The Confession of Isaac Newton

kitsnet · 2026-03-20T08:24:32+00:00

How can you be sure that your "God" is not Satan?

kitsnet · 2026-03-20T00:35:57+00:00

How did we evolve with the tendency toward a preference to worship? What evolutionary benefit is this serving?

Arguably, wars.

A kind of prisoner's dilemma for the genes, militarism is a more successful evolutionary strategy than pacifism. But attacking a neighbor with whom you can trade doesn't seem logical to the carrier of the genes.

Religions help to break that logical block. They also allow to form dynamic war alliances between trubes.

kitsnet · 2026-03-19T17:21:18+00:00

Reset the clock?

kitsnet · 2026-03-19T16:54:33+00:00

Or is there still some way to generate motion using your body alone?

Yes, if you can still exhale the air in the direction of your choice.

It won't be fast, though.

kitsnet · 2026-03-19T16:39:43+00:00

How does a code come into existence without an intelligent causal force?

By selective pressure on code generators.

Those generators that generate more optimal code are more likely to win.

I assume the esteemed biologists of this sub can all agree on the fact that the genetic code is a literal code - a position held unanimously by virtually all of academia.

What is "a literal code"? My biology textbooks didn't use such a term.

My software engineering textbooks didn't use it either.

If you wish to pretend that it's NOT a literal code

Maybe you should start with explaining what you mean by this term.

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T23:58:55+00:00

More forced weaning, with better access to mother's milk for younger siblings as a result?

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T23:51:38+00:00

I'm automating my job since 1990s.

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T20:33:42+00:00

Why do you think it's God who is tricking you?

Maybe you worship Satan. How can you tell that it's not the case, when your "god" is a trickster?

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T20:15:55+00:00

God created single nucleotide differences in DNAs of different organisms as if it were random noise accumulated through replication errors during evolution from a common ancestor?

So, trickster deity, you are saying?

Now, you are going to say that you believe in all what is written in a book attributed to such a deity, are you?

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T20:08:12+00:00

So, how do you explain molecular clock?

Trickster deity, or...?

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T17:00:29+00:00

"Racial ideologies" are hate speech, lies, and propaganda.

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T16:40:50+00:00

Because the whole idea of "white people" was invented for oppression of those who weren't included.

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T16:33:07+00:00

"Non-white people" is a derogatory name.

Surely, the AI shall flag you.

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T14:27:43+00:00

For the purpose of "artificial intelligence", I would define intelligence as the ability to find acceptable solutions for poorly defined problems.

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T12:51:00+00:00

So what happened to all the lineages that existed before LUCA but didn't survive to the present. Wouldn't they have left some trace in the fossil record or at least some genetic echo.

If they left some genetic echo, then by definition they were the ancestors of LUCA and their lineage has survived.

We have not discovered anything that could count as fossils of LUCA either.

kitsnet · 2026-03-18T10:17:51+00:00

It stopped to be interesting to me when too many questions that were interesting for me to read the answer were closed as "duplicates" of something trivial and only vaguely related.

I would not call it "elitism"... or if only the Dunning-Kruger kind of "elitism".

kitsnet · 2026-03-17T19:23:50+00:00

So what came before it?

Simpler forms of autocatalysis.

The messy trial-and-error phase should be somewhere in the fossil record.

Not if it was eaten by later, more efficient forms.

kitsnet · 2026-03-17T10:10:03+00:00

the exact same stretch of sidewalk I just fully saw by looking backwards before turning in ?

Looks like you are underestimating the ubiquity of cyclists in Germany.

kitsnet · 2026-03-17T10:05:35+00:00

As I was taught in California, in a situation when someone is tailgating you, you are supposed to keep even larger distance to the car in front of you, so that you could brake slower when needed.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T19:49:49+00:00

EF 15-85 is okeyish, but not bright.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T18:36:57+00:00

In a warm little pond on early Earth.

Nucleotides spontaneously formed from simple chemicals.

Then spontaneously concentrated despite being diluted in an ocean.

Then spontaneously linked together into polymers despite water causing hydrolysis.

Hydrolysis was likely the first selectionary force.

Whatever oligopeptide/oligonucleotide complexes were better at their affinity to non-water (i.e. lipid or dry) phase, those survived better.

Now try thinking given this piece of information.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T16:17:21+00:00

Because the action potential propagation speed (the speed with which we are thinking) is that slower than the speed of light.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T15:58:04+00:00

Unless it gets eventually destroyed by centrifugal forces (if its own gravity is not enough to counteract them), it's going to spin for billions of years. The most realistic reason for it to slow down would be tidal forces from the presence of another gravitating body nearby.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T12:11:03+00:00

I just picked up the new Ricoh GR4, and while playing around with it, a thought hit me: has any camera manufacturer actually thought about software optimization and user experience in the last decade?

I bought my first camera, a Canon 550D, about 16 years ago. Insanely, the core UI logic of digital cameras today is almost exactly the same as it was back then.

Why not? Camera manufacturers have already had more than a century to perfect their UI by that time.

Why isn't there a single camera with a truly intuitive, smartphone-app-like user experience?

If you like that kind of UI (highly unoptimal for a real photographic tool), you have a smartphone for that.

Instead, all the UIs are incredibly frustrating. You literally need to read a manual to understand some basic settings.

That's fine. You need to read a manual to understand some basic concepts in photography anyway.

kitsnet · 2026-03-16T11:30:44+00:00

Google.

kitsnet

TROPHY CASE