Viewing profile — natechols

"The Shockwave Runner" has aged vastly better than "Stand on Zanzibar", which I found unreadable. The first book predicts an early-21st century society full of smartphone users, ub…

The paper by Paul Adams used an earlier version of AlphaFold that was publicly available, not AlphaFold 3 which is not.

It's kind of amazing in retrospect that it was possible to (occasionally) produce very good predictions 20 years ago with at least an order of magnitude smaller training set. I'm v…

I also worked with the same people (and share most of the same biases) and that paper is about as close to a ringing endorsement of AlphaFold as you'll get.

The DeepMind team was essentially forced to publish and release an earlier iteration of AlphaFold after the Rosetta team effectively duplicated their work and published a paper abo…

This must be some kind of sharp generational divide, right? I'm over 40 and I can't think of anything that has made me feel as old as I do reading the "green message shame" discour…

Seconded, and it touches on the key themes he developed later. I love how a throwaway plot element became a central part of an unrelated novel later, like he had more ideas than he…

I think it's also one of the best descriptions of living at the onset of massive, disruptive technological changes, and how disorienting (and occasionally terrifying) this would fe…

> Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication gi…

The goal of protein folding simulations like Folding@Home is not to predict 3D structures - it's to understand how folding actually works, and why it sometimes doesn't work. When F…

Don't forget, they also had to pass another remedial bill to add exemptions later!

7) Mitochondria (and chloroplasts) have double membranes, exactly like they would if they were smaller cells engulfed by the host cell. 8) There are multiple examples of ongoing en…

If you haven't already read "The Ungoverned" I recommend it as well - although much shorter it's effectively the second part in a trilogy, bridging the two novels and featuring the…

I had to read the book a couple of times before I completely understood this, but I'm pretty sure there's an implicit metaphor that ties the two plots together, and it's about the …

> What I think will happen will be extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, and those will put up sky-high walls (literal and figurative) to block out everyone else. That a…

A public execution is ritual human sacrifice, the only difference is the label that Western cultures apply to it.

Do you have a more recent example than Vioxx in mind where your approach might have made enough of a difference to be worth the longer review process?

I helped with similar experiments at LCLS-I and the first half of this comment is correct. The chemical reaction is carefully timed on the order of milliseconds, so they get a seri…

Because raging against the spending habits of billionaires is always easier than self-examination and consideration of one's own wealth and privilege.

It's weird to me that we've completely normalized having to present ID to buy any medicine at all, especially one that has an excellent safety and efficacy record that I was buying…

> the relevant fields are controlled by different corporate interests As opposed to governments, which are famously cautious about deploying destructive technology, and scrupulousl…