🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@skells Ha, very.

Interesting fact of the day:

The TASER is named after Taylor Swift, and the name is an acronym for "Taylor A. Swift's Electric Rifle"

@freepeoplesfreepress Very true.

@freepeoplesfreepress In my case at least I can always just leave the country and exist in a new one... So the debt really has little to do with me since I am not locked into america in any way.

For all the #DrWho fans out there!

#SciFi

A classic :)

@TruthSandwich To really test this someone more moderate with a more balanced following really should do the same poll.

@lucifargundam would still stand up to alcohol ;)

@lucifargundam Pretty sure youll be hard pressed to find a sword that melts into nothingness with a little bit of isopropyl... sounds like the sword is the mightier one!

@lucifargundam Well no longer existing is about as broken as it gets :)

@lucifargundam how did you break all your pens at the same time?

@humblenair Great to have you here. A lot of the people here are also scientists in many fields. While I wouldnt call my self a chemist I was working for the past 2 years doing a lot of chemistry based resarch myself (working with GCMS mostly rather than actually dealing with chemicals, and mostly overseeing the team rather than operating it myself)

Wowowowow...... I just rebuilt a pen i built myself. Basically took a modern pen body, threw away its existing nib and ink feed and replaced it with an ink and nib feed that is 102 years old. Had to modify the size of the feed and use some teflon tape around it to get a good seal so the ink flowed right.... but my god of all my many amazing pens this now out performs them ALL! The nib is soft, has way more range than I thought, and the tip is fine enough for everyday writing too... best of all the modern body is so so sexy.

@freepeoplesfreepress Would be a nice trivia to see if people could at least remember what the episode was about... But yes, it was season 1 :)

@GeePawHill haha yes, this is true.. obviously i use those terms loosely.. the point is the system itself only exists because it is an improvement on random chaos at all... every thing about the system is there fundamentally as an improvement in the big picture.

I think where your right is more around the word "improvement"... where people go wrong is they thing evolution is evolving towards some "best" state that is some super intelligent super strong being... but as you know thats not the case... improvement to me means "improvement in ones local environment"... A whale is no more "better" than a bacteria, or vice versa... they are just better in the sense that they evolve to fill a niche and exploit that niche better. It means very little in a global sense, outside of a particular niche.

@GeePawHill I'm not sure thats where we are though... the overall process is designed, built, and fundamentally about improvement. The act of improving doesnt mean every individual step towards improvement needs to be an improvement so long as those steps are fundamental int he overall process of improvement.

@GeePawHill Right, but to me that is still saying evolution results in improvement... If every change that lasts is one that either causes a break-even state, or an advantage, and advantages are favored over break-even, then in the end it is always driving towards improvement in ones local-environment.

I would argue that the genes that dont themselves confer direct advantages are still a long term advantage because they allow for more genetic variation and therefore more genes that can further mututate offering a larger search area for mutations to find advantageous mutations. In other words there may be a string of 20 or 30 mutations that are "break-even" that ultimately lead to one being an advantage. Since you couldnt leap direct to the advantage (since it would have randomly been improbably for 20-30 mutations to happen at once) it was those break-even mutations that lead to it being possible... So even break-even mutations are effectively advantageous in the long run.

@GeePawHill

Mitochondrial eve is a specific case of evolution, but a rather exceptional case too, im not sure it is valuable to focus on that case exclusively, even though it does represent an improvement.

Ok so you are talking about evolution as "all changes". evem ones that dont get passed on and the new offspring die... but that is exactly how improvements are found.. when an evolutionary change represents an improvement then it will pass on, when it does not represent an improvement it wont. We may not always be aware of why something is an improvement as humans, and it may not even be an improvement at all (just be of equal value) until much later on in the process where it provides the ability for later evolutionary changes.

Take even something as simple as color being lost in a birds feathers... if that winds up being preserved in the species that means its "selected for" and as such represents some sort of improvement. It may be better camaflauge or it may just save energy not producing pigments... but its still an advantage.