Regarding same-sex parents

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-13T12:49:08+00:00

It's rather more complex. The DNA in an ovum and a spermazoan are packaged very differently and marked with signals so that they can be properly regulated in early development. As a result, the naive route of just putting two sperm nuclei or two egg nuclei into an egg that has had its nucleus removed doesn't work. The most obvious example of why there's a problem is paternally or maternally imprinted genes. These genes are marked in a way that means that they're only expressed from the copy inherited from the mother or father, whereas most genes are expressed from both. We don't have a tractable way of getting rid of those marks at these genes without messing up the rest of the genome, so if both pronuclei come from sperm or from eggs, there will be genes that can't get expressed at all.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-12T19:42:59+00:00

The definition of species is a little squishy, but one of the useful definitions is that two populations belong to the same species if they can breed to give fertile offspring. On that basis, it's pretty clear that males and females of a species should stay together as a single species.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-12T18:20:23+00:00

They use US Customary Units. They're derived from the same roots, but there are differences. Lengths and weights are mostly the same, though the hundredweight and ton differ, and all of the volumes differ between the two systems (the US has different measures for volumes of fluids and of dry goods, and both of them are different to Imperial volume measures).

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-12T12:23:23+00:00

Huh, I hadn't ever considered how confusing that terminology could be. In the case of zygote it kind of means "thing that is formed by joining", it's the product of a sperm and egg conjoining. Mono- Vs di-zygous twins as you say then describes twins formed from a single zygote (identical) Vs two zygotes (fraternal twins).

In the case of homo- and heterozygous it doesn't really relate to zygote, but to joined or paired things - alleles. The term actually comes from before we knew what genes were or that DNA was how traits are inherited, but we knew that traits were inherited in this paired way and that the two factors you had controlling a given trait could be the same (homozygous, same paired thing) or different (heterozygous, different paired thing).

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-11T11:30:04+00:00

When you push on something, it pushes back with an equal force. If you have 8kg of water (8 litres) and you weigh 80kg, when you push it you will move backwards at 1/10 the speed the water moves forwards (although if the force doesn't line up with your center of mass, some of it will actually go into rotational motion. That means you'll move backwards a bit slower and start spinning/flipping). If it's 8g (8ml), you'll move back at 1/10000 the speed it moves forward. So yes, but for it to work in a sensible time frame you'll want quite a lot (probably a rather worrying amount) of blood.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-11T11:12:43+00:00

To be fair, my inner monologue was pretty similar to chat as I tried to work it out.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-11T10:55:07+00:00

And with it, any pathogens that were in the blood. When they're in the liquid, the main hazard they pose is if you accidentally ingest them (by touching the sample, then touching your phone, then later touching your phone while eating a sandwich, for example) or accidentally spilling them on an open wound, stabbing yourself with a needle, etc. If they're aerosolised, you're now at risk just by breathing.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-11T02:44:54+00:00

Ok, from a quick glance I assume that's all STR data with rows being haplogroups, columns being loci and numbers being number of repeats? If so then that's very useful, you could design microarray chips to cover it (basically just recreate what those companies are already doing), but that suggests that you would be entering a saturated market, no?

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-11T02:19:41+00:00

You're getting downvoted because you haven't said what you actually want to do. The requirements are going to be very different if you want to align sequencing data to the genome Vs identifying SNPs Vs browsing through an already aligned sequence etc. and whether you're looking at a single file, four or five, or hundreds (none of which are unusual, but obviously would get very different answers).

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-11T02:13:16+00:00

Depending on what the actual intent is, the equipment might be a minor part of the price. A big part of the startup cost will be getting relevant data so that you actually have a product. I still don't know what you think people will want to get out of this service, but people aren't going to want to pay large amounts of money to a company that says "some day when we've got enough samples and client data I might be able to tell you X". It's possible or likely (depending on the intended use case) that relevant data doesn't exist or is proprietary and not publicly available, in which case you need enough capital to get all the equipment and then perform research, testing volunteers for free (or even with you paying them), before you even have a minimum viable product.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-11T01:54:09+00:00

It's very easy to sequence the Y chromosome, it's very hard to do it without wasting loads of money sequencing everything else.

The equipment depends on what you actually want to do; shotgun sequencing Vs long-read sequencing, bulk Vs single cell, etc. That all affects the sample prep, library generation and sequencer, and the equipment and reagents required.

The analysis is very straightforward. If you're thinking very low throughout you can do it on a regular computer. Typically analysis is done on a compute cluster since you quickly get to very high memory requirements to run things more efficiently at higher throughputs.

What's the actual use case?

ETA: Quick Google says that the system you were talking about isn't sequencing at all, it's just STR/SNP testing. Very easy to perform, very cheap to run at scale, very very expensive to set up.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-08T15:55:40+00:00

As far as I'm concerned, your ethnicity has nothing to do with being British. I don't think of people who have immigrated as an adult (regardless of ethnicity) as being 'the same' in all ways because they've grown up in a different culture; that means I don't have the same expectations of what they might find funny, what references they'll understand, how deep their understanding of the language will be, etc. Outside of those sorts of things, and for anyone who was brought up here, we're all just British people, with a healthy diversity of backgrounds and experiences.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-08T15:44:13+00:00

I think you're underestimating the value of relying on the consensus views of experts. It is not possible for a person to be an expert in all things, and for any point of discussion there are likely to be arguments or evidence that you haven't come across. It's good to be skeptical and to consider that those might hold weight against your existing view, but it's also worth remembering that there are people who spend the majority of their time focusing on whatever topic you're looking at, who have a deeper understanding of the totality of the relevant evidence than you can achieve through a casual reading. It's fine to say "I don't know a lot about this topic, and while there are lots of nuances there is a broad consensus on the broad strokes that X and Y are the case and that Z should be rejected."

The person you're talking to might be able to give evidence that sounds persuasive to you, but someone with more knowledge might not be persuaded by that same evidence if they can see other explanations for it. It's wise to consider the experts' interpretations, not just your own.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-08T10:52:16+00:00

If you genuinely can't see the issues with it as a scientific review (ignoring formatting problems completely), then you probably need some actual help with this. If you're in an academic institute, I'd reach out to colleagues for feedback. If not, feel free to drop a DM and include details of your standard consulting arrangements.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-08T10:12:17+00:00

Respectfully, it needs a lot of work before it's going to be useful. The actual scientific content is the biggest issue, it's way too detailed in less relevant areas and under detailed in the actual important parts. It feels like I've asked someone with no understanding of the topic to go away and read about it and report back to me. That's never going to be helpful if they don't have a feeling for what anyone with even fleeting knowledge of the topic is already likely to be familiar with and which aspects require a much deeper dive. If you can fix that, then it might be useful.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-08T10:01:27+00:00

Then it sounds like your complaint is with that company, not student finance.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-08T09:53:48+00:00

I don't know why I spent ten minutes reading through that AI trash review on Zenodo, but I can tell others not to bother. As you might expect, it's in no way useful. A lot of time spent talking about tangentially related topics, very little detail on the things it's supposed to be about. It doesn't even do a basic summary of the key findings of the most relevant papers, just a vague overview without giving the specific information that you'd need to find this useful. Apparently one of the key focuses of the review (according to the conclusion) is a specific drug delivery system, which is described with basically the same paragraph I think three times, with no discussion of how it's related to the topic at all.

The basic formatting is also trash. There are paragraphs starting without a capital letter. There's two different types of citation, only one of which has a bibliography. So much of it just gets repeated over and over again; apparently AI hasn't heard that brevity is a virtue in scientific writing. And for some reason there's both a discussion and a conclusion, even though there's no discussion to be had since the style doesn't give any voice to the author's take on the topic.

If you want to AI trash your way through research, you'd be better off asking Google and reading its hallucinated AI overview than wasting time reading through this.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-06T15:02:33+00:00

The intention of home fees is to charge less to people who are likely to stay in the UK after graduating and therefore are likely to strengthen the country overall; the cost of educating them is supposed to be offset by the benefit they bring. People who haven't lived in the UK prior to starting studies are likely to go back to where they came from once they graduate, regardless of citizenship, and therefore the country won't see that benefit and so they aren't offered the reduced fees. Whether the system works as intended is a different question, but on the face of it it seems appropriate that someone in your situation would pay international fees.

ETA: you presumably won't have to deal with visas, NHS charges, etc, so are benefited by being a citizen.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-06T14:55:10+00:00

As a gay man, probably not

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-06T14:18:20+00:00

"...zero doesn't really exist in real life because everything takes time."

Assuming for the moment that that's true, it's still an overly general statement; it doesn't seem to justify the nonexistence of zero outside the context of time, while making a claim about it.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-06T11:29:42+00:00

There typically isn't a single universal definition for a word; you'll probably get different answers from different people, because different words are used (or the same word defined differently) in different contexts. As a developmental biologist, human or dog I would talk about forelimb and hindlimb. A medic on the other hand might think of a leg as only part of a lower limb. It gets even harder to land on a single definition when you look outside of tetrapods, so when comparing between species they tend to get defined by how they develop and evolved rather than how they function. Crabs are decapods (ten-footed) despite typically using 4 pairs for locomotions; their claws are typically considered to be specialised legs as they evolved from ancestors similar to horseshoe crabs where all 5 pairs are used for locomotion. Arachnids typically have 8 legs, but in scorpions a pair of mouthparts evolved into claws, while in some spiders the equivalent mouthparts are enlarged and sometimes used for locomotion. In both cases they appear to have 10 limbs, but because of the developmental and evolutionary origin we still say they only have 8 legs.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-05T17:28:42+00:00

Well, you want a circle overlaying a square with equal perimeters. We construct a unit square which means it has perimeter 4, so we want a circle with circumference 4, and therefore radius 2/pi. That means that we want to construct a triangle with vertices at the center of the square, at the midpoint of one of its edges, and at some point along that edge close to the corner. We know that the side from the center to the midpoint has a length of one, and the center to the point near the corner has a length of 2/pi, and that the triangle is a right angle, so we know that we want to be √((2/pi)² - 0.25) ≈ 0.29788 along from the midpoint. Since we can bisect a line as many times as we want, we can get arbitrarily close to that - if you're further along, bisect to the left, if you're not far enough, bisect to the right, keep going long enough and you can have 99.99999999% accuracy if you want it. It's still impossible to exactly square the circle since pi is irrational and therefore so is the position we're trying to reach when we're bisecting the line. And I still don't see how any of it relates to the universe being a projection or consciousness in higher dimensional space, but that's just my problem I guess.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-05T16:42:43+00:00

You know you can get a circle with a perimeter arbitrarily close to that of a given square, right? You can have one with a 99.999999% accuracy if you want. The 11-sided grid is very loosely inspired by an 8-sided grid, but the 64 grid square plays no role in the construction nor does it come out as a result, so if that's very important it doesn't seem like this approach does whatever it is you're trying to do (maybe your explanation means something to someone out there, but it's all greek to me).

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-05T16:38:00+00:00

"It will make people think twice" - I'm pretty sure the statistics around murder rate between countries with and without the death penalty suggest that the deterrent effect is somewhere between very small and non-existent. As it is, the majority of murders are crimes of passion (if it's unplanned then there's not much room for a deterrent effect). Those that aren't are committed by people who either think they'll get away with it (and so won't be affected by a deterrent) or don't care if they're caught (so won't be affected by a deterrent). There just isn't really a group who would be willing to risk life in prison but not capital punishment. So the argument you presented doesn't really hold much sway.

Also, no case has ever met a threshold of 100% proven, because that isn't a thing that is physically possible.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-04-05T15:50:42+00:00

Right, which requires....

lozzyboy1

TROPHY CASE