DNA animation

On May 15, 2019, Bill Sloman wrote (in article):

The classic examples have to be Relativity and Quantum Physics, and thus the atom bomb.

In 1900, people though that Physics was pretty much settled, and that all that remained was to tidy up a few constants, and figure outa few odd little results like the photoelectric effect existed and why thermal radiation was red, not blue (like the theory said). Little did they know....

Joe Gwinn

In a generation we've gone from reluctance to allow 13-year-olds to wear makeup to allowing them to get tatoos, and ear piercings an inch wide used to be found only in National Geographic pictures of African tribes. So people will definitely lose their inhibitions about having 4 arms eventually.

And they'll also fix themselves to make their mods inheritable. Improve your eyes and pass them on to all your descendants. Some people won't do it, and they won't be able to breed together or they'll make blind kids. That might be a plot point in the sci-fi.

Relativity was already implied by Maxwell's equations derived in 1861 although it took Einstein to follow through all the implications of c being a constant for all observers in an inertial reference frame.

The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of luminferous ether so things were ripe for a change.

The establishment is always a bit complacent when it looks like all that is left to do is tidy up a few remaining loose ends. A major physicist at the turn of the century famously said words to the effect of "(Classical) physics will be solved within two decades and then we can move onto solving chemistry.". I'm sure it is in A Random Walk in Science somewhere but a quick flash read didn't find it just now.

Then someone devises and executes a cunning novel experiment that shows something new. That "something new" if it is real and reproducible will almost certainly gain the experimenter (or their boss) a Nobel Prize.

Likewise on the theory front. Newton and Leibnitz revolutionised theoretical physics in the 17th century, Einstein in the 20th century so we may be in for a long wait for the next big paradigm shift (or it could be announced tomorrow that some a string theory really is it).

My money is on some variant of Clifford algebras but we will only know the next great thing when we see it and it demonstrates its novel predictive powers. What we have at the moment works pretty well even if you do have to carefully subtract of the odd infinity here and there to get the answer. This never really bothers practising physicists although it appals those of a more purist mathematical persuasion.

Without doing any numbers.. it seems like there would hardly be any gain. (I'm lucky to get ~10 hours of full sun in a week.) It takes a corn plant all summer to make a few ears of corn. (I'm guessing I have about the same area as a corn plant.)

George H.

I don't pick up nonsense, I invent it. For fun and profit.

I don't think we'll invite you to any of our brainstorming sessions. Some people poison brainstorming.

A little nonsense now and then Is cherished by the wisest men.

- Willy Wonka

At the rate we are progressing with CRISPR and such, we may live for

Progress just keeps happening.

One doesn't have to know much about it to get the impression that you shoul d have done more.

If " hybridising with animal genetics" isn't quite you had in mind, you cle arly ought to have read enough to be able to express what you actually had in mind, with the subsidiary point that you probably didn't have a clear en ough idea of what might be done to have had a idea that you could have expr essed clearly.

unk of the text I might be able to give you comments.

I know the feeling. Finding a narrative line isn't easy.

Not a great starting point for a gripping narrative line.

Get as much sun as you can. It not only makes vitamin D, it does other good stuff.

MS is unheard of in sunny climes. People in cold gloomy places get it.

For some people. If you ancestors weren't frequently starved your genome mi ght be lighter on "stock up with fat while you can" mechanisms.

The Dutch have been taller then their neighbours since Dante's time (and pr obably earlier) which implies that they have been tolerably well fed for qu ite a while, and morbid obesity isn't common in the Netherlands.

We really haven't got the surface area to make it worth the effort, I saw a n analysis - a very long time ago - which worked how much foliage we'd need to photosynthesise all the sugars we burn. Roughly a tree's worth.

But it would be purely cosmetic. Photocells capture quite a bit more energy per unit area, but switching our metabolism over to using electricity woul d require a more substantial make-over.

Yebbut. There are two phases to brainstorming: - firstly rapid generation of ideas, which requires complete suspension of disbelief - followed by selection of the ideas that might work, and discarding the others

Alternatively consider team makeup...

If you have two "ideas men" only, then sparks will fly and everybody will also have great fun - but nothing will be able to come of it.

If you have two "critics" only, then there will be very realistic plans, but they will be boring.

OTOH, if you have one "ideas man" and one "critic" you stand a change of getting novel and realistic plans.

Of course if you want to get something used in the real world you also need "workers", "finishers", "communicators", "chairman".

Notice the words "little" and "now and then".

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The connection between relativity and quantum physics and the atom bomb is pretty remote.

The Einstein-Szilard letter

may have got the Manhattan project going, but it was Szilard's chemical con nections that prompted him to write it, and Einstein was dragged in because he was famous, not because his contributions to relativity or e=mc^2 wer e all that relevant - special relativity came out in 1904.

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Some elderly physicists said stuff to that effect. The reset of the field w asn't blind-sided.

Max Planck had invented quantisation to sort out the ultraviolet catastroph e in 1900, but it took Einstein's 1904 paper on the photoelectric effect to give the idea some traction.

More than you do ...

We aren't bother by the nonsense you sell (and it doesn't look all that nonsensical. We are bothered by the nonsense that you pick from climate change denial propaganda web-sites, and books of creationist propaganda.

You don't invent any of that, you just redistribute it. You may do it for fun, but the damage it does to your scientific credibility probably isn't helping you profits

Others produce so much utter nonsense that the merely unexpected ideas get squeezed out. Equally poisonous.

When one of the more prolific posters on the news group gets most of his output by recycling dubious propaganda, we aren't talking about a little nonsense, we are talking about industrial scale intellectual pollution.

at carries the seed of viral life then I get that. But I look at the life cycle and a virus has one, so clearly it is alive. The fact that it has ca st off loaded it's excess baggage and uses the nest of another like a Cucko o doesn't mean it isn't alive.

That's your definition which simply rejects the idea that the virus is a se ed and the life form is what happens in the cell it invades. In fact an ar gument could be made that a virus is the ultimate level of sophistication o f life where the excess baggage has been trimmed away by evolution.

I believe a distinction between viruses and other life forms is arbitrary a nd most importantly - without value.

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MS certainly happens Australia. It killed one of my parents friends.

seems to have been restricted to American patients, and claimed that more s un between ages 5 and 15 halved the risk. The sample size was small, and th ere's no discussion of possible confounds which puts in the class of scient ific studies which frequently turn out to be misleading.

stand why

Yes, well certainly being American is a tough handicap to overcome.

ut 4"

have to

Must have been a farm house with so many ducks.

That's just JL's way of dismissing any field of study that can't use a few simple equations to analyze every issue they encounter like the work he does.

I guess you can make any point you wish when you make up data.

Yes, and our homes will be powered by nuclear fusion in 10 or 20 years.

Great stuff progress. We should have more of it.

Sometimes the seed of a great idea comes from someone that nobody expected anything from, like an intern invited in to observe. Sometimes the inspiration is just a question.

Brainstorming is a group extention of a basic process: send your mental tendrils as far and wide as possible into the potential, real or absurd, solution space, dredge up anything interesting or amusing, and play with it to see what develops. More people can spread out further into that space, or riff on what someone else finds.

Our little fiberoptic back channel monitor, the minimal FSK generator/detector thing, is trivial and not worth optimizing, but has inspired about 20 approaches so far and has been a lot of fun. Exercizes like this tend to linger in the back of ones brain and sometimes turn out to be useful years later.

The logic gate Icc charge dispenser F/V converter, based on a suggestion in this group, is really slick. It's barely possible to brainstorm circuits in a public forum, but it's difficult because the majority of posters are dour and idea-hostile or frankly uninterested in electronics.

Most professions, including brain surgery and electronics design, are mostly disciplined implementation... grunt work. I spent the weekend tweaking impedances and crosstalk clearances and bypassing on a very big PC board. Good thing, because all that staring at the presumably finished design turned up a big mistake. Then, for comic relief, I got to write a test plan for the customer to review.

Of course original thought happens a small fraction of the time, except that most people never do it.