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Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

caltech.edu

91–100 of 102 posts

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also kind of crazy how long “but that’s the way we’ve always done it” can remain the dominant system, despite a revolutionary change being so trivially achievable. This required absolutely no technological advancement, literally just putting a little more space between letters to reduce ambiguity.

Imagine if it Turned Out that Capitalizing Various Words made Things more Readable. How Quickly Would That be Adopted?

Do you speak German? A language famous for capitalizing its nouns of course.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#92
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is good example. It has not been fixed for long while. Even if there would be so many better ways to write certain words.

I feel like Mathematical notation is also a great example (since Math is ultimately a separate language: the language of measurement) It's been built up over centuries where new innovations and shifts in perspective often create new kinds of notation, but those most frequently just get tacked onto whatever else is already standard and the new notations almost never actually supplant the old. AFAICT we haven't really…

I think Bourbaki did brought forth a shift (clean-up) in mathematical notation and writing, at least in France.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#93
post #73
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL community biolabs are a thing ... Are they really? Is this just limited to some very specific areas with an active biotech scene?

In my part of the world it is a common thing among high schoolers, which form associations and use labs at school or a local university. It's not uncommon that adults do something similar and run a community workshop with whatever the members are interested in.

That is very cool. Over here we can barely keep the odd makerspace or hacker space afloat, nevermind anything related to biology or chemistry.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#94
post #88
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

For the most part, they only have the power others give them.

Slight correction: the power others gave them a long time ago, and now nothing can help those others take it back without uprooting the whole civilization in the process. Current power is a malignant formation too advanced to heal without destroying the whole organism.

Or so it seems, I'd really like to be wrong here.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#95
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early printing press was probably focused on short few page documents (an increasing scale), and it wouldn't be surprising if page numbers were a solution to help printers not mix up pages.

The Gutenberg Bible was one of the first mass produced books - no page numbers on early copies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#/media/File:Gu... Hindsight is 20/20 , lol. There are so many obvious, effective constructs and functions in modern English, we kinda miss the absolute janky mess of hacking and tradition and arbitrary rules and facepalm moments that went in to the last 1500+ years of developme…

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Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#96
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, they only have the power others give them.

Slight correction: the power others gave them a long time ago, and now nothing can help those others take it back without uprooting the whole civilization in the process. Current power is a malignant formation too advanced to heal without destroying the whole organism. Or so it seems, I'd really like to be wrong here.

It's not a slight correction, those claims are the exact problem - the propaganda of the powerful: Give up, there is nothing you can do.

People in democracies can easily vote to change where power lies (that is, power lies ultimately with the citizens), if that's what they want, and it's not hard to see how: The current situation is highly unusual for democracies; there is a long history of what to do and how to do it.

A major reason they don't do it is that they keep reading and believing they are powerless.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#97
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight correction: the power others gave them a long time ago, and now nothing can help those others take it back without uprooting the whole civilization in the process. Current power is a malignant formation too advanced to heal without destroying the whole organism. Or so it seems, I'd really like to be wrong here.

It's not a slight correction, those claims are the exact problem - the propaganda of the powerful: Give up, there is nothing you can do. People in democracies can easily vote to change where power lies (that is, power lies ultimately with the citizens), if that's what they want, and it's not hard to see how: The current situation is highly unusual for democracies; there is a long history of what to do and how to do i…

The concept of "police" came up through "private militia" hired as.

Most of the world enjoys 5-day workweek (40 hours work per week).

But the world got this work schedule only due to workers (mostly working in mines and railways) and labor unionists who fought and died for favourable work conditions and fair working schedule.

The rich elites even sent Pinkertons to assassinate the "rebel" leaders.

It was Henry Ford who finally saw the writing on the wall, and he announced the 40-hours workweek in his company, and thus ushered in the modern era of work-life balance.

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#98
> has made it possible to design genetic sequences encoding for diverse biological applications, such as proteins

lol every time I ask Claude to whip me up a protein for this or that I hit a guardrail. I love the idea that some internet random is untrustable with an ai hallucinated amino acid sequence, as if I could encode that and stick it into my ecoli farm out back

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#99
post #97
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a slight correction, those claims are the exact problem - the propaganda of the powerful: Give up, there is nothing you can do. People in democracies can easily vote to change where power lies (that is, power lies ultimately with the citizens), if that's what they want, and it's not hard to see how: The current situation is highly unusual for democracies; there is a long history of what to do and how to do i…

The concept of "police" came up through "private militia" hired as. Most of the world enjoys 5-day workweek (40 hours work per week). But the world got this work schedule only due to workers (mostly working in mines and railways) and labor unionists who fought and died for favourable work conditions and fair working schedule. The rich elites even sent Pinkertons to assassinate the "rebel" leaders. It was Henry Ford w…

*hired as private army/security for rich powerful elites.

"Police force" was created not for liberty, justice, and public good - it was created to brutally quell poor folks rising against rich tyrants, it was created as a weapon to ensure the rich stayed rich.

History of how the world got the 40-hours 5-day work week: https://firmspace.com/theproworker/from-strikes-to-labor-law...

Re: Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy

#100

That page numbers in books were only invented 50 years after the printing press is a fun snippet from the article

Sometime after 685 AD, they invented spaces between words. All text - in Latin to that point, mostly - was written in scriptio continua. All sorts of ambiguity and hilarity would ensue; to be a good writer, you needed to ensure that words didn't bleed together and form incorrect meanings in unintended combinations. If you lost your place when reading, you'd have to know generally where you were in a scroll, and resta…

Wondering: If we would still write continua style, would LLM be even possible at all?
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