linkstream2 microblog

http://atropos.as.arizona.edu/aiz/teaching/nats102/mario/solar_system.html

QT:{{”

Initially the cloud was about several light years across. A small overdensity in the cloud caused the contraction to begin and the overdensity to grow, thus producing a faster contraction –> run away or collapse process

Initially, most of the motions of the cloud particles were random, yet the nebula had anet rotation. As collapse proceeded, the rotation speed of the cloud was gradually increasing due to conservation of angular momentum.

…
Gravitational collapse was much more efficient along the spin axis, so the rotating ball collapsed into thin disk with a diameter of 200 AU (0.003 light years) (twice Pluto’s orbit), aka solar nebula (movie), with most of the mass concentrated near the center.

As the cloud contracted, its gravitational potential energy was converted into kinetic energy of the individual gas particles. Collisions between particles converted this energy into heat (random motions). The solar nebula became hottest near the center where much of the mass was collected to form the protosun(the cloud of gas that became Sun).
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Seq. variants influencing…TF occupancy
http://www.Nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n12/full/ng.3432.html Uses allelic analysis to develop the CATO score, how variants alter binding

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This approach resulted in a simple scoring scheme, termed contextual analysis of transcription factor occupancy (CATO), that provides a recalibrated probability of affecting the binding of any transcription factor, as well as a quantitatively ranked list of transcription factor families whose binding might be altered.
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The #Brain #Somatic Mosaicism Network
http://science.ScienceMag.org/content/356/6336/eaal1641 Long lifespan of neurons accentuates impact of individual somatic mutations

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Neuropsychiatric disorders have a complex genetic architecture. Human genetic population-based studies have identified numerous heritable sequence and structural genomic variants associated with
susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disease. However, these germline variants do not fully account for disease risk. During brain development, progenitor cells undergo billions of cell divisions to generate the ~80 billion neurons in the brain. The failure to accurately repair DNA damage arising during replication,
transcription, and cellular metabolism amid this dramatic cellular expansion can lead to somatic mutations. Somatic mutations that alter subsets of neuronal transcriptomes and proteomes can, in turn, affect cell proliferation and survival and lead to neurodevelopmental disorders. The long life span of individual neurons and the direct relationship between neural circuits and behavior suggest that somatic mutations in small populations of neurons can significantly affect individual neurodevelopment. The Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network has been founded to study somatic mosaicism both in neurotypical human brains and in the context of complex neuropsychiatric disorders.” “}}

Bit by Bit: The #Darwinian Basis of Life
http://www.PLoSBiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001323 Overview of the amount of generated information in replicating molecules

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“The number of possible compositions is xn. If these are all equally probable, then each has a prior probability of occurrence of x−n, and the information content (number of bits) associated with a particular realized composition is log2(xn). This can also be expressed as 2#bits = xn. For a binary polymer, #bits = n; for a nucleic acid polymer, #bits = 2n.

If the various compositions do not have the same prior probability of occurrence, then the information content associated with a particular realized composition must be calculated based on its prior probability of occurrence (pk), which ranges from 0 to 1. The information content (number of bits) associated with a particular realized composition is −log2(pk).”
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Gerald F. Joyce
Published: May 8, 2012
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001323

http://ehs.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Safety-Bulletins/may2017.pdf

QT:{{”
 Avoid wooded and brushy areas with high grass and leaf litter.  Use repellents that contain 20 to 30 percent DEET on exposed skin and clothing for protection that lasts up to several hours.
 Bathe or shower as soon as possible after coming indoors to wash off and more easily find ticks.
 Conduct a full-body tick check using a hand-held or full-length mirror to view all parts of your body upon return from tick-infested areas.
…
Removing a Tick
 Use fine-tipped tweezers to grasp the tick as close to the skin’s surface as possible.
…
Never crush a tick with your fingers.
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QT:{{”
“One of Esvelt’s goals at M.I.T. is to facilitate that shift. Part of his job, as he sees it, is to challenge what he describes as “the ridiculous notion that natural and good are the same thing.” Instead, he told me, we ought to think about intelligent design as an instrument of genetics. He smiled because the phrase “intelligent design” usually refers to the anti-Darwinian theory that the universe, with all its intricacies and variations, is too complex to have arisen by chance—that there had to be a guiding hand. The truth is more prosaic, and also more remarkable: for four billion years, evolution, driven by natural selection and random mutation, has insured that the most efficient genes would survive and the weakest would disappear. But, propelled by CRISPR and other tools of synthetic biology, intelligent design has taken on an entirely new meaning, one that threatens to transcend Darwin—because evolution may soon be guided by us.”
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How DNA Editing Could Change Life on Earth
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/rewriting-the-code-of-life Intelligent design from CRISPR & gene drive rather than natural selection

Some ones l liked.

QT:{{”

Schedule or cancel a meeting. Ex.: “Schedule a meeting with [name] tomorrow at 11:30 a.m.” or “Cancel my 5 p.m. appointment.”

Set location-aware reminders. Ex.: “Remind me to remember my keys when I leave,” or “Remind me to feed the dog when I get home.”

Set alarms. Ex.: “Set an alarm for 1 a.m.” or “Set an alarm for six hours from now.”

Delete/turn off all alarms. Ex. “Delete all alarms” or “Turn off all alarms.”

Check the number of days between dates. Ex.: “How many days until October 6?” or “How many days between April 3 and June 16?”

Send an email. Ex.: “Send email to [name] about [subject] and say [message].”

Set a timer. Ex.: “Set the timer for 10 minutes.”
Check the weather. Ex.: “What’s the weather like today?” or “Do I need an umbrella?”

Random tips and tricks:

Find out what airplanes are currently flying above you. Ex.: “What airplanes are above me?”
Roll a die or roll two dice.
Tell me a joke.
What does the fox say?
Knock knock.
Who’s on first?
Why did the chicken cross the road?
What is zero divided by zero?
Learn how to say my name.
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https://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-complete-list-of-siri-commands/

The Heroism of Incremental Care, by @Atul_Gawande
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/the-heroism-of-incremental-care Positively compares GPs-v-surgeons to bridge inspectors v rescuers

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“For a long time, this would have seemed as foolish as giving your money to a palmist. What will happen to a bridge—or to your body—fifty years from now? We had no more than a vague idea. But the
investigation of the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse marked an advance in our ability to shift from reacting to bridge catastrophes to anticipating and averting them.

Around the same time, something similar was happening in medicine. Scientists were discovering the long-term health significance of high blood pressure, diabetes, and other conditions. We’d begun collecting the data, developing the computational capacity to decode the patterns, and discovering the treatments that could change them. Seemingly random events were becoming open to prediction and alteration. Our frame of medical consideration could widen to encompass our entire life spans.

…
Our ability to use information to understand and reshape the future is accelerating in multiple ways. We have at least four kinds of information that matter to your health and well-being over time: information about the state of your internal systems (from your imaging and lab-test results, your genome sequencing); the state of your living conditions (your housing, community, economic, and environmental circumstances); the state of the care you receive (what your practitioners have done and how well they did it, what
medications and other treatments they have provided); and the state of your behaviors (your patterns of sleep, exercise, stress, eating, sexual activity, adherence to treatments). The potential of this information is so enormous it is almost scary.

Instead of once-a-year checkups, in which people are like bridges undergoing annual inspection, we will increasingly be able to use smartphones and wearables to continuously monitor our heart rhythm, breathing, sleep, and activity, registering signs of illness as well as the effectiveness and the side effects of treatments. Engineers have proposed bathtub scanners that could track your internal organs for minute changes over time. We can decode our entire genome for less than the cost of an iPad and, increasingly, tune our care to the exact makeup we were born with.

Our health-care system is not designed for this future—or, indeed, for this present. We built it at a time when such capabilities were virtually nonexistent. When illness was experienced as a random catastrophe, and medical discoveries focussed on rescue, insurance for unanticipated, episodic needs was what we needed. Hospitals and heroic interventions got the large investments; incrementalists were scanted. After all, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, they had little to offer that made a major difference in people’s lives. But the more capacity we develop to monitor the body and the brain for signs of future breakdown and to correct course along the way—to deliver “precision medicine,” as the lingo goes—the greater the difference health care can make in people’s lives, as well as in reducing future costs.”
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#Software or softwear?
https://www.1843magazine.com/style/software-or-softwear Appears fashions change faster for computers than clothes. Cf
http://www.SFChronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Going-beyond-geek-chic-CeBIT-6883249.php?t=a28a0bfcd600af33be&cmpid=twitter-premium

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For years now I’ve written about fancy-schmancy clothes, shoes and bags. I’ve visited factories and ateliers across Europe to observe artisans make Hermès bags, Kiton suits, Berluti jeans, Tod’s loafers, Mulberry luggage, Private White VC jackets, John Lobb Oxfords, Brunello Cucinelli sweaters – and much more besides. I love watching skilled craftsmen going about their business, then trying to explain the process in print without resorting to hype.

But buying the stuff? Despite my privileged access and my love of beautiful things, whenever push comes to shoving my hand into my pocket and slapping down the moolah, I tend to cringe: £600 ($750) for a pair of shoes? A £900 coat? A £3,000 watch? Uh-uh.

I tell myself that my hesitation is based on prudence. I’ve got kids to feed, after all, and the closest I’ve come to planning for the future is booking a hotel in Paris. Yet when it comes to another retail category that dominates this golden age of consumer capitalism – personal technology – it’s another story.

Ever since my childish paws first caressed the orange plastic contours of my beloved Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, I’ve been a sucker for a screen, a shutter-click or a bleep. From my first computer (an Amstrad CPC464), first camera (a Pentax me Super) and first mobile phone (a Sony Ericsson whose model number eludes me – maybe it fried the relevant synapse), I can chart each period in my life according to the hardware I was using. And I’ve never felt anything but virtuous about forking out when the cash was, briefly, in hand. Why? Because personal tech is the toolbox of 21st-century life. It empowers. It frees. It improves.

But last month I had an epiphany. It happened as I sat in the Genius Bar of an Apple store feeling stupid, paying £300 to repair the suddenly blank screen of a laptop purchased not much more than a year earlier. The cheery Genius at hand had told me that in my position, he’d probably just buy a new computer: “but that’s just me”, he said, “I always want the latest model.”

Briefly, that technophile, Pavlovian response kicked in: woof! Lead me to the newest, most expensive version! But it was swiftly replaced by a howl of inner fury.

More and more, I observe technology companies adopting the marketing strategies of luxury-goods firms. Sure, their narrative focuses not on heritage or trends, but on incremental upgrades in processing speeds, peripheral capabilities and software compatibility. Yet many companies talk just as enthusiastically about design as functionality, and propose that owning their products is a declaration of personal identity. Each new launch inevitably presents whatever product is being pitched as the ne plus ultra of its type – a big fat lie that becomes ever more glaring as the cycle of enforced obsolescence spins faster and faster.

I’ve spent the last week or so sifting through my personal archive of the obsolete: à la recherche du tech perdu. From tangles of cable and brick-like batteries I’ve excavated minidisc players (Sanyo!), BlackBerrys, Nokias, ThinkPads, iMacs, a Google Glass, Coolpix and more. None, of course, is fit for purpose now, unless you’re going to a “Back to the Future” party.”
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Why Is Bullet Journaling Popular? It Makes You Feel Productive for…About Anything
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/01/13/why_is_bullet_journaling_popular_it_makes_you_feel_productive_for_doing.html @GTDguy’s approach w/o computers

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“To summarize: You should write down the things you need to do, the places you have to go, and ideas that occur to you. Then, at the beginning of every month, you should look at your list, jettison the items that are no longer relevant, and start afresh. In essence, it’s Getting Things Done for people who like old-fashioned pens and paper.” “}}