Viewing profile — jergosh

Hopefully far enough to illustrate that "altering brain structure changes personality" isn't the same as "different personalities have to have a basis in brain structure."

You can change the way a program executes by interfering with the hardware. You can also run different programs on the same hardware.

I happen to be an evolutionary biologist and I said nothing about reproductive strategies. You would first need to establish a link between reproductive strategy and psychology (ev…

Um, all the things that are not bodily fluids. And anyway you picked one particular bodily fluid, not even essential to the functioning of a body.

Why would this fact be particularly significant?

There are four copies of each part of the message so you can lose entire chunks and still be able to recover everything. As for subtitutions, unless you get the same error in 2 cop…

You don't actually need to that much, as long as you can keep it dry and reasonably cool -- one idea we had kicking around was to use a cave of the sort that's used for long term s…

In principle a few hours but currently you have to outsource synthesis (i.e. writing) to a company and its an expensive process. Sequencing (reading) can be done more easily and ha…

I wasn't directly involved but the research group I'm part of did some earlier work mentioned in this paper (ref. 10) and I would be happy to answer any questions people may have.

"Not that it really matters once the referendum comes up as the UK will likely be out of the EU after that." That's actually highly unlikely. Much as the Brits value their independ…

terrible use of percentages.

> Modern classification schemes are so arbitrary and error-prone as to be essentially just a painful way to satisfy scientists' compulsion to shove things into neat little cubbies …

R core developers are notoriously resistant to change. A number of glaring inefficiencies have gone unfixed for years, despite people submitting patches etc.

Neurons in AI are not supposed to exactly mimic the behaviour of 'real' neurons...

It's easy to talk about 'no-brainers' in the abstract. A different story if it's your own favourite bit.

It's a braver decision from someone who depends on their looks for livelihood. Also creates a mindset "if she could do it, then so could I"

Her going public about this has got a great potential to raise awareness and make other women more likely to consider this course of action. The sad reality is, however, most women…

Same story in the UK http://www.davidarno.org/2008/09/15/fly-to-new-york-and-buy-... (2008)