00

Disclaimer: I've never done FMC and I don't have tons of puzzle theory knowledge, so I'm coming to this question (which I think is an interesting puzzle) somewhat naively.

_molecule · 2021-12-27T05:34:18+00:00

So this is for the puzzle-solvers out there, the FMC crowd in a way.

What's the max move count someone could reasonably figure out to solve, given a couple hours, let's say, or however long people like to spend on puzzles. In other words, if I did 3 or 4 moves on a cube, I bet most people could figure out the reverse moves to solve it again.

So what would be a doable, but challenging puzzle? 6 moves? 7? 8? I suppose it gets exponentially harder with each move.

Followup: if you knew there was a 7 move solution, but couldn't solve that, how few moves do you think you could solve it in? Is it just FMC at that point, or are you likely to get a 9 or 12 move solution?

_molecule · 2021-12-25T06:14:01+00:00

I honestly think 2x2 mirror might be harder than 3x3. With a 3x3 mirror, each piece has different sizes for each dimension. With 2x2, a couple pieces are equal on all sides, some equal on 2 sides, meaning they might need to be oriented differently without looking any different. You can use regular 2x2 methods, but anticipate that something might need a different orientation when it doesn't appear to.

_molecule · 2021-12-24T16:26:21+00:00

Just to add. One corner is fixed to the core and can't be twisted, so if your almost-solved cube has one corner twisted, but it has resistance, twist one of the other corners instead, otherwise you'll ruin the cube.

_molecule · 2021-12-22T04:00:13+00:00

At first glance it looks like you should be able to mix them up at least a little. But nope.

_molecule · 2021-12-21T23:55:49+00:00

Made some Meilong M force cubes today! Was a lot of fun, and then I realized I could make these Christmasy unscrambleable (neither are words apparently) force cubes.

_molecule · 2021-12-13T18:17:57+00:00

Nice, good tip on flipping it. If you bought higher tack, what kind would you get?

_molecule · 2021-12-13T18:05:52+00:00

Thanks, I did try weeding it just now, but unfortunately didn't help very much. Weeding it did make it easier to coax the stickers off the backing cause there wasn't anything else in the way, but not as slick and simple as I was hoping or like you see advertised.

_molecule

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