gloriousduke

I was about to add a similar comment. Definitely interested to read his evaluation and whether there is more hype than substance here, though I'm guessing it may take some time.

If that's the case, the QC computer endeavors are still worthwhile since while failing to scale them we may develop another piece of a more complete model of reality.

> Fix death please, that's a good way to prevent the fear.

Even if you were able to postpone your non-existence to some late stage of the Universe, it's all but assured you will have to end eventually in light of postulated Cosmological denouements. In other words, you will not exist forever due to physics.

That being said it would be nice to know it's possible to get at least a few hundred years of healthy and happy living in. Yet, would the fear of the end grow even greater then?

A world of only perfect beings does sound pretty boring. I'm not sure if anything worthwhile would actually happen in such a place. That being said, mental (rational) tools that help one recognize the origin of anxiety and reduce its deleterious effects are quite welcome. I think this article could help programmers/founders do just that.

The article describes how influenza viruses (not coronaviruses) use sialic acid to bind to the upper respiratory tract.

Edit: a letter.

> then you get a picture of an extraordinarily complicated system, and the nuts and bolts of exactly what that system is running on fall away into irrelevance

I think this is a common failing of thought experiments. Gedankenexperiments help us ask better questions and design better real experiments, but if you're trying to use them to make fundamental conclusions about reality in an a priori way, you're likely going to fail.

This may sound absurd, but you actually need some (mostly settled) philosophy to determine what “facts and empirical truths” are.

> But these two things are not directly comparable

Correct. You simplified my comment nicely here (though I'm trying to find papers about smaller scales):

> While species diversity as a whole in the Hawaiian islands is likely increasing, due to introduced species, the diversity at smaller spatial scales is likely decreasing as endemics become rarer.

How do conservationists make value judgements in cases like this?

It's interesting that the image used for the article, from the windward side of Oahu, shows only invasive species (or maybe that's the point). Ironically, the biodiversity of plants on the Hawaiian Islands has increased tremendously since the arrival of man. The graphic shows 79 species of plant lost. Anyone that's been to Hawaii knows there are far more than 79 introduced plant species.

I'm not saying this is a good thing by any means, but it's interesting to see that novel forests of invasive species are still maligned even if they contain a greater number of species/area than what was displaced. If anyone is interested in this comment, I can unearth at least one paper that examines these values.

In the end, I suppose we value the total number of different species in existence, and as that number decreases, there is a Great Loss. Yet I do like to mull over why conservationists favor native species that are struggling to survive over the introduced that are flourishing, often at great economic cost to control said invasives.

Note: this comment only considers plant species, which probably makes it very uninformed and bad. Take it with a grain of salt.

When I was looking at a Game of Thrones subreddit after the episode last night, I realized I was getting more emotionally from the memes (which aren’t exactly the sort of memes Dawkins was thinking of) than long-winded analysis of what was good/bad about the episode. Those reddit memes are a way to encapsulate quite a bit of thought and feeling with only a few words and an image or two. Aside: those memes have been building up on each other for years, so quite a few images, words and online interactions are involved in their existence from a historical perspective. Not to say there is anything profound about this memeified manner of communication, or that it is all that much different from other types of human language and the appreciation of art or a photograph, but I still found it interesting (futuristic?) that I was thinking that way.

The article seems well-researched and informative. It made me think about the balance between economic growth's positive and negative outcomes. If it takes a modicum of editorial trickery to get more eyes on such a piece, I think we're fine.