Part the First: Where Have All the Grownups Gone? Corey Robin is always worth reading (the first edition of The Reactionary Mind is much better than the second), and lately he has been more active publicly, here asking about the grownups:
For a long time now, I’ve thought that you’re never really a grownup until you realize that there are no grownups. We all have a fantasy, inherited from childhood, that somewhere, someone, is truly in charge and knows what they’re doing and has got things under control. I remember the moment when I realized that’s not true. There is no such person. It’s on you, me, us, to try to be a little wiser than we are, which involves, as a first step, giving up the fantasy that anyone in the actual world knows entirely what they’re doing.
This was followed by his take on Andrew Cuomo flailing impotently at Zohran Mamdani. We have all seen it, no matter what we do for a living, and in the academic world, well, there are too many people haunting the halls who have never had to work for a living. In politics, I did think that Susie Wiles would be the grownup in the room at the White House, but it could be that grownups have no power to tame the feral politco:
One of the elements of W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument in Black Reconstruction that surprised me most the last time, or maybe the time before that, that I taught it, was just how much attention he pays to the Radical Republican’ vision of congressional power and congressional government over and against a Constitution based on presidential power and presidential government.
I bring this up today as I read about Trump’s plans (after denying such plans) to demolish entirely the East Wing of the White House, which are grotesque in every way you can imagine, for the sake of building the biggest ballroom ever. Incidentally, that desire, and its frustration, is a recurrent grievance in Trump’s many complaints in one of his many campaign books prior to 2016, about how he repeatedly called the White House to offer to pay for a big new ballroom there and how Obama, snoot that he was, never would take his call.
Congressional democracy? DuBois thought it could exist. And maybe that is what we should be working toward, long-term, however long that term lasts:
It is a vision a world that does not hinge upon what happens every four years, in one election, of a world where one individual can’t impose his vision of a ballroom in the sky upon all of us, of a world in which our actions and those of our representatives, on a day to day, more proximate (in time and space) basis, matter most.
Hey, a boy can dream, but I have been voting since the midterm election of 1974. Still dreaming.
Part the Second: We Finally Get that Hour Back, for a Few Months. I remember when daylight savings time (DST) was restarted in the late 1960s. It meant that in summer we could stay out for an extra hour after supper, and when we rode our bicycles to the softball games at the recreation department we could watch twilight descend over the salt marshes. Later when I was a freshman in college and the time did not change back in the fall, I went to first period class that began at 7:50 am in the cold and dark rain, while successfully avoiding getting flattened by a university bus. Anyway, the argument continues about the utility of DST in An Indigenous approach shows how changing the clocks for daylight saving time runs counter to human nature – and nature itself.
It is that time again. Time to wonder: Why do we turn the clocks forward and backward twice a year? Academics, scientists, politicians, economists, employers, parents – and just about everyone else you will interact with this week – are likely debating a wide range of reasons for and against daylight saving time.
But the reason is right there in the name: It’s an effort to “save” daylight hours, which some express as an opportunity for people to “make more use of” time when it’s light outside.
But as an Indigenous person who studies environmental humanities, this sort of effort, and the debate about it, misses a key ecological perspective.
Biologically speaking, it is normal, and even critical, for nature to do more during the brighter months and to do less during the darker ones. Animals go into hibernation, plants into dormancy.
Humans are intimately interconnected with, interdependent on, and interrelated to nonhuman beings, rhythms and environments. Indigenous knowledges, which despite their complex, diverse and plural forms, amazingly cohere in reminding humans that we too are an equal part of nature. Like trees and flowers, we are beings who also need winter to rest and summer to bloom.
As far as we humans know, we are the only species that chooses to fight against our biological presets, regularly changing our clocks, miserably dragging ourselves into and out of bed at unnatural hours.
The reason, many scholars agree, is that capitalism teaches humans that they are separate from, and superior to, nature – like the point on top of a pyramid. That, and I argue, that capitalism wants people to work the same number of hours year-round, no matter the season. This mindset runs counter to the way Indigenous people have lived for thousands of years…
In my view, people might be better off if the discussion about changing the clocks in the fall and spring wasn’t about how much time we can “make use of” or how much daylight we might “save,” but rather about reducing the number of hours we are expected to be made useful – and profitable – to secure a more just and sustainable existence for all.
Sounds like a plan to me. But while the Neoliberal Dispensation continues to dispense with every human need in favor of the “needs” of the economy, for as long as the economy creeps along, I’ll keep changing my clocks just like everyone else in the United States. Except our fellow Americans in Hawai’i and Arizona. I have watched the summer sunset in both states, an hour earlier. Seemed about right.
Part the Third: When gCaptain Writes About CDC, It Is Probably Time to Get Your Affairs in Order. gCaptain is one of my regular stops about all things shipping on the seas and it covered this accident, which happened in a place I know very well. But now we have the good people at gCaptain covering this: Kennedy Orders CDC Probe Into Offshore Wind Health Risks. The hits, they just keep on coming:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff to probe the potential harms of offshore wind farms, according to people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump marshals his administration to thwart the clean energy source he loathes.
In late summer, HHS instructed CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Kennedy has personally met with NIOSH director John Howard about the issue and listed particular experts for Howard’s team to contact. The office of the US surgeon general has also been involved in the initiative, which HHS leadership — prior to the ongoing government shutdown — had aimed to have completed within a couple months.
Among the offshore wind health impacts that HHS staff have investigated is the electric magnetic frequency generated from undersea cables used to connect power from the machines to the electric grid, one of the people said. Wind proponents say they aren’t harmful. HHS spokespeople didn’t respond to inquiries.
Trump, who fought against a wind project within view of his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland, has long shown contempt for wind power, claiming without evidence that the farms cause cancer, and dismissing them as overly expensive eye-sores. His efforts against them have included rescinding permits and halting construction for wind projects worth billions of dollars. This includes the Revolution Wind farm being constructed off the coast of Rhode Island by Orsted A/S, which was already 80% complete when it received a stop work order in August that cited national security concerns.
Well, Trump and his minions are not the only NIMBYs on offshore wind farms. But with this we passed “ridiculous” five exits ago. Might wind farms disrupt the marine habitat? Undoubtedly. But their effect is piddling compared to Melissa and bleached coral and North Atlantic right whales killed (only a few hundred left) because we leave our detritus in the sea and will not enforce a nautical speed limit where the whales are calving.
Part the Fourth: A Note on AI. What is it good for? One would imagine that it will eventually be good for what the internet has become good for, as noted by this link from Statista.com that lists the most visited websites in the world. In first place is Google, no matter how enshittified it has become. No surprise there. The eighth, between Wikipedia and Yahoo is no surprise, either. Now comes OpenAI. From The New York Times:
I’ve read more smut at work than you can possibly imagine, all of it while working at OpenAI.
Back in the spring of 2021, I led our product safety team and discovered a crisis related to erotic content. One prominent customer was a text-based adventure role-playing game that used our A.I. to draft interactive stories based on players’ choices. These stories became a hotbed of sexual fantasies, including encounters involving children and violent abductions — often initiated by the user, but sometimes steered by the A.I. itself. One analysis found that over 30 percent of players’ conversations were “explicitly lewd.”
After months of grappling with where to draw the line on user freedom, we ultimately prohibited our models from being used for erotic purposes. It’s not that erotica is bad per se, but that there were clear warning signs of users’ intense emotional attachment to A.I. chatbots. Especially for users who seemed to be struggling with mental health problems, volatile sexual interactions seemed risky. Nobody wanted to be the morality police, but we lacked ways to measure and manage erotic usage carefully. We decided A.I.-powered erotica would have to wait.
It won’t wait. It can’t, or another AI giant will go all-in on bots that fill the need. Scary times.
Part the Fifth: News You Can Use if Snakebites Are Likely to Be in Your Future. In a previous life I worked with a very good scientist who was fascinated with snake venoms and how they did their damage. There is a lot of fundamental protein chemistry, structure, and function in venoms. Having grown up in snake heaven, where Crotalus adamanteus and Agkistrodon piscivorous are common, I have seldom ventured too far into the bushes without boots (although I have never found a pair of snake boots that matched those of my grandfather – thick leather with laces all the way up to the knee).
A news article in Nature has the good news: Single antivenom protects against 17 different snakebites:
An antivenom using antibodies from a llama and an alpaca can neutralize venom from some of the world’s most venomous snakes, according to a study published today in Nature1. When administered to mice, the treatment conferred protection against toxins from 17 African snake species and reduced skin damage caused by venoms.
Snakebites are a neglected public-health issue that is estimated to kill roughly 20,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa every year. Around 300,000 snakebites occur annually in this region, and tissue death from venom leads to approximately 10,000 amputations.
Current antivenom treatments are made by injecting large animals, such as horses, with small doses of snake venom. The horses produce antibodies against the venom, and the horse plasma is extracted and used to treat bites in people. But these antivenoms are mostly specific to a single snake species.
It can be difficult to identify the snake behind the bite, and that makes providing timely treatment difficult, says study co-author Anne Ljungars, a bioengineer at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby.
Now, this is very good science. There are many fewer different venomous snakes in North America, and I expect emergency rooms in the US to be stocked with a similar multivalent anti-venom against rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and copperheads soon. Our dogs will appreciate this, too.
Part the Sixth: How We Should Think About AI While Dealing With It Willy Nilly. After three years, I still have not asked ChatGPT a question and I have ignored prompts from other “vendors” to do so. In January and February, I will be tutoring medical students in the Gastrointestinal System and Hematology. This time around I will ask my students to close their laptops and put away their tablets and actually discuss the cases in the syllabus. I imagine the pushback will be strong, but one thing does encourage me. Earlier this week several students came to my office and asked when we were going to stop letting ChatGPT think for students in our tutorial groups, which is how we deliver most of our curriculum. Not everyone has fallen for the magic fairy dust!
This essay from Front Porch Republic tells us a truth: ChatGPT Can Code. But It Cannot Discern:
From their inception, universities prepared students for the future not just as workers but also as citizens and human persons. Students read widely in the classics, poetry, and literature while also studying to become theologians or lawyers. In early America, this tradition continued with the founding of our nation’s oldest universities. But throughout the twentieth century, universities slowly narrowed their focus. Today, universities focus on “relevant” “skills” for the “global economy.” Educating deep thinkers, molding model citizens, and forming human souls are often afterthoughts.
Now ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are threatening this model. Skills can now be outsourced to generative AI. For Gen Z, ChatGPT and its analogs are quickly becoming the next calculator, word processor, and search engine rolled into one. For the future of our workforce, this may be a net gain. Depending on where and how it is used, AI can help many workers accomplish tasks better, faster, and more efficiently. Thus, teaching students to use AI must necessarily be part of universities’ role, especially in professional courses where students learn particular techniques and strategies to make the best use of the new tools that exist.
But the purpose of a true liberal education is to develop oneself as a person—a development that can be achieved only via reading, thinking, and practicing, not by taking shortcuts to a more efficient product. In short, universities must remember the human side of education. They must return to cultivating wisdom, teaching discernment, and preparing students for responsible citizenship—callings for which there is no AI replacement.
All true. Except the university in America lost the plot long before ChatGPT was a gleam in the eye of any one of our pestilential misanthropes. My university is a case in point. Last week I was on campus for an event. And this time, the University Bookstore (sic) had even fewer useful books for a university student than when I was there in February. Where previously there were rows and rows of publishers’ backlist titles in natural science, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, politics, economics, art, and music, the entire space was taken up by branded apparel and other knickknacks with the mascot prominent always.
Yes, I know that most of my classmates seldom set foot in either the bookstore or the libraries, and some even bragged about never darkening a library door. But ten percent did. What does that ten percent do now? Do they still exist? I wonder. Soon after starting in my current position, we had a group of medical students over for dinner. One of them liked a set of lamps in the reading room. I replied they were knock-offs of a Frank Lloyd Wright design. She had never heard of him.
Books are essential tools of the intellect. Without tools we are not human.
And on that cheery note, see you next week! Happy Halloween!
Growing up in SoCal, our house was one of the first subdivisions, but nobody had bothered to let the rattlesnakes know about it, so by my late pre-teen years i’d killed a few dozen of them, and then one day with chums we came across the biggest one i’ve ever seen, close to 6 feet long with over a foot of rattles, none of us wanted to partake in dispatching it, so one of my friends went and got his dad, and he comes along with a shovel and off with it’s head and he digs a hole and buries it about a foot down, and about 5 minutes later the head made it way up out of the ground, and needless to say was really pissed off, over 50 years later I can still see its outstretched fangs in my mind-the things that cause nightmares.
I was paddling a canoe in a placid blackwater river once when a cottonmouth appeared to be looking for a place to get out of the water and was swimming in its sinusoidal way straight for the boat. A couple of strong strokes and I was out of range. I never took my eyes off the water again. Those things are scarier than alligators by a long shot. And I never paddled beneath the overhanging, Spanish moss-laden trees. Probably a rural legend that they will drop into a boat intentionally, but I wasn’t taking any chances. As juveniles they are beautiful creatures, though. Same with rattlesnakes and copperheads, who maintain their looks throughout their lives.
We have harmless snakes that swim in rivers and lakes here, and its always a bit of a shock to see them~
Anti-venom is pretty pricey, I remember seeing the bill for some yahoo in SoCal that decided to take a selfie with a rattler~
It was $153k
Inflated in my opinion even if it must be expensive.
This is America, where if cars followed the health care pricing scheme and had an MSRP of $500k, but you could get one for $125k if you pay cash.
Had a family member get bit by a prairie rattler this summer. Three days in hospital and 3 rounds of antivenom. Our local regional hospital had to have two of the doses flown in because they usually only keep one dose on hand.
No long term damage thankfully, although it required a morphine drip for pain the first 24 hours. Was amazed to get away with only paying $1500 out of pocket. Thankful for modern medicine for sure.
Nothing beautiful about an Eastern brown snake here in Oz. We have lost a horse, dogs and cats to them and twice recently we had to rush big dogs to the vets for expensive treatment to save their lives after they were bitten. Eastern brown snake tend to have heart attacks at our place though because you can say that when you remove their heads, their hearts stop working. That is why we keep shovels handy in our front and back yards-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_brown_snake
And I do not give a goddamn that as a snake they are protected by law here.
The do seem to be monochromatic as adults.
“Eastern brown snakes are readily available in Australia via breeding in captivity. They are regarded as challenging to keep, and due to the snakes’ speed and toxicity, suitable for only experienced snake keepers.”
Crazy-ass Snakehandlers of a different sort from my part of the world!
My neighbors and I have a ‘if you see one-kill it’ policy towards rattlers-as the risk to reward ratio is so out of whack (getting bit is the risk-just seeing one is the reward) and a neighbor’s dog* (we called it the $19,000 Dog) got bit twice and as mentioned anti-venom ain’t cheap.
Our efforts must be pretty good as I haven’t dispatched one in a few years~
* a friend is a vet and in the spring is when a cavalcade of canines bit by rattlers make their way to her, and they always get bit on the neck or head, and she related in extreme cases if their head kinda blows up in size from the bite, a dog’s lips will fall off!
Cats seldom get bit and anti-venom doesn’t do anything for them, so a good thing!
Rattle snake hunts and selective breeding – quiet snakes:
https://www.southtexasnews.com/beeville_bee_picayune/news/silent-and-deadly/article_09c8df58-682a-11e9-9f50-37e5e7bae067.html#:~:text=Herpetologist%20Daryl%20Sprout%20of%20Dallas,over%20the%20past%20quarter%2Dcentury.
Cats seldom get bit
I can’t help but recommend this radio theater
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-icZUhjaus
“A shipment of mute fate”
A few years ago in a Georgia USA firearms forum the cost of snake bite medical care for a person was discussed. Commenters told about $40k – $60k out-off-pocket costs.
EMF stands for electro magnetic field not frequency.
The frequency would be 60 hz, same as what is common in the US assuming it’s using AC and not high voltage DC for transmission.
EMF decreases as the square of the distance. So double the distance and it drops to 1/4 of its original strength. I can’t find out how different it is in salt water.
Yep emf from offshore wind farms is definitely high up on my list of things to be really concerned about, not.
<"EMF stands for electro magnetic field"
Maybe in medicine, but in physics always knew it as electromotive force, generally used in conjunction with Faraday’s law of induction.
Electrostatic fields from small sources decline 1/r^2, but for an oscillating field, at distance from the source the field strength declines as 1/r (radiation fields — energy transmitted is proportional to field strength squared)
Didn’t we go through this in the late ’80s with a whole discussion and research about high voltage power lines causing cancer? Thoroughly debunked, if I remember correctly. What is it about wind-generated power, or underwater transmission of that power that’s different?
What’s different is that salt water is conductive, which attenuates the electromagnetic fields as they pass through. That’s why you can’t easily use a radio in a submarine. Therefore, even if the EMF were harmful, it would be less of a concern in offshore wind than on land!
Infrasound (air pressure waves from the rotating turbine blades) is a whole ‘nuther issue.
I’ve noticed some regular NC readers often link to Matt Taibbi over at his Racket substack. You guys should do a response to the piece he just posted about 3hrs ago about Bill Gates, the environmentalism/environmental movement, conspiracy theories and “denialism.”
I don’t have a paid subscription to Taibbi and haven’t since he went bonkers for bucks with his new pro-Trump paid commentariat, so maybe someone at NC does?
No, AI “won’t wait”. These must be interesting times for anthropologists and behavioral scientists.
Some of your students pushing back against AI is encouraging. Lambert liked to say “If your business depends on a platform….”, lol, that seems to apply here.
We’ve trained young minds to have short term memory-and we’re seeing the results now~
How can you read a book, when you can’t remember what happened in prior chapters?
Where Have All the Grownups Gone? Caitlin Johnstone postulates that the “everyone is twelve now” theory holds true-
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/you-believe-the-mainstream-narrative-of-course-you-do-youre-twelve-04a57ab74183
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-193144275.html
> For a long time now, I’ve thought that you’re never really a grownup until you realize that there are no grownups. We all have a fantasy, inherited from childhood, that somewhere, someone, is truly in charge and knows what they’re doing and has got things under control. I remember the moment when I realized that’s not true. There is no such person. It’s on you, me, us, to try to be a little wiser than we are, which involves, as a first step, giving up the fantasy that anyone in the actual world knows entirely what they’re doing.
Thank you; I find this helpful — I’m not alone in my sense of still being “not wise enough” in spite of reaching an age at which mortality is in plain view.
On the topic of “grownups”, a related question that applies to all areas of life these days is, where are the adults? It’s not a trite question. Children are born in a society but children need to trained in order to be adults. In many places in the US it seems like parents are incapable or unwilling to train their children to be adults. It is hard for the physically mature to be “grownups” if they are not adults. We seem unable to even be able to agree on standards for competence to train children against as they age. One last topic might be driving, but record numbers of teens are choosing to forego that experience just like record numbers of licensed drivers are choosing to ignore the standards we apply to people operating vehicles in favor of distracted driving.
I suggest that our society now entertains the concept of “adultescence” is a sign of failure on many levels. Too many children are growing up with no competence in basic abilities for survival or self management, even in urban environments. So how can they hope to be functioning adults? Too many adults are not agreement capable. Their signature means nothing. Their promise is worth less than air. Everything is some one else’s fault. We won’t have grownups in politics until we see a return of adults to society.
Contrary to Mr. Robin, there are people who are supposed to know what to do in challenging situations. There are people youre supposed to be able to turn to for help. These are the people who keep our society running so people like bloggers can turn on the light switch and fire up their laptops at midnight when the muse strikes. If that’s not him, then he has some work to do.
One thing I’ve learned is that no one is coming to help.
The only thing that can save us is US.
You and me, NC.
There ain’t NOBODY out there.
It really is like training the plebs one by one. But bro lemme tell you what they talk about at work. What do grown ass men talk about at work (at least the white ones lol)?
Video games.
We are so fricking smart and capable and here we are talking about THESE STUPID FN GAMES!
And you know what the worst part is? They don’t even play the game I actually do like – Fortnite!
This adultelescence is real. The parents are letting these vicious companies and social media raise these kids and don’t challenge them.
But I know wtf is going on. I want them to be good men and women who can take care of our society as well as themselves.
It’s hard, but that’s what it takes. At 41, I’ve finally figured out about all the great men of history and what it takes.
What it takes rn is a man of peace and vision and BALLS.
Hudson has shown us the way forward to unite the world away from the bloodsucking slave owners of the Empire. And thank the gods for Putin & Xi and their grasp of history and economics, because the Western Leaders are straight garbage.
Power really is lying there in the streets.
Let us be the ones to take it to the masses!
There are no grownups, except for maybe you and me. Just lots of old children who have never moved out of the high school status games which they will play till the end of their days. Is it any wonder that we are where we are today?
Andre Malraux interviewed an old priest near the end of his days and asked him what he had learned of human nature from the confessional. The priest answered that “There is no such thing as a grown-up”.
I wonder if the lack of adults is in any way connected to the death of God. Many of the things I learned about morals were based on things in the Bible. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, perhaps. People over profit, that one comes straight from Jesus. So, perhaps there is a connection here
guys. i am so wasted rn in my edrooom.. (happy halloween but now all saints day.) thank u 4 being a good site. it took me like 2 years 2 find a rlly good site where the comments are nice and people comment good ideas. i benefit so much from this site. it is forming who i am becoming as a person in a good way i think. thank u. alll of u.,
sorry if the people hate this comment for being unprofessional but in my defense. its halloweeekedn which is the big party night of the fall semester. and i am 21. so this makes sense.
and ppl r talking abt there being grownups and no grownups but i am like. becoming a grownup. and i feel like part of growing up is when u experience something enough 4 it 2 become normal yk? like filing taxes enough times tha tu no longer think abt it.its’ like what ppl take in they assume 2 b normal. so if guy has only recieved inputs of crabs he will think everything is crabs. it is like my friend who is a college sneior but has never been 2 a party so she is a freshman in the regard of party but a senior with respect to our courseowrk. everything so relative. ppl only bcome grownups w/r 2 the things they ave experienced. like. taxes and laundry. but they may never bcome grownups with respect 2 other aspects of life. yk? sorry for the unprofessionalism but i love this site even if it doesnt let me comment this.
Hell Yeah bro
Welcome to Thunderdome.
I got people wasted all night at the bar I work at in the French Quarter and bro we’re they fn WASTED tonight.
Saw some great costumes and titties.
Murica
🇺🇸
Hello Matt. Good for you for seeking out other than mainstream bs news! I value this site and have learned much here, may it continue to be a source of information and community for you. I often have the impression that many of us here are older folks… thank you for bringing down the average age. Tell your friends!
If I’ve ever drunk posted here, which may or may not have ever happened, I’m not so sure I’d be so forthcoming about it.
Welcome aboard!
Ezra Pound insisted that poetry should cling flat to experience. By that standard, matt, your comment is poetry.
Smart rich people will fix this up quick smart … minting more now like eva before ….
For molecular biologists when, for instance, searching in the immense annotated sequence databases, AI is indeed extremely useful and do in minutes what otherwise might take hours and probably missing important stuff in the way. Then it is the job of the researcher to check and discern what of what AI brings is relevant or spurious and the significance of the findings. Molecular biology DNA and protein “languages” are relatively simple (4 letters x 3 DNAletters/protein-letter in coding regions and about 20 letters in proteins) and relatively straightforward but long or extremely long, and things get more complicated when you want to analyse the “phrases” within the sequences and extremely complicated when interested on tridimensional structures. Context of sequences is also important. Prokaryotic/eukaryotic context, for instance. So, very useful but must be combined with other tools and cannot replace the brains of the scientists.
Yet, i don’t know how different might be the analyses when done by some old scientist who started the hard way and has been assimilating in his life time all the progress compared with a new scientist working in an automated environment. For instance. Would the latter detect the mistakes and flaws that the former learnt in the process?
I believe AlphaFold has solved or largely solved the protein folding problem. I also believe AlphaFold at best poorly shows its work as many mathematics teachers might require.
I suspect the “phrases” within the sequences and their many combinatorial relationships to tridimensional structures contain the essential information AlphaFold has encoded to obtain protein structure from a given ordered sequence of amino acids derived from DNA. Alphafold works brute-force to find a combination of tridimensional substructures that minimize total energy of the full structure. I believe the language is sensitive to the context of near structures but only up to a finite depth constrained by the effective distance of the forces operating between structures.
Anyway, AlphaFold encodes a rudimentary language for building and understanding protein structures. Thinking of proteins as extremely complex mechanical structures, AlphaFold encodes the beams, columns, joists, stiffners, and other components of protein structures. ‘Mining’ AlphaFold for drug designs ignores much of the hidden gold it contains. Some old scientist or new scientist constrained by circumstance needs to work through the details of how AlphaFold obtains its solutions, and extend those details to encompass the complex interactions between basic protein structures. Proteins and other large molecules should be understood as mechanical structures and those mechanical structures should be studied to identify some of the peculiar properties that accrue to strong forces working over short distances.
AlphaFold is, well, a miracle that might make it possible for me to do a project alone that would have required a large team of structural biologists (x-ray crystallographers and protein NMR experts) and would never have gotten funded anyway. Just need the time, after an extensive literature search to find out if I have been scooped. 😉
I have a 12 year old boy’s sense of wonderment-which i’m not giving up anytime soon.
The Texaco station about a mile from my house was a typical 60’s-70’s gas station, in the office inside you could buy cans of oil, Wrigley’s chewing gum & Life Savers, and that might be it.
When i’m 12 the owner decides to put in a couple of brand new pinball machines, which of course attracted every other 12 year old boy.
I had to ride my bike or walk to the Texaco get my fix, and it was always the 2 same pinball machines-so you got pretty good at them. Little did the gas station owner know, but our keen 12 year old boy minds were able to hack one of the pinball machines, in that if you rapped on the side panel on the right hand side about halfway up it would register as many points as you’d like, so we’d play normal for 4 balls and if we needed an assist for that 5th ball-well alrighty then!
The owner of the place rightly thought we were genuine pinball wizards, with that distinctive replay sound resonating repeatedly, we got a lot out of our 2 bit investment.
They were games-sans video.
And then I grew up and have played perhaps dozens of pinball games since (there’s a weird inflationary thing in that when I was just a little kid-you’d need say 1,500 points for a replay, by the time I was 12, it was 30,000. I played a year ago somewhere and needed 3.5 million points for a replay) but it was just a passing thing, and maybe a few people had pinball machines at home, but they would have been few and far between.
Video games are insidious time wasters-where often the object is to destroy something or kill somebody.
RE: messing with the clocks.
Our local Amish community does not do DST. So, for seven months, I have to confirm, when discussing meetings, etc., is that ‘Amish’ time or ‘English’ time?
And, a time corollary: I drove my Amish friend and shopkeeper, L, to another Amish community this week, to pick up two clocks from the regional clockmaker. They are beautiful windup shelf clocks, with carved wooden cases and pendulums. Prices range from $300 to $500 and they are a major wedding gift in the community. After all, every home needs a clock, or two, and they are made to last a lifetime.
One of my grandfather’s many hobbies was clocks. He liked to buy ones that weren’t working and get them going again. The problem was sleeping in my grandparents’ house as all those clocks were chiming and ticking all night long.
Apparently beneath the East Wing lies the White House Bunker. This has been deepened and hardened over the years (it was originally dug for FDR). So the Golden Ballroom may be an excuse to excavate an even deeper, stronger bunker in which the President will be safe when the Oreshniks land.
If so, this is another bipartisan activity, just like war against Iran or Venezuela, or the Gazan genocide.
I wish the PMC-ers, Education edition, get their facts and foundational reasoning correct:
No, European universities were established because the STUDENTS demanded verification that their time and money would not be wasted on con artists and swindlers.
And the only way colleges and universities can save themselves is to again refocus on the wants, needs, and desires of their students. Not on their tenured faculty or admin staff.
This is not the history in the US. We had a long post on what drove Harvard’s early institutional priorities, and Harvard was extremely influential in terms of US practice for centuries. And students were not influential in these decisions.
Products don’t get to tell the factory owners how to run the factory.