gort

Then adjust parent's argument to be about how tweets from Team Red and Team Blue are treated.

Sure, but this is only possible if the original (shared) gene was really quite close to being able to transport oxygen.

> Um. If this gene was the result of a mutation, isn't it possible, at least in theory, that mutation happened more than once? At two different times? At two different branches on the species tree?

Genes are long sequences of information. You could easily have quite different genes doing similar things, but if you have the very same gene (sans minor differences) it's just too unlikely to have originated completely independently twice.

The closest thing I can imagine to your scenario is where, because of shared ancestry, 2 species have a certain gene, and then some minor mutation hits both of them, and now they both have some other gene. I suppose that's possible. But they already shared the original gene to start with.

While I like this idea a lot, I doubt you'd get them to agree to it. They probably think (rightly or wrongly) they'd lose too many people if the extent of their data collection was well known.

> people of color I know are worried about being in the wrong town after dark

Is it really more dangerous to be black and in the wrong place than to be white and in the wrong place? I'm not from your country but this is certainly not the impression one gets; I do know a white guy from Baltimore who would disagree, anyway...

"I can only write this comment because I live in a universe that allows life."

Sure; but my point is, it's really quite unlikely that the one and only unplanned universe would have life, at all. Life then seems like evidence for something...

"It's like marveling about how come that those two [...] people are my parents"

By contrast, I'm not sure what that would be evidence about.

"But our universe isn’t well suited for life, our planet is."

I suggest that most possible universes would have zero regions containing life.

Given how well-suited our universe seems to be for life, I feel like we should admit that one of 2 things is true...

(1) There is a God who decides how things are.

(2) Many universes exist.

Actually I usually feel that the second is simpler than the first, despite my prejudices as a near-Catholic. But I'm increasingly skeptical about efforts to maintain that there's only one, unplanned, universe.

Wow. I briefly played with searching for these, but was skeptical if there was such a thing. This is one of the greatest discoveries in Life ever. (Though perhaps of little "practical" importance in building other things?)

I notice this has been pushed down the rankings on the frontpage (it was near the top a few minutes ago). Surely this sort of incompetent implementation of a politically-motivated decision by a major tech company is worthy of our attention?

(Exactly how submissions end up at a position other than their natural ranking has always been a bit mysterious to me - should I blame some algorithm thing or malicious actors?)

And "rifle", I think. You can't even do searches like "shogun" (famous novel) or "begun".