👓 A few notes on Medsec and St. Jude Medical | Matthew Green
👓 Living Bits: Information and the Origin of Life | PBS
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
our existence can succinctly be described as “information that can replicate itself,” the immediate follow-up question is, “Where did this information come from?”
from an information perspective, only the first step in life is difficult. The rest is just a matter of time.
Through decades of work by legions of scientists, we now know that the process of Darwinian evolution tends to lead to an increase in the information coded in genes. That this must happen on average is not difficult to see. Imagine I start out with a genome encoding n bits of information. In an evolutionary process, mutations occur on the many representatives of this information in a population. The mutations can change the amount of information, or they can leave the information unchanged. If the information changes, it can increase or decrease. But very different fates befall those two different changes. The mutation that caused a decrease in information will generally lead to lower fitness, as the information stored in our genes is used to build the organism and survive. If you know less than your competitors about how to do this, you are unlikely to thrive as well as they do. If, on the other hand, you mutate towards more information—meaning better prediction—you are likely to use that information to have an edge in survival.
There are some plants with huge amounts of DNA compared to their “peers”–perhaps these would be interesting test cases for potential experimentation of this?
👓 Remembering Stephen Hawking | Christoph Adami
The passing of the great physicist Stephen Hawking today at the age of 76 fills me with sadness for many different reasons. On the one hand, it was inspiring to witness that, seemingly, the power of will and intellect can hold such a serious illness at bay for so long. On the other hand, I am also sad that I never got to talk to him, and perhaps explain to him my take on his great body of work.
Remembering Stephen Hawking. My short tribute. https://t.co/2aJH8EsAiK
— Chris Adami (@ChristophAdami) March 15, 2018
Bookmarked on March 14, 2018 at 06:36PM
👓 Caltech Mourns the Loss of Stephen Hawking | Caltech
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🎞 Black Panther (2018)
Directed by Ryan Coogler. With Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira.
T'Challa, the King of Wakanda, rises to the throne in the isolated, technologically advanced African nation, but his claim is challenged by a vengeful outsider who was a childhood victim of T'Challa's father's mistake.
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Got a simple brioche, but it was simply dreadful. Somehow it had an off chemical taste.
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👓 Smelvetica | Tims Curious Creations
Smelvetica is an experimentation in taking one of the worlds most beloved fonts, and turning it into a morbid monstrocity.
📖 Read pages 1-36 of 208 of Henry and Ribsy by Beverly Cleary
Henry's father promises to take him salmon fishing if he can keep Ribsy out of trouble for the next month. But that's no easy task, especially when Ramona gets into the act.
They don’t arrest dogs for theft?!