Nah, they’ll just add a “for entertainment purposes only” disclaimer to the government itself.

I can’t see how Lamarck’s theories can be seen as aligned with more “dynamic” theories like the extended evolutionary synthesis. The idea that an organism’s evolutionary potential is completely embodied by its current traits (even including epigenetically-transmitted traits like niche construction) renders it purely reactive: inert clay whose every change is dictated by the external pressures of natural selection.

A separately-transmitted genome with some components hidden from selection is the only way for organisms to evolve dynamic strategies for reacting to selection in ways not completely determined by their expressed traits.

All cardinalities equal to or greater than that of the natural numbers.

I think machines have replaced the role of the chorus in classical Greek tragedies. Everyone knows they’re not supposed to represent individual people—they’re just the personification of social expectations and unconscious norms.

Or 5/9 of the Supreme Court.

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The lion-and-sun flag is the flag of the old Safavid Empire.

If you want to use a historical flag, a more appropriate one might be the pre-Islamic Sassanid Standard of Kaveh—the flag of the legendary blacksmith who overthrew the tyrant Zahhak. (But that flag has also been used by Iranians protesting the current regime, which may not be the overtone you’re intending.)

I will avoid saying why I’m planning on doing it now only because it will color people’s interpretation of why I’m doing it.

Flags are symbolic—they exist to communicate, and the only criterion to judge their appropriateness is whether they communicate the intended message to the intended audience.

Without knowing your intended message, it’s impossible to say whether or not you should use one in a given context.

Institutions aren’t the sum of their parts—their behavior is dependent on human participation, but is largely independent of the values or goals of the participating humans.

Unless you’ve identified a specific weakness and have a plan to exploit it before going in, your participation will probably benefit it more than any opportunistic harms you can do to it while participating.

Nationalism—the idea that there ought to be (or ever was) a 1:1 correspondence between countries, cultures, and ancestry—is a 19th-century invention unsupported by history, anthropology, or genetics. Ancestry tests that categorize results by country are obfuscating real data to meet a demand for pop pseudoscience.

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MediaWiki’s probably overkill for basic wiki functionality, but I use it for the sake of Semantic MediaWiki and associated extensions. But SMW has more of a learning curve, so it might not be worth it for a casual-use wiki.

The point of Maxwell’s demon is that there’s an intimate connection between thermodynamic entropy and information: increasing entropy reduces information, but adding information can reduce entropy.

I think what they’re getting at here is that the enzyme’s state preserves information about its recent past which it then uses to reduce entropy the way Maxwell’s demon does.

the researchers constructed a theoretical model where the transient increase in motility served as a “memory” of the enzyme’s immediate past reaction event. The enzyme used this information to leave the product molecules, thereby eliminating the probability of the reverse reaction.

So if I’m understanding correctly, just after an enzyme catalyzes a reaction it “remembers” that the products it just produced must still be nearby and knocks itself away from them?

Has Trump considered making the ship look like a big horse?

Does this solve Eigen’s paradox?

Any group can be empowering for its members. If it’s a group that already has an unequal amount of power in society, exclusive meetings will tend to exacerbate the inequality. But if it’s a relatively powerless group, it can counter the imbalance.

I studied linguistics in the 90s, and that was the general attitude about Chomsky then (specifically universal grammar and to some extent X-bar theory—his work on generative syntax and formal grammar from the 50s was still considered foundational).

But I’ve lately discovered the research of the Minimalist program that he was working on for the last few decades, and that seems pretty solid and groundbreaking even now.

Chomsky’s attitude seems representative of a lot of men and women (most of whom were younger than him) who had always described themselves as feminists, but who had similar feelings that #metoo was unfounded hysteria.

Epstein was capitalizing on that and promoting it, not just with Chomsky but with a lot of other academics outside of his usual circle.

What I find most damning in the correspondence isn’t Chomsky’s defense of Epstein—he seems to have genuinely believed in his innocence—so much as Chomsky’s subscribing to the framework that the #metoo movement/“cancel culture” and associated wave of sexual assault allegations was a baseless collective “hysteria”. Valeria’s statement implies that this was a stance Chomsky arrived at independently of Epstein.