I had a Sinclair QL which pioneered the keyboard. It wasn’t great - it was far behind the Acorn BBCs and the Commodores) but it was quite usable.

There was significant vertical travel, and there was variation in the push the key gave back - increasing to a point of no return, then a quick downward movement to the thunk of the end of key travel.

I could type moderately fast on it.

The reference if you haven’t seen it.

Dara Ó Briain is a legend!

That was one of the original proposed mechanisms to explain how the (obviously false) autism was caused.

But since then, since thiomersal was removed, other ‘causes’ and moral issues have been invented, including cells from abortions.

The one that makes me laugh the most is that it’s terrible that the poor poor baby is exposed to so many illnesses (measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, notovirus, rotovirus and more) in such a short space of time, it’s no wonder the poor dear’s immune system is compromised. And then the same mother drops the kid off at daycare and exposes the poor dear to all those viruses and more - and live viruses at that.

There is no bleeding logic, just feels. And they get so angry at the fake harm that medicine is causing, and simultaneously actually causing real harms to real people.

I don’t think that the anti-oop collective is attacking polymorphism or overloading - both are important in functional programming. And let’s add encapsulation and implementation hiding to this list.

The argument is that OOP makes the wrong abstractions. Inheritance (as OOP models it) is quite rare on business entities. The other major example cited is that an algorithm written in the OOP style ends up distributing its code across the different classes, and therefore

1. It is difficult to understand: the developer has to open two, three or more different classes to view the whole algorithm
2. It is inefficient: because the algorithm is distributed over many classes and instances, as the algorithm runs, there are a lot of unnecessary calls (eg one method on one instance has to iterate over many instances of its children, and each child has to iterate over its children) and data has to pass through these function calls.

Instead of this, the functional programmer says, you should write the algorithm as a function (or several functions) in one place, so it’s the function that walks the object structure. The navigation is done using tools like apply or map rather than a loop in a method on the parent instance.

A key insight in this approach is that the way an algorithm walks the data structure is the responsibility of the algorithm rather than a responsibility that is shared across many classes and subclasses.

In general, I think this is a valid point - when you are writing algorithms over the whole dataset. OOP does have some counterpoints encapsulating behaviour on just that object for example validating the object’s private members, or data processing for that object and its immediate children or peers.

I’m going to suggest food items that we still take from nature and eat with minimal preparation:

• Honey
• Fish like salmon, trout, grouper
• Shellfish (eg oysters)

We have evidence of shellfish and fish being eaten for a very long time - at least the middle stone age at 140kya - in middens which are 10s of thousands of years old.

Honey is likely to have been a food source - a treat even - even before humans left Africa (so before 100kya) but sadly this would be invisible in the archeological record

BMI classifying weightlifters as morbidly obese is a flaw of the BMI, not on how medics consider obesity. BMI is used because for most people it is really simple and quick and gives a reasonable result. When a doctor considers your health, they consider many many factors including your bloodwork, quantity and location of fat, fitness level and more

Sorry for taking a long time to reply.

with plain old binary fission cell division, how do you get both to divide at the same time, and give each cell one of the new organelles?

An excellent question! Luckily it was answered in the paper. The researchers actually had a high resolution soft x-ray movie of cell division (ok, an exaggeration, they had a few micrographs showing the sequence). In the sequence, it showed how the organelles (including the novel N2 fixation one) undergoing division and each ‘child’ organelle ending up in different halves.

Cell division is controlled in the cell by an amazing process:

• 2 centres are created on opposite sides of the cell
• Structures like tethers are built that connect each centre to each of the organelles (the nucleus, mitochondria and the N2 fixators). These are called microtubules
• The microtubules then start shortening, pulling the organelles in two directions, separating them.

The x-ray micrographs show that the N2 fixators are already integrated into this mitosis mechanism - my guess is that the N2 fixators already ‘understand’ the parent cell’s mitosis signaling.

The authors also say that the organelles have lost a number of genes for essential cellular functions, relying on the parent cell to provide those capabilities. By comparison, mitochondria have only 37 genes left, and chloroplasts weren’t known for having any DNA when I was at school, but are now known to have about 110 genes.

In other words, a lot of evolution has already occurred and they are well on the way to being ‘proper’ organelles.

an extreme change like this can’t be selected for

I think you mean that the initial bit - where the smaller bacterium is swallowed but stays alive in its host - is the “can’t be selected for”. After this, if the chimera survives, then most definitely the natural selection process is in action and selection is taking place.

That lectern as pictured is a cheap copy worth way less than $1000. The allegation is that she paid her friend for costs of a trip to Paris of which there are social media photos at expensive nightlife locations.

Note the caveat:

With PYTHON_GIL=0 set, I spot-checked a few tests and small programs that don’t use threads. They all seem to run fine, and very basic threaded programs work, sometimes. Trying to run the full test suite crashes pretty quickly, in test_asyncio

This is exactly the answer.

I’d just expand on one thing: many systems have multiple apps that need to run at the same time. Each app has its own dependencies, sometimes requiring a specific version of a library.

In this situation, it’s very easy for one app to need v1 of MyCleverLibrary (and fails with v2) and another needs v2 (and fails with v1). And then at the next OS update, the distro updates to v2.5 and breaks everything.

In this situation, before containers, you will be stuck, or have some difficult workrounds including different LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings that then break at the next update.

Using containers, each app has its own libraries at the correct and tested versions. These subtle interdependencies are eliminated and packages ‘just work’.

Have you seen his, ahem, retruth of the video ‘and God created Trump’ video? He’s literally comparing himself to Jesus. And his followers went wild!

Well that’s obviously true! Trump’s one of the greatest legal minds ever, so any ordinary lawyer should simply recognise this and follow Trump’s lead. Anything else means you’re a dumb lawyer /s

That is a leading theory, but that takes many many generations for the behaviours and instincts to change. And the wolf in question wasn’t one of those that initiated domestication.

The Catholic church is self-governed by Canon Law - its own law that's been around since the collapse of the Roman Empire. For a good portion of this time, Canon Law superseded national laws that applied to people who weren't priests. I think the church still privately believes that only Canon Law matters, and they can basically ignore everyone else. That's why they have protected child abusers, rapists and all other kinds of shit their medieval claptrap says isn't important. They are a bunch of arrogant pricks who believe themselves better than, you know, people who don't abuse those with less power.

Not really. People shed skin and hair constantly, and the small particles float in the air and distribute themselves throughout the volume. And your bacteria are along for the ride. One of the functions of the protective suits, gloves and hairnets is to contain these these particles and thus keep the air as clean as possible. When combined with lamina airflow, positive room pressure and other techniques, it keeps contamination down hugely.

Same with me! I was binary searching cladistically and it spoiler >!it was a jawed animal and did not have hard bones!<. My search among the >!cartilaginous fish!< was all negative. Damn

It's almost as if the army tried to make the 5.56 bullet more effective at killing enemy soldiers. But now I've learnt that they wanted to create clean, non-deadly wounds.

/s in case it's not obvious.

And to add to that, all the characteristics listed their green flags - characteristics used to judge people.

My god that brought back memories. The first commands when sitting at a new terminal was always, always:

stty sane

stty erase '^H'

It was well into the 2000s before Unix had useable defaults.