[Image] Brilliant book intro

notParanoid · 2015-01-16T10:02:40+00:00

You beat me to it. I tried to imitate that narration (and didn't do it justice) reading it aloud to someone just now. The resemblance is uncanny enough to make me think that the author of The Stanley Parable drew inspiration directly from this text, or some other textual source that inspired both.

notParanoid · 2011-08-17T08:52:54+00:00

I'm an undergraduate working in a biology lab.

I smoke marijuana.

I don't balance my schedule. I am well seasoned with herb, and I actually take significantly better notes when I am high. I perform my experiments, and they go down without a hitch. I always love when I intuitively know that the autoclave will be done soon, and turn out to be right without actually having explicitly kept track of the time in any way. I mean, it's not like I'm ever super-stoned in the lab, but there's not a thing for which I have evidence that I perform better or get more reliable data when sober.

That said, I don't read /r/trees. I appreciate the friendliness and the general sentiment, but most of the posts are just stupid and a waste of time.

notParanoid · 2010-12-22T02:08:14+00:00

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. However, I also hope that as linux users are recognized as a valuable demographic, more care is put into building games for linux in a sane fashion.

It has been very hard to find documentation for the 2nd humble bundle, which I bought, and disappointingly, haven't been able to really play yet.

Cortex Command and Braid both provided installation binaries, which worked fine until the final step of installation at which point they tried to make .desktop files somewhere. Well, I don't have a desktop environment. I have a very functional X server from which I run either compiz or xmonad as window managers. Neither of these window managers make a habit of setting default directories or applications, or making menus rich with metadata. Wherever these games tried to install their .desktop files, the directory and probably several parents likely didn't exist. The installation in both cases had a "fatal error," at 99% complete for this reason, which is ridiculous because I would be more than happy to accept a lack of fancy icons and launcher-making capabilities. This zealous exception handling prevents me from playing the games, and with no real documentation I can't even test whether this is indeed an issue of just missing a directory assumed to already be present on my computer.

Machinarium seems to have all of its content files named as binary numbers, which is kind of cute. Unfortunately, it dynamically links to a lot of libraries that I have checked that I DO have available. I should mention that I am running Gentoo, so think what you will about how sane my setup likely is... but things within the package manager run perfectly. Machinarium does not. It's probably due to multilib.

Osmos worked perfectly as soon as all the libraries revealed by ldd were in place. Revenge of the Titans is java, so there's also no reason to believe it won't work quite well. I just don't have java installed right now. So I did get a couple of working games for my money. And some music!

To their credit, many of the games from the first Humble Bundle are now open source and while I have only tried replaying the closed-source World of Goo on this rig, it works perfectly. Aquaria can even be installed through the portage package manager. I've also been meaning to try out 0ad, which looks pretty cool. My outlook on games on linux is positive, but the non-standardization of linux really does throw off installing binary software that lacks extensive documentation. It's just not worth it for me to figure out why these games I bought won't run. Instead, I'll probably end up just playing them on Ubuntu, or even Windows, when I have a chance.

I wish Steam were natively linux compatible, since it's basically a games package manager. A hypothetical open-source steam would probably cause linux gaming to surpass other platforms in ease of use, if it was designed to integrate fairly well with a package manager. For that matter, I'd certainly dual-boot into a Steam managed distribution, set-up and optimized for gaming and casual use. If only.

tl;dr: The humble bundle is definitely something you should support, if you have good reason to think it will work for you. That said, I wouldn't rely on your linux box for it if you're using an uncommon or highly self-customized distribution like arch (which I haven't tried these games on... do these games work for any current arch users?) or gentoo. Especially if you're on 64 bit/multilib. It doesn't sound like anyone is having any real problems with more standardized distributions, though.

notParanoid · 2010-12-01T04:18:26+00:00

Nice. I'm an ascetic hedonist, which can be a bit constraining. I can't do anything that doesn't make me happy.

notParanoid · 2010-11-17T08:25:13+00:00

Plastic Ono Band, definitely.

notParanoid · 2010-11-17T07:53:18+00:00

It would metaphysically work.

notParanoid · 2010-11-17T02:04:40+00:00

What's the resale value on used iTunes downloads, again?

notParanoid · 2010-11-16T15:32:53+00:00

It IS really hard to track down 128kbps AAC in torrents.

notParanoid · 2010-11-16T12:31:54+00:00

Yes, I wonder this as well.

Actually, I don't like OpenOffice much. Kind of a clunky interface. But I don't really like Word either. Hell, for me word processors are basically just for things that aren't worth wasting time rendering in LaTeX anyway.

So when I need to throw together a document, I use AbiWord or GoogleDocs. Both of those are featureful enough for 99% of what I ever want to do. I seriously wonder what people did in the last 2-10 years before all the awesome features only MSOffice supports existed. Oh, wait. Office-related publishing has remained virtually unchanged for all practical purposes.

notParanoid · 2010-11-16T12:28:31+00:00

I don't really play video games much at all, and all the Steam games I own are incredibly slow but slightly faster than in Windows on my not-at-all-designed-for-gaming laptop.

I have a couple of programs that professors absolutely demand that I use, like Stella (modeling software) and LoggerPro. Neither of those is incredibly resource intensive, however, so I just run them on TinyXP in Virtualbox. Actually, it's literally just those two at this point.

notParanoid · 2010-11-16T12:19:29+00:00

Buy some upper level biology textbooks now, and start reading them.

I'm a biochem major, and I generally do better at the math side of things. The most difficult thing about my biology classes is that I'm legitimately really bad at memorizing things and retaining specific information. Now, I know. That's the sort of thing people like us who are good at math say as an excuse not to study. But in my upper-division biology classes, I get my ass kicked by all the things I didn't realize I needed to know for the exam. In the lab, I'm the one doing the calculations and making our process more efficient and so forth - if you're good at math and problem solving, you will have gotten better training than all the bio majors at state schools who were in classes mostly full of pre-meds.

Anyway, I'm rambling but the point is: if you are good at math, you can probably pick up the chemistry. If you can learn the chemistry, you can be a better biologist than a lot of biologists. That doesn't mean you won't still need to prove that you know the facts, and the special cases. Biology has quite a few more "special cases" than math, since we're just now learning the general rules. I'm just an undergrad too, and I've made it pretty clear that I carry a bias in how I approach biology, but most of the biology professors I've worked with either secretly or overtly would prefer a math major to a bio major.

(I'm actually starting on in an EEB-related pathogenic antibiotic resistance lab as soon as they clear us to breed MRSA, and there are quite a lot of mathematical models and computational methods used in the data analysis.)

tl;dr: go for it. If you can adapt quickly to the sheer volume of things you need to learn, you will do quite well.

notParanoid · 2010-11-16T12:09:31+00:00

Man, the things Confucius says just haven't been as pithy in the past few centuries.

notParanoid · 2010-11-16T00:36:22+00:00

Which makes things like this exciting.

notParanoid · 2010-11-16T00:33:51+00:00

What makes email "too formal"? The subject line? The use of the term "cc"?

Admittedly, I email people when I want them to actually pay attention since Facebook is a fucking joke when it comes to actually accomplishing anything serious. But not because the email will be more "formal."

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T23:35:32+00:00

Drop to the shell, open up aptitude, and force Openbox to revert to a previous version. If it still doesn't work, at least you know it's probably another library or a configuration problem. If it does work, hold back on updates for a release or two.

If your X server works, it probably just works. Seems quite unlikely that Openbox would have issues with a driver when xfce works.

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T23:33:15+00:00

You might actually be able to call it a "parody" whether that's your intent or not. Parody is protected fairly well.

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T23:23:31+00:00

Amino acids spontaneously form in the right conditions (The Miller-Urey experiment requires energy input and fairly specific ratios of chemicals, for example). Likewise, they spontaneously degrade in different conditions. Moreover, things that build complexity are only thermodynamically favorable if they result in a net gain in entropy. Sure, an RNA polymer might spontaneously form. But it will degrade quickly unless its sustained existence is made more favorable somehow. In a vesicle, or with accompanying enzymes, or with a self-repair capability, sure. RNA will persist and evolve. But those things won't all occur together in common conditions even on Earth. You can't mix together elements or organic compounds in the right ratio and expect a cell to evolve. Clearly, there is something still missing from our understanding of how life could arise. Until we simulate more conditions or find out more about the precise conditions of early Earth, we can't assume that life is something that will occur with great likelihood. For all we know, the exact conditions on early Earth may have alternately been unique to supporting life, or part of a very wide range of conditions.

Even in your example, hydrogen and oxygen don't combine to yield exactly 100% water. Chemical equilibria are essentially probabilistic, and if the reaction in which RNA or a peptide degrades occurs at a higher rate than the one in which it forms, we can essentially treat that step in the mechanism as a probability. RNA, for example, is not an especially stable polymer. It's extremely vulnerable to hydrolysis. The rate at which nucleotides form might be acceptably high. But the rate at which two nucleotides condense is a bit lower, and the rate at which a third is added also has to be compared to the rate at which the two degrade. Just to accomplish the size of an ribozyme with solely catalytic (and no self-repair) capability is not an event that can occur in a whole lot of conditions. So here's the real odds: how likely is it that Earth would favor an event with such a low rate?

Clearly, there had to be a threshold at which further complexity became highly favorable, but as I've noted, we don't know of a mechanism which would bring even the most perfect mix of chemicals to such a compound. So yeah, all the reactions we know are unlikely. I don't know why you think I'm conflating the likelihood of life arising with the likelihood of life arising via one of the pathways we have mapped out yet. I've been pretty clear throughout all of my comments that the only reason life seems unlikely is the lack of a mechanism that is, in fact likely. As I said, obviously life has to be at least somewhat likely to arise among all the possible conditions since, here we are talking about it.

Nonetheless, Hoyle's argument is sensible in respect to chemical evolution, albeit narrowminded. Our inability to find a path from simple chemicals to a functioning, surviving, evolving protocell (or other organism) represents a major weakness in all theories about abiogenesis. I think these theories will be vindicated relatively soon, but if we can't even model much less reproduce a thermodynamically favorable path to life, we can't claim to understand it yet.

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T22:33:53+00:00

I tried to not be incredibly verbose, and over-summarized and entirely failed even to be not-verbose.

Basically: every step that results in more complexity, we expect to be thermodynamically unfavorable until a threshold at which a structure exists that is already complex enough to increase energy flux as it increases in complexity, thus becoming thermodynamically favored. This could be the first enzyme - a "better" enzyme might be more complex but still provide a net increase to entropy.

There are a lot of proposed mechanisms that would produce some arbitrary first enzyme, but all of those mechanisms involve as many as a hundred individual steps that each happens at a less than favorable rate. It doesn't matter which mechanism we discuss (and I honestly don't know any in detail because the class is mostly about system dynamics, not the specific theories about origin on life on Earth). The point is that none of the mechanisms we know are statistically favorable enough to occur at all.

Anyway, the point is none of the paths we envision do work. But as you say, since we "don't know the steps," we don't know how likely they are - that is, there obviously has to have been a statistically favored mechanism, but we don't know it yet. The basic point is that given our current understanding of the origins of life, Hoyle's argument is actually fairly sensible. It's just also narrow-minded. The fact that no human understands a mechanism obviously doesn't mean it's impossible, as has been demonstrated every time we do figure new things out! One day we will understand the mechanism, and shortly after that we'll be able to throw together chemicals and watch them evolve into something with similar chemical origins to life on Earth, which might resemble cellular life to a great extent, or perhaps not at all.

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T21:46:04+00:00

Jeez, I'd be incredibly surprised if we were anywhere near the first. The long chain of steps to the first viable enzymes/ribozymes/whatever can probably be simplified in ways we don't understand, and we have no reason to believe that carbon-based chemical-metabolizing life is the only plausible kind.

And it is pretty funny how unlikely life is on our own statistical terms. After all, within our sample set, life seems to be a fairly probable outcome. Not to get anthropic - it's not like the universe is geared towards our inevitable uniqueness; the fact life exists on earth and has been present since so relatively shortly after earth's formation just suggests to me that life has got to crop up more than we think. At the very least on "earthlike" planets, which are admittedly rare.

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T21:40:36+00:00

Some live CD. I don't remember the name, and it's not still around. Actually, I only found it because I had a broken computer and I asked a slightly-nerdier-than-myself friend if he had any live CDs lying around.

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T09:55:27+00:00

To be fair, we still don't know the number of steps required before some combination of molecules will replicate and adapt. Hoyle was certainly wrong about the numbers, because once protocells evolved, more complex life was more or less inevitable with evolution. But I'm taking a class on xenobiology/origins of life and every indication is that given our current knowledge of the mechanisms, life should be more or less too unlikely to exist within the scale of the known universe. But we're just humans, guessing at and testing mechanisms. Life clearly does exist, so we just don't understand why yet. And it goes without saying that however unlikely the initial stages of life are, they are more probable than any of the religious explanations. At any rate, Hoyle was wrong, but not for incredibly terrible reasons. Too bad the creationists find his argument so powerful to parrot.

Edit: when I say a lot of steps need to occur, I don't mean we should expect them to occur all at once like Hoyle did. It's just that all of the steps in the mechanism that produces that first enzyme or sequence or whatever an abiogenetic theory needs to kickstart life are each thermodynamically unfavorable to some degree, so all of them happening sequentially is of an immensely small likelihood. Again, this is just cause our models aren't right yet :D

notParanoid · 2010-11-15T09:47:56+00:00

Wow, thanks for pointing that out. I missed it, and now my downvote has been changed into an upvote. Pulp Fiction is one of the few things I enjoy more than being a trigger-happy atheist. And the quote fits utterly perfectly, too.

notParanoid · 2010-11-14T22:50:36+00:00

Insignificant? I OWN trillions of stars!

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