DNA animation

We only have your word for that, but I am inclined to believe you.

You could not be more wrong. I enjoy brainstorming new ideas.

However, I am not prepared to allow you to attack modern scientific research from a position of wilful ignorance without pushing back.

But not when you are trying to peddle it as science.

Sadly, sometimes not just blind but outright hostile.

those discoveries are

Or some crazy amateur who doesn't know he/she isn't allowed to discover things.

As if! They require a test plan, but they are apparently not required to read it.

Primordial soup!

Discovery only counts when you convince others. That's swings and roundabouts.

It is regrettable, since there are many cases where the re-discoverer gets all the kudos.

But it is also *necessary*, to trap out all the false concepts and ideas.

So, a normal customer that might feel able to blame you for something you couldn't have known and they didn't specify/avoid.

I would be much more willing to engage with you if you didn't try so damn hard to make yourself odious. There is a great story here and some excellent vivid characters, but I don't know how to build tension when the "disaster" foreseen turns out not to have been a disaster at all. Sort-of an anti-thriller...

The story is told by patient zero, a retired female GP, in response to questions from her grand-children. That's the literary device to introduce the story anyhow. There is the story about how it all started, but there is global social turmoil in the intervening generation... and then there is "now" - acceptance of what has happened and cannot be reversed. So the story-telling can jump between these.

Clifford Heath.

You'll like this extraordinary quine, which (run repeatedly) prints a rotating globe. Somehow it has the global map, though it only prints one side at a time. It requires a Ruby interpreter, which comes built-in on my Mac.

I thought this discussion was playing with the boundaries of a definition of life, not taking an existing definition as gospel. So I proposed a definition (above).

Clifford Heath.

Their system requires a test plan. Actually, I have no idea about what a test plan should look like, so I made something up. I could probably have filled it with dirty limericks and submitted it.

I did put some Bullwinkle cartoons in a proposal to a big aerospace company, and they liked them.

We call that box the Wayback Machine.

John, when you look at that video of the DNA replication at real-time speed, the parts being assembled are amino acids that form a soup in the cell. It's amazing the parts are right at hand for the machine running at that speed. You know that elemental primordial soup can make amino acids because we've done that, so there's no problem.

How is that a "problem" that _needs_ to be "solved"?

That's like saying "I'll be later getting to work if I leave now, rather than an hour from now because the traffic is worse this time of the day.". Absurd.

That's been said before but that "at least for a while" seems to get shorter.

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

Really? E=mc*2 came from Special Relativity. Before that, nobody even guessed that such a thing could exist.

The following stuff are interesting details, but change nothing.

Joe Gwinn

Example?

Some people extend into more useful space than others. Knowing more about what you are brainstorming about can point the extension into more useful areas.

Like the junk in the attic, that never gets thrown out because it "might be useful".

My 1976 PWM D/A converter started off using logic outputs to generate the square waves, but the voltages coming out of a logic gate aren't well-defined. We went to driving a transmission gate to generate the waveform and got much better precision.

There's a lot of hostility to bad ideas. They can soak up a lot of effort to no useful purpose.

And lots of people who think they are doing it are actually re-inventing a lumpy version of the wheel, long after their better-informed colleagues have moved onto other problems.

Wilful ignorance.

Example?

Example?

hould have done more.

clearly 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 clea r enough idea of what might be done to have had a idea that you could have expressed clearly.

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

g"

al

Like I said, not a great starting point for a gripping narrative line.

Good news doesn't sell newspapers.

The global social turmoil offers the potential for dramatic events, but hav ing patient zero talking to her grandchildren kills off a lot of the potent ial dramatic tension.

Wrong analogy. I've jumped in early twice - once using TI's 64k serial memo ry (in 1978) and once using GigaBit Logic's GaAs fast logic (in 1988).

In the first case, 16k RAM got cheap enough a few months later to make the approach sub-optimal, and in the second case GaAs logic never got up to the production yields it needed to make it attractive while Motorola's ECLinPS was close enough behind (and much easier to produce - and use) to kill any enthusiasm for further development.

Putting your faith in quantum computing then? That does seem to exploit a d ifferent set of physical laws.

In 1904. It didn't have much practical application until people started seeing the mass defect in heavier atomic nuclear masses.

F.W. Aston, Proceedings of the Royal Society 115A (1927) 487 seems to record what Aston saw when his second mass spectrometer was accurate enough to detect the mass defect (better than 1% accuracy).

That you don't know how your "astounding discovery" took a couple of decades to go from a theoretical insight to the germ of a practical application?

No, it's like saying "should I jump on the bus now, or wait until my wife returns from the shops so I can drive the car to work?"

If you start work with a technology that slows you down, it's easy to get too invested in it to be able to jump ship when a better way comes along - so it's better not to start yet.

It's always hard to say though. At the time when Intel produced the first Pentiums and had trouble getting the yields high enough, they were using 17 mask layers to make it.

DEC's Alpha was using 4, HP's 800 series was using 3, and MIPS was using only 2, to produce CPUs of comparable power - but with much better yields of course, and much better MIPS/Watt.

Where are those others, now?

And before that, we thought it was all about MIPS, until we discovered that it was actually all about bandwidth - the RISC vs CISC wars died out when neither could get data on and off chip as fast as they could do something useful with it.

Clifford Heath.