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Great Oxygenation Event: MIT Scientists’ New Hypothesis for One of the Grand Mysteries of Science (scitechdaily.com)

Your conclusion is, intentionally or unintentionally, incorrect. Your guess is incorrect. Data and information are different concepts and the differences are addressed differently depending on the context of discussion. Sorting out the details may be better suited for a separate thread. A quick example, here are three different Swedish phrases with very different meaning*. Only the dots differ: får får får får far får far får får A fourth sentence with a completely different meaning: far far far Without the dots the first three examples and the last example are indistinguishable and that has impact on the entropy. The example addresses the initial general question about decreasing entropy. "About the same" is too vague to be interesting in this context. I take that and similar entries as an illustration of entropy as defined by Shannon; the redundancy in the texts allows for this to be filtered out without affecting the discussion. And if the level of noise is too high from a specific sender it may be blocked or disconnected from the channel altogether. *) (approximate) translations of the four examples 1: does sheep give birth to sheep 2: does father get sheep 3: father gets sheep 4: go father go

Yeah, but REAL bravery is obviously driving around with the express purpose of creating a traffic jam with a truck to protest a mask mandate that’s already been lifted. All she did was write on a piece of cardboard. #perspective /sarcasm

Her name is Marina Ovsyannikova, and she's been an employee at Russia's Channel One state TV, and she chose to interrupt a heavily watched news show Monday night. She's definitely a hero!

I had to go to the paper itself to find out what these POOM species are: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28996-0 Seems, as I suspected, they are organic compounds with hydroxyl and carboxylic acid groups on them. These will be polar and presumably able to bond to silicates by H-bonding. The interesting thing is that the paper associates the oxygenation event* with evolution of the enzymes that catalyse such partial oxidation, suggesting it was this evolutionary step that led to it. *I'm pleased the article called it the Great Oxygenation Event rather than the alternative Great Oxidation Event. I always find the latter misleading, as it was really, from the planet's point of view, a reduction event, leading as it did to free oxygen everywhere!

Hillary is not in politics anymore, and Hunter never was. Jen Psaki doesn’t make policy AFAIK. And no GOP members/pundits on the list. I wonder if they get paid in rubles, will they continue to shill for Putin as the exchange rate drops?

As I read it, this paper does not challenge the primacy of photosynthesis in generating free oxygen. What it suggests is that the suddenness of the 2 oxygenation events can perhaps be explained by a positive feedback effect by which, once partial oxidation enzymes evolved, binding to marine sediments of partially oxidised metabolic byproducts would accelerate the rate of burial of organic matter. This would reduce the competition among the various oxygen-consuming processes, encouraging more free oxygen. And the more of that there was, the more organic matter would be partially oxidised and so the more efficient that burial process would be, and so on. Until there was so much partially oxidised material (i.e. so much chemical detritus from life processes) that, even though a lot of it was bound to minerals it nevertheless could take up enough oxygen for a balance to be reached, but at a far higher free O2 level than before. Or something like that - I have only skimmed it. (By the way, Rubisco always makes me think of Shredded Wheat................😁)

Not sure I follow. RuBisco is sensitive to oxygen (or rather, oxygen and CO2 both compete for the binding site) and increasing oxygen levels lower the effectiveness of carbon fixation. Or do you mean their abundance increased in response to oxygenation...?

This is genuinely one of your better counter-arguments. I'll have to reflect on it more, but those are some really good points. My first thoughts in response: A law protecting impoverished people, would be more about protecting the people than protecting poverty. I could also argue that it is a way of protecting the pipelines out of poverty. It can also be said that if you are born into poverty, it is an inherent characteristic of your past/upbringing, but yes, not your entire being as you point out. Not all of my immediate thoughts completely convince me that your point is moot. So I will definitely need to think on it more and get back to you. How seriously would you take precedent setting case law on this? If I can find cases where poverty came up as an important factor in a civil court, do you think that would give more to the discussion? Good point to make, as I said to Peterkin I will have to reflect on it more. Do you think there is a legislative means of protecting those in poverty more than we currently do, without making it a protected characteristic? We both agree classism is a problem, so going from there, how do we mitigate the problem, if we assume making it a protected characteristic is not a good solution? Realizing that is your position now. I'm sorry for snapping at you before.. again.. my anger management is still a work in progress. I think I have a shorter cooling off period now though and am more patient since my daughter was born.

Of course it should not. To enact a law that "protects" poverty is to establish poverty as an inherent characteristic of a designated group of people, and thereore enshrine poverty as a necessary and inevitable feature of human society. Poverty needs to be eradicated, not legally perpetuated.

I disagree with your position that socioeconomic class should be a protected class. Not because there is no discrimination, though. Classism is a problem. Some people are snobs. The problem as I see it is that protected classes are groups of people who are trapped in their group (though they might not agree with my wording of being trapped, and I don't mean any disrespect by it) What I mean is that if you are of a particular race or skin color, or are a woman, or you follow a particular religion, or are above a certain age, etc. there is no way (other than via extraordinary means for one or two categories) out of being in that category. That's not so with socioeconomics. It's not easy, but it's possible to go from being poor to being middle class, and you can go from middle to upper class. And you can go in the other direction with poor planning or bad luck. Further, the solution of applying this to hiring practices is too small. The friction of being poor happens continually, and isn't just an issue of when someone is hired. My issue here is not so much that I disagree with the broader thesis about classism (because I don't) as that I think you aren't making a good argument for assigning protected class status for hiring purposes.

Thanks for the good wishes. It's just a runny nose, really. (But then I have had 3 doses of vaccine, plus an encounter with the original virus in March 2020.)

Heroes in Russia: Anti-war protester in studio disrupts live Russian state TV news | Reuters

Since this is just one possible outcome out of an almost infinite array of outcomes, why do you think this article's author is correct? I'm only interested in why this is worth any amount of time thinking about, unless one is writing fiction about it, and then it's quite obviously up to the author. It seems to be a topic that probably has about 7 billion different opinions, each unique and equally meaningless. Edit to add: Over the time periods you're asking about, I don't think the even most educated biologists could do more than guess at how evolution will affect our overall appearance. But this is just an argument from incredulity, so I'm willing to be educated.

The lovely blue there...Why would they have joined NATO? I wonder why they didn't join Putin?

Yes, its role is trivial. It doesn't play a non-trivial role.

It didn't go anywhere. You can leverage the angular momentum and torque, as Derek explains in the followup. Notice the path of the apparatus - he's not lifting straight up.

There is no way to predict how humans will look like or whether we will still exist in 50 million years. Being ugly is likely the least of our worries.

What I meant was no reader of Swedish would find the missing marks surprising, because they expect to see them. So they would understand written Swedish with or without the marks; it's like how you can ndrstnd nglsh wtht vwls n t. Or wat. ys. mst frms r fr jrks. Lk xchmst. What a mature question; you must feel so proud of yourself; you don't even have to try, do you? Seriously, you don't have anything better than schoolboy jokes? What a bunch of clowns. Seriously. What a pack of goddam idiots. Patting each other on the back aboout how much you like each others inane posts. Jesus Christ. You can keep this shit. I'm wasting my time with it Eat shit and die, you dumb fucks.

Right. According to you a computer can be switched off and still be computing! What a fascinating worldview. More completely dumbass stuff from an "expert". Shannon entropy is about the frequency of messages; it's about information content and how to encode that efficiently. The surprise factor is not some kind of highfalutin terminology. Expectation is not an ill-defined term in communication theory. My guess is you probably think data and information are different things too. You provide an example: the Swedish language without the extra marks. A change of encoding that makes almost no difference to the information content. So it has about the same entropy. What a pack of retards.

That looks almost intelligent. What you've clearly forgotten is that languages are context-dependent. Strange too, that after dismissing the need for a sender, receiver and a channel, you invoke the concept of noise in a channel, and filtering. You don't realise how inane that is. You don't because you have immunity, right? The difference between information and data: there is no physical difference, it's entirely artificial; it's one of those things called a choice. You can't or won't agree of course, because this discussion is all about how much you can disagree with whatever you choose to disagree with. What fun you must be having,