OT: How life came to Earth

The "no" team.

David Brown snipped-for-privacy@hesbynett.no wrote in news:sufn22$avo$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Had he only stayed at a Holiday Inn Express the night before...

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Wow... tapped in to the all knowing judge and jury mind, eh, child?

You have a TrumpTainted PhD in ignorance.

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Larkin is on an insult rant this year, eh?

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I would say "fire" was and is to this day bigger.

Just ask those frozen Texans... oh wait... you can't becasue

Cruz and Abbott let them die.

Because fire led to the bronze age and the iron age and the industrial age and is even essential to the electrical and electronics age.

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Dahmer Gezpacho?

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Yes, did you spend your entire education with blinders on?

Tom Gardner snipped-for-privacy@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in news:suge5t$pbl$2 @dont-email.me:

I perform multiple rail bank shots and do the math instantaneously with no numbers. I just "see" the shot angles.

Then I pondered just how we can hit that specific spot on a ball with another ball carrying the right spin to do a shot so precisely.

Then I saw Ronnie O'Sullivan shoot tiny snooker balls on a 12 foot table with astounding precision. He is better than Efren Reyes IMO. Just WOW!

Then I remembered seeing Howard Cosell way back in the '70s talking with Meadowlark Lemon at half court with his back to the hoop, and he tosses the ball over his shoulder for a swish shot.

I have sinced dubbed the capacity for someone to drum up their muscle memory and experience 'expertise' as "The Harlem Globe Trotter Effect".

Do it long enough and you get good at it... real good.

I can shoot without even touching the table. But still I got nothing on Reyes or Ronnie O. Or many others for that matter. But I am pretty good.

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Idiot. That electricity was generated by steam.

Are you denying evolution???

Jeroen Belleman

No, just asking for evidence to support an opinion.

I believe in evolution more than most people.

Nobody understands exactly how DNA-based life originated, but - looking at the way it works today - it looks very much as if it evolved from RNA-based life, which acquired the capacity to transfer RNA-sequences into the corresponding DNA-sequences, and transfer them back out again.

<snipped irrelevant video>

I wonder what John thought that might mean. The mechanisms that translate DNA into a RNA are encoded in DNA as part of the genomes of all the cells that do it, but that's implicit in the mechanism that allows life as we know it to propagate.

There's no team effort involved in pointing out that John Larkin has posted ill-informed nonsense. Plenty of people here will point when anybody has posted ill-informed nonsense. John Larkin posts a lot of ill-informed nonsense and seems unwilling to undertake the constructive reaction of getting better informed, and prefers to resent the disrespect which he has earned while staying just as ignorant as he has always been.

Sadly, John Larkin doesn't understand what evolution is, and what he believes in isn't the process that most people describe as evolution.

He seems to have much the same problem with the phrase "electronic design".

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

Er, no. That's tinfoil hat territory :)

We don't act as a team and correct/argue with each other when we disagree. It just so happens that we (mostly) agree on this topic.

Synthetic RNA in the lab is getting close to understanding what the very first self replicating RNA systems might have looked like. They have made working examples that are capable of most of the required steps.

This article in Nature might clear up some of your misconceptions iff you can be bothered to read it (free access).

Most of this detailed stuff is behind a paywall unless you have university credentials or a subscription to nature:

The first self replicating molecule only really has to occur once to take over a lot of territory if the raw materials are present. After that competition for resources and the inaccuracy of RNA copying allows it to evolve to respond to environmental constraints.

There are also surprisingly a few examples of likely throwbacks from the late RNA world stage that include some extremely large complicated RNA only viruses that mostly parasitise amoeba now but which were misclassified for a long time as unculturable bacteria because they couldn't get them to multiply in the lab (and they were "obviously" too big to be viruses). Pithoviruses and Pandoravirus being examples:

They still have most of the bits present that would be needed in a fully functioning RNA based cell independent of a host.

There may well be some more smoking guns for RNA world lying around.

Biologists have really only just begin to recognise them. They were only noticed as something very unusual when a virus specialist looked at an electron micrograph of an infected amoeba!

They were indeed and had full access to the heretical knowledge that they deprived the rest form seeing. We know a remarkable amount about medeival engineering and technology through one Jesuit Father Verbeist who helped convert a Chinese Emperor to Christianity (and arguably built the worlds first steam powered car). The Chinese documented just about everything he did in meticulous detail in wood block prints and some prints and some wood blocks survive to this day. A cannon with "Verbiest Fecit" came to light in a wreck off the coast of Japan when I lived there. I knew the guy who did the research on these prints. He led a very interesting life and suffered a fair amount during his initial fight with the resident Chinese astronomers.

The ones I knew got thrown a couple of relativistic transform formulae and told to apply them. I never saw the relevance myself either. It explains why the electronics engineers on early GPS birds insisted on having a defeat switch on the relativistically corrected orbital clocks!

I'm not convinced that at least some of the mathematical rigour isn't necessary if you are going to design things that will work well. I think much more important is knowing when and how to make approximations that will be good enough for engineering purposes. I have a small collection of very cute ones that make otherwise intractable problems into something you can solve approximately with at most a cubic equation.

snipped-for-privacy@decadence.org wrote in news:sugs38$1t33$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:

Y'all do not know how to debate.

Larkin spouts off and you respond to him.

Here is my choice but I get only crickets.

You need sufficient rigour to understand the presumptions and limitations. After that, the old saying applies: the best result of mathematics is that you don't need to use it.

As for approximations, yes they are extremely valuable. You can get considerable practical insight from them, even if you resort to number crunching for detailed analysis.

That's another version of the old quip: - when I was a schoolkid/undergrad I used a 12" slide rule - when I was a graduate I used a helical 13m slide rule - when I was a professor I used a 6" slide rule