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@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!

@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)

Hi everyone! I'm a computational chemist and a drug discovery researcher. I'm currently doing an industry postdoc at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Looking to connect with fellow compchemists and drug discovery researchers here.

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.

@GeePawHill

I woudl argue that evolution **does** mean improve for the first of a species which evolves when that new species turns out to be viable. but it does not mean the species as a whole is improved (as it may be at a disadvantage from competition within its own species in the long run)... but if the initial mutations werent improvements then they wouldnt have evolved.

@GeePawHill I thought it was pretty good, at least for an action movie... That said all purely action movies are "medium" at best I'd say.

Carter: If I died I wouldnt have any regrets. You?

McNeil: I would regret dying.

-- Stargate SG-1

@Empathy1st

I've had COVID 7 times so far that I've tested and confirmed. Thankfully long-covid seems to be fairly rare, enough that most people dont get it, myself included. That said like many diseases COVID should be taken seriously and can cause all sorts of harm. But lets also not go overboard (as we have in the past) about it, just be reasonably responsible and dont let it take over your life either cause that can do as much harm as any other virus.

So I started wearing plain wedding band like rings. Partly because im in a relationship (not married) so it sends the signal to women I am taken... but more importantly as a style choice.

They are mostly cheap rings (Tungsten ~25$ up to cobalt and other mid grade metals at ~100$ to 300$). But I'm picking them out so they have some stripe of color like blue, red, purple, and green. Then matching whatever ring I wear that day to the color I'm wearing... this is probably the farthest I'll ever go for fashion.

@Romaq There is no magical formula for a platform where people wont suck sadly.

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