Viewing profile — Paedor

For those that are interested in self-assembly, or crystal structures, I made a general purpose crystal growth simulator. It can produce samples of the global crystal structure gen…

20000 moles of length 45 nucleotides is 306 metric tons? Spread out over millions of years, that does seem completely feasible.

This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked har…

The second objective is easier than the first. It may be easier to find any M1 and M2 that collide, than to find an M2 that collides with a specific M1.

Hey cool! I once hacked together a serverless game like this using firebase as an intermediary. https://github.com/amdson/rtcpvp / https://amdson.github.io/rtcpvp . I remember wish…

For 1) The asymptotic best for sorting is O(n log n), if you're only allowed to compare the size of elements. If you allow operations like array indexing with elements, which is po…

Pretty nice satire once you realize it's a joke. My favorite quote is definitely "(where by curiosity," of course, we do not mean to imply that anthropomorphic categories or judgem…

Is there a physical difference between using the resistance device, and just breathing through a narrow straw? It seems a lot cheaper to just jury-rig something.

It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5 pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough.

I'm doing a comp-bio PhD right now, and the more I learn about the process of playing with genes, the further I think we are from expanding intelligence with them. In the current s…

Conceptually, every step of applying a Kalman filter in the simplest case is just updating a Gaussian prior representing position with a new datapoint sampled with (assumed) Gaussi…

The best tradeoffs for humans are also different from the best for plants. Even fully domesticated ones like wheat still have to put energy into completely regrowing themselves eve…

Wow, it's uncanny how well this post mirrored my own thoughts, down to the phrase "consciousness is observer independent". I ended up rejecting the conclusion though, for the rough…

In fairness, we only run the AI in response to further input, so it's not even really powered on while waiting for the rest of a conversation. It would only be able to be lonely (i…

Fun fact, when you consider the bits required to contain p, this is equivalent to bucket sort with a bucket size of 1.

Aren't you measuring glucose instead of insulin though? I might expect a spike in insulin after a spike in glucose, but the other way around doesn't seem as likely.

You don't necessarily need gravity to make something tilt, it can happen naturally during rotation. For instance, imagine spinning something that distorts asymmetrically, like a pe…

My, completely unverified, thought, is that under those conditions of stress and focus, we turn off our digestive system to some extent and literally absorb less calories. It fits …

A neuron in the brain is subject to orders of magnitude more noise, from chaotic factors like blood oxygenation, signaling molecules, aging... For our actual conscious experience t…

There's a great episode by planet money on the difference between Amazon and physical stores, the transcript is here: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/697060225 . They mention two k…