schrodingersCat

I'm a little confused why the NHMFL home page ended up in my hacker news RSS feed, but I received my PhD here and thus feel obligated to comment and upvote...

PhD in molecular biophysics here (did virology rotation in grad school also). There's not enough time to go into how bad the "science" is in this paper. Evidence is cherry-picked, and circumstantial at best. Lots of non-sequitors presented that are unconnected to the actual science. I've read earlier claims that are similar to this and basically they see low alignment similarity to commercially available vectors and claim "AHA it must be engineered". But anyone who has studied molecular biology knows that vectors are almost always derived from natural viruses. Also, while viral linkages are normally linear, crossover between viri in hosts is well documented and does occur "rarely". That's say it's rare compared to normal genetic drift, but common enough that it's not particularly surprising to see genetic material from another "vector" in the wild. It does not have to be lab derived to see the mutations observed. Once you call into question this fundamental premise, everything else looks like the scientific trash that it is.

The major (and really only) criticism of Finder is a lack of an "address" bar. I would really like a bar where I can change directories quickly instead of doing ALL navigation using mouse clicks. Yes, I know you can invoke a Command-Shift-G to do this in a secondary menu, but Explorer has this built in. Having an address bar with tab completion and unix file-system shortcut support (i.e. "~", ".", "..") would be great!

The subreddits r/netsec and r/crypto can be helpful

I posted an edit to my original comment. I meant that the equivalent defining of a function (in zsh) does work, but zsh -c won't run the function unless you permanently add the function to your env.

New rfid applications would be great and by means pursue them! The reason I think this is a great problem for CV is that right now, only a nurse would be able to tell if there is a puddle on the floor from a leaking IV, patient's puke, overflown catheter bag, etc. Also is there air in a line, does the label on the drug match the prescription in EMR? These are common sense, cheap to fix / prevent problems that I'm not sure rfid could solve. RFID would be great for matching drug labeled with rfid with chip in patient's armband. One could think of lots of implementations for that sort of thing!

I guess it really comes down to what sort of focus you want your project to take, and what idea you think your PI will be interested in considering. Good luck!

Sexual selection is a huge area of research in evolutionary biology. You don't have to like the wikipedia article, but a quick search on google scholar on the term reveals over 2M+ results. Check it out. Peter's description of sexual selection was much better than mine, so thanks! I brought up the Giraffe's neck because its one of the best examples of bad scientific method leading to incorrect evolutionary conclusions. Giraffe males joust as a dominance ritual prior to mating, and generally the giraffe that can exert more force will win and hence mate. There are no advantages to the neck outside of this ritual as far as anyone has been able to determine, hence it is understood to be a purely sexually selected trait.