eggie

A gui installer would be fun, but an installation process that fixed all the weird quirks (like with LANG settings) by default would also go a long way to making it more approachable.

Guix is amazing, all the awkwardness aside.

> There are plenty of viruses from animals known to infect humans

Yes, absolutely. AFAIK that's where almost all viruses that infect humans come from.

> it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human

With extremely high efficiency, from the first appearance of the virus! If it were not already optimal, then the initial transmission rate would have been lower, and the genome would have had to rapidly change in the process of surviving. This was seen with SARS1. It's seen with other epidemics. The fact that it isn't seen here is very, very weird. Why did SARS2 not have to adapt to its new host?

The antibody tests do have a degree of cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses, but if this is reliable it's a fascinating finding.

While from a US political perspective, it may appear that the lab leak hypothesis began with the conspiracy theory that China created a weapon, this is not the dominant perspective among scientists who have expressed doubt publicly (and privately).

Our prior is that novel viruses come from zoonotic sources. We haven't ever experienced a pandemic derived from a laboratory leak. It seems fanciful, because it would be unprecedented. But, what would it look like if it did happen? How would it be any different than what we've seen?

Given the situation, yes, we cannot make any conclusions without evidence. And this implies a burden of proof on governments. The fact that this outbreak began in China is unfortunate, but it does not make it right for them to withhold information on the origins of the virus. They should share every scrap of information and evidence that they have, or expect exactly the kind of reaction that you are critiquing.

There is no fallacy of middle ground here. There is simply a lack of hard evidence to confirm a particular hypothesis about where this virus came from. And, there is an uncomfortable abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing in a highly unusual direction. This is not an issue that you can align with the US political spectrum. And it can be approached without needing to make any claims about how good or bad the Chinese government is. You cannot claim to know what this virus is without information that is not available.

Claims that it is zoonotic are unfortunately just as baseless as any conspiracy theories about weapon development that you've been hearing. The argument for zoonotic origin are based on a single piece of evidence that came out of the labs in the very city where the virus was first found: the sequence of a related SARS-like virus, and one with some very unusual sequence features and publication parameters. Doubt is reasonable. We should fully accept the possibility that humans were able to generate such a construct, and be ready for the next time it happens. The basic fact is that we know how to make such a virus, and that information is now out in the open whether or not this particular virus came from a lab.

A more hopeful interpretation. This can be a tool for good. It's not necessary for the state to have access. We already have access.

This capability is precisely what we need to generate data that can be used to resolve this crisis and allow us to safely exit from quarantine.

The GDPR allows individuals to request access to their own data.

They can voluntarily share this with their health systems, communities, and governments, such as when testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. This doesn't have to be open-ended, just for recent data that could help track transmission and find other contacts.

On the flip side, individuals who don't know if they're carriers can plug their own data into a system that relates it with the movements of affected people and warns them if they need to get tested.

The low mortality is likely due to the recent introduction of the virus into the community there. It takes weeks to go from infection to ICU.

> If universities had to worry about students defaulting, they would get rid of bullshit degrees that don't result in an actual job and the prices would come done due to free market forces.

This is a hypothetical but classic example of how regulation is required to support a free market.

> I conjecture if/when e-ink displays match conventional LCDs in response time and resolution there will be a movement towards “outdoor offices”.

I think you're right. Working outdoors with a laptop is already better than indoors. It'd be easier with e-ink.

It seems unlikely to me that biological systems wouldn't exploit digital (e.g. genomic/DNA/RNA) kinds of memory storage, given that the materials are there and the energy costs of maintaining and accessing that kind of storage can be fantastically low. Keeping memory alive in neural circuits would seem much more difficult. Surely that's happening to a large degree though. I'm just highlighting the possibility of an alternative basis for certain kinds of memory in the brain.

> neurons appear to serve as both CPU and memory storage

I'm not sure this is really certain. But that uncertainty is more because it's hard to prove that there isn't another means of recording memory than something we know.

There has been speculation that there might be some genetic or biopolymer based system in the hippocampus, but I'm not familiar with anything more than speculation on that topic.

And the chain. The chain has more pieces in it than the rest of the bicycle by a significant margin. A safety bicycle could never have been created with out modern precision mechanical engineering and production.

> As WGS comes online for association studies it will both validate and more deeply explore the genetic nature of every disease. It is going to be mindblowing.

But there is another layer of confusion, because WGS implies resequencing, and resequencing is only as good as your reference genome, and will distort results when the genome you're inferring is to far from the reference (reference bias).

The real mind bend will come when we have thousands or millions of whole genome de novo assemblies and we compare these to each other to do our GWAS. Only then are we going to have a hope of knowing what is actually causal in a genomic sense. Until then we remain in the land of association.

In nature, most adaptive variation appears to be large and structural. All the recent studies that have used whole genome assemblies to look at this have found the same thing. I would be surprised if this isn't the case for humans too. If it is, then much of current perspective on GWAS (both based on chips and WGS) will need to be rewritten.