Wavefunction

My comment is about the building blocks. We seem to find amino acids everywhere. It seems like once conditions exist that they can form, they DO form. We don't have any equivalent building block which is anywhere nearly so ubiquitous. In addition, these building blocks are reversible within 3kcal/mol. Life requires reversibility. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2008/10/unbearable-heat-capacit… We have no other building blocks with this kind of versatility. None. So, life may not be based on DNA/RNA, but it's almost certain to be based around amino acids.

That's a terrible analogy, and here are two good links on why: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/03/cancer-genomics-and-tec… http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/reading-the-human-genome-with-sy…

I thought this was interesting: "Both Betzig and Moerner made their original pioneering discoveries in industry - Moerner when he was working at IBM in San Jose and Betzig when he was working in his own private company" - http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2014/10/the-2014-nobel-prize-in…

The author actually makes a pretty convincing case that Feynman wasn't, in fact, sexist. I asked for clarification here: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2014/07/richard-feynman-sexism-…

Very nice, thanks. Here's a somewhat related article too: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/science/article_4b79fc5d-4d5e-5395-a771… On the other hand, it sounds like VS isn't exactly at 100% production yet: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2010/04/will-virtual-screening-… But getting there. Based on your HN profile, I defer to you obviously. Curious subject. E.g., based on the wikipedia article, I had no idea the range that Berkeley DB was being used for...

Given that his sister Joan was an accomplished scientist in her own right, and they got along well, I don't think your comment is accurate. > “During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.” > “No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.” > I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.” http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/04/richard-feynmans-sister… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman

The setup of opposing forces leads one to think in terms of entropy ("the fog of war", the manifold of possible mistakes, etc etc).. Then there's that story about the break even point between French and Mamluks iirc? (And what was the break even point between LGA and the Coalition?) Somewhere in between we might characterize tech debt; rococo doesn't turn to rubble overnight, & most of it is still around. Or maybe there are some relatively cheap ways to mitigate tech debt. Always backpropagating debugs to spec, for instance. So we could kick the (meta)grokking/turning point down the road https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/nassim-taleb-scientific-disc… >There's no built-in payoff for complexity (or for making things complex). "In academia," though, he says, "there is". [Make sure your phonebooth expands at around the rate that the range of your (melee) weapons/number of participants increase] And those promised tubes are annoyingly hard to find http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2015/02/derek-lowe-to-world-bew… Thankfully, Derek has somewhat identified the opponent as, not other scientists, but biology/evolution..