Micand

I'm grateful that my 2019 Norco Section uses a round seatpost, threaded Shimano BB, and standard cockpit; I deplore the "self-adjusting" D-shaped Giant seatpost on my girlfriend's bike (which is subtly off-centre and takes all kinds of witchery to approximate the ease with which I can adjust a standard seatpost), as well as the mess of BBs and integrated cockpits that are becoming common even on mid-range road & gravel bikes. When I buy my next bike, I will go out of my way to select something using standardized parts. I very much hope something akin to the Framework laptop comes to market in cycling, where the entire machine is built to be user-serviceable with off-the-shelf, readily available parts. I put something like 20,000 km commuting to school on my early 1970s Raleigh Record, which I rebuilt almost completely with my brother, and it was a gloriously simple machine that I miss dearly today.

This is very excellent.

You have 46 chromosomes. Each chromosome is one massive contiguous molecule of DNA, which can be represented as a string of (up to) 150 million letters ("nucleotides") drawn from {A, C, G, T}. Together, the whole human genome is roughly 3 billion nucleotides. Since you have two copies in each cell, you have 6 billion nucleotides in total.

Each chromosome is either an autosome or sex chromosome. The autosomes are chr1 to chr22. All people (excepting those with chromosomal disorders, like trisomy 21) have two copies of each autosome, with one copy coming from each parent. Then, for the sex chromosomes:

* If you're male, you get an X chromosome from your mom and a Y chromosome from your dad.

* If you're female, you get an X chromosome from your mom and another X chromosome from your dad.

So, yes, "two copies of each chromosome" and "two copies of the genome" are the same concept, since the genome consists of chromosomes.

I moved to Toronto from Calgary four years ago to do my PhD at the UofT. I love Toronto.

* Toronto has a legacy as one of the best places to do ML, and while it felt like it was losing momentum, the Vector Institute's opening has infused the academic community with incredible energy. Vector's been recruiting top researchers from around the world, but particularly from the US -- there are a number of new Vector members who've come from the Boston/Cambridge area. The academic community in Toronto will only become stronger over the next few years, given how hostile the US has become to students from abroad.

* The strength of the academic community is fuelling a burgeoning startup scene. While it's still early days, there are a number of accelerators associated with the UofT and other entities, so given the talent coming out of the academic system here, I think the community will grow rapidly.

* Quality of life is fantastic. The food and music scenes are world-class, stemming largely from how diverse Toronto is. Downtown Toronto feels like a mixture of Manhattan and Brooklyn, just on a smaller scale. I don't own a car, and only use the subway perhaps once a week -- everything is in easy walking distance.

As to downsides:

* We have a reasonably cold winter from November to March. It's far less harsh than Calgary, though.

* Rent is expensive and rising. I've lived in the downtown core for all four years on a grad student's salary, so it's possible to make it work. But finding accommodations seems only to be getting harder.

* The political interests of the city are often overwhelmed by the sprawling suburbs surrounding it that make up the Greater Toronto Area. The new provincial government seems to be intent on attacking Toronto at every opportunity.

I've had the privilege to travel around the U.S. and Europe quite a bit during my PhD, and it's made me realize how well Toronto compares to the rest of the world. I plan to settle here after graduating -- the tech scene here seems like it's going to explode over the next decade, and it will be a lot of fun to be part of it.

Hype has almost universally negative connotations to me. Based on the name, I expected your extension would hide "hyped" stories (where hype is perhaps defined by a high comment-to-upvote ratio for a story), since hype is usually bad. You may wish to consider a new name.

I remember reading about OpenWorm a few years ago and thinking it was ridiculously cool. I'm glad to see the project has persisted. They do a bad job, however, of selling themselves.

1. What have they accomplished to date? I see little more than an animated worm. Tell me about how you're trying to model the worm, and how these approaches may accurately capture its behavior.

2. Why should I care about having an animated worm in my browser? Why is this an appropriate medium to deliver the simulation? If I want to do any kind of science, how will this help me? What I've seen to date looks scarcely more useful than Bonzi Buddy. The most interesting part seems the Academy, but I must donate at least $250 to gain access. This seems counter to the "open" part of "OpenWorm."

3. What academic affiliations does the project have? If the project is useful and has experienced success to date, surely they can recruit students/postdocs/whatever to work on it full-time, with well-established labs making major contributions. Are they computational people? Biology people?

4. What are the bona fides of the people involved? If they can't typeset or capitalize the species' name properly ("C. Elegans") in their video, that doesn't lend much faith to their expertise. The gentleman in the video marvels over the mere "1000 cells" in the worm, but does nothing to put this number in context (with, say, the 10 trillion cells of humans).

I'd love to see this project succeed, and I admire its attempt to recruit funding through a novel means, but the pricing seems too steep, and the overall quality of the pitch is regrettably poor.

I wish Calgary had better public transport. As a Calgarian, my commute is 20 minutes by car, 58 minutes by bike, or 75 minutes by public transit.

I don't understand the crux of this fellow's argument. If we can engineer and then print a fully functional cell, one which perhaps performs a function radically different than found in any natural organism, then what we're doing is no longer synthetic biology -- it's nanotechnology. In this case, we're building nanomachines, not cells.

Synthetic biology's appeal is that it leverages nature to do all the heavy lifting -- we don't have to engineer functions from the ground up, but only find similar designs in nature and then tweak them for our purposes. Furthermore, in synbio, we don't actually have to build anything, but only design it. We let nature -- which can assemble cells extremely efficiently, through a process it has been refining for the last four billion years or so -- build our systems for us, once we've translated them into the language of genes. If we have the ability to build our own nanomachines from the ground up (understanding, of course, that the cell is simply a specialized nanomachine built by nature), there's no need to constrain ourselves to the limitations inherent to nature's design. At that point, there's no reason not to divorce ourselves from the "biology" part of "synthetic biology."

The issue of how to deal with people who seek out child porn troubles me. The tone accompanying an article such as this inevitably vilifies those who consume such material, as though this is a clear moral issue. This implies all of us have pedophilic urges, with only those who lack the moral fortitude to resist going on to seek out child porn. But this is not accurate -- I don't have the least desire to view such images, but instead feel a visceral disgust. Most others, I imagine, have the same reaction.

People who want to view sexually explicit images of children are sick, not immoral. They suffer from a deviant urge from which the rest of us are free. The issue, then, should not be how to punish them, but how to cure them of this urge. (Whether such a cure is possible is another matter altogether -- our sexual desires exert regrettable power over our behaviours.) In conjunction, we must do everything we can to halt the dissemination of such material, just as Microsoft is doing here. By shifting our reaction from wanting to punish consumers of child porn to wanting to rehabilitate them, we will encourage more to come forward for treatment, ultimately reducing the amount of such material that is consumed, and thus the number of children harmed in its creation.

Just what is that "larger point"? Is it that by revealing his identity and publicizing his movements, Snowden has shifted attention to his personal story, away from the issue of U.S. government surveillance? If so, I disagree with the point -- Snowden's story has, if anything, given the issue a more compelling narrative arc, and kept it in front of the public far longer than if he remained an anonymous whistleblower.

I'd also appreciate an invite, if possible. My e-mail address is <my HN username>@gmail.com. Thanks!