
Re: Prisoner's Dilemma!
Somehow, I suspect Her Majesty's finest will have the skills to engineer a situation where the UK is bitch to both sides.....
186 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2011
Viglen P90 with 16MB and a 1000 MB SCSI drive, for Slackware, then Debian 1.2.8 on about 30 floppies...
I thought the thing about static vs dynamic linking was as much to save RAM, as executables could share pages?
Kernel modules could help too - I built one without IDE, though at this remove I can't recall if it achieved anything more than being able to say I'd done it.
There are more practical reasons. This is a bit like saying "get 12% extra RAM by using those ECC bits".
Biology doesn't put methyl groups on DNA for prettyfication, it is a marker for a purpose (e.g. defence against pathogens, turning some genes on or off in response to environment... there is a whole field called epigenetics dealing with this). So if you use a biological system to process or reproduce this DNA, you'll have to be sure the data isn't erased or corrupted. At that point you might be better just redesigning the system from the ground up with non-natural bases etc.
Incidentally if you want to compare I'd say DNA is more like tape backup, as it not infrequently needs to be unwound from histones to be read. It's also more stable then you would think, because of the deoxy function which slows down non-biological degradation hugely. RNA, especially mRNA is more like RAM, it is used for working copies and has a much shorter biological lifetime.
Of course it is the sort of work that raises institutional profiles and gets good publicity, so can't blame the boffins for milking it a bit.
Coincidentally, I was watching the House of Lords Covid Vaccine Rollout committee (Parliament channel, last night).
Oxford vaccine boffins were being asked about their views on progress towards better planning for the next pandemic. Besides some rather tart opinions on various Government initiatives, they all agreed that the parlous state of UK funding (and high living costs) meant that talent is going to the US and Japan, not coming here.
This used to be a common problem with xenon arc lamps as well. First instruction in the S.O.P. "Turn on the lamp BEFORE starting the computer..."
Equipment designers have made progress in PSU arrangements over the last couple of decades, grizzled lab staff buyers roll their eyes if you have to explain why bits of your new Whizzo-XX+ have to be turned on in a strict order!
IIRC gold prices went up a lot at some point after the 70s, which prompted development of plating with a much thinner gold layer. That made recovery from more recent e-waste uneconomic. I guess now the economics have swung back with a higher gold price and also higher cost of non-recycling disposal.
Excir's contribution has been to develop a process avoiding cyanide, which is an environmental nightmare. However, from the limited descriptions I have seen it uses organic solvents and halogen acids, so not exactly nice. But TANSTAAFL, it's an inert metal so you've got to be brutal to get it out!
This could actually be quite significant. Sulfur deposits on earth occur near volcanos, from chemical processes, but also arise from microbial alteration of rocks. My geology isn't good enough to know if these can be distinguished but I'm sure boffins will be pondering the question!
From a previous Reg article. apparently 3 gyros have failed; the single gyro mode lets them keep 2 in reserve presumably extending the total lifetime of observations. The single gyro mode uses other instruments to make up for the lacking two, so I suppose must reduce the versatility and response time of the telescope. Best of a bad job.
In a local charity shop last week, I came across one of those Chinese-style cardboard packets, unusually heavy. On a closer look at the labelling, it proved to be a contraption of wheels, blades and apertures designed for stripping long bits of cable. Not having enough time for the hobbies I've got, I left it for someone else to take up cable stripping for fun and profit, but I did wonder who the target market was, and why it was languishing among the pottery labradors and microwave egg poachers.
E = E0 + (RT/vF) * ln((a(A)*a(Bv+)/(a(Av+)*a(B))) where E0 is standard EMF, R gas constant, F Faraday constant, v number of charges in the reaction and a() activities of reactants A and B.... according to Atkins.
So it's proportional to absolute temp (Kelvin), which gives us a drop to 78% going from +25 to -40C. I guess there's more loss than that due to electrolyte viscosity etc alluded to in previous posts.
> decent diesel generator in the EV's boot.
I'd fancy a trailer with sled and dogs...
Now there's a word I haven't seen for a while. In the olden days when chemists used burettes and washbottles and got jobs with the Water Board, they were taught about such things. Apparently soft water, as seen in areas fed from peat covered volcanic geology like western Scotland and north-west England, contains organic acids that do lift a bit of lead off the pipes so flushing is not a bad idea. In hard water areas (on chalky ground) the minerals tend to coat the inners of the pipe so there is less of a danger. In the cities of course, you got plenty of lead from the dust in the car exhausts anyway.
> run cold tap for a minute to flush the water from house lead pipes
Or you might think that Pharma has been round this loop before with "new drug bonanza" methods and (a) doesn't want to saddle itself with datacentres and compute farms if it's a dud (b) knows very well what its internal strengths and weaknesses are and realises to get moving it needs external expertise.
See also the Boehringer/IBM story a couple of days ago. I wouldn't be surprised to see more hook-ups like this.
The use of AI for generation of new candidate therapeutics is unlikely of itself to be a threat - this is the start of the process before all the effectiveness and safety testing. Most of the previous approaches have the same problem that they generate many candidates from which you then have to pick the winners. It's not like Pharma hasn't done that before (and we all know what happens when it goes wrong) so I'd be more worried about AI being used to interpret effectiveness or safety testing data.
The antibodies slant does seem to be a novelty - most drugs are "small" molecules that fit like a key in a lock to disrupt some process. Antibodies are much bigger and work the other way round, by enveloping themselves round or sticking to a smaller entity (epitope). Historically, drugs were made by chemists and antibodies by biologists - it's only relatively recently that antibodies have been recognised as potential disease fighting molecules*. The classical way of making an antibody is by immunising a person, or animal. This is a very hit and miss process but its mechanisms are becoming better understood through systems like Alpha Fold, so I can see why AI would be a good bet to move the field on in a rational direction.
It's not going to reduce lab coats though - still got to make and test the things!
* Though anti-toxins and anti-venoms have been used for specific purposes for about a century.
I guess for "default" read "lowest common denominator". If the Calamares installer is the same as Debian uses, then the Manual Partitioning option in the install will allow for separate /home, on a separate drive etc.
Not sure how much swap partitions are used these days.