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doggoes kitties open thread

Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Hope you all are having a lovely day today, whatever this day means to you (or doesn’t). Consider this an open thread, to discuss whatever, from presents to politics to cats to whatever holiday stress you might be feeling.

And here’s some stuff I found on the Twitter.

— David, who is hanging in there

https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/945193410662682624

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kupo
kupo
6 years ago

@Mish
Cloud cover here, too. Even set my alarm early for it.

Jules
Jules
6 years ago

I saw the super-blue-blood moon this morning! Really cool. Hasn’t happened since 1866 IIRC (at least for North America?).

It was a nice way to bond with neighbors/strangers too. Like, there’s all kinds of division and… unpleasantness… but everyone can appreciate a celestial event! It makes me happy that I’m not the only one who cares about these things in my community.

Sheila Crosby
Sheila Crosby
6 years ago

@brony Thank you! I didn’t know about LUCA or ribosomes and now I’m fascinated.

@David If you feel well enough, a new article would be nice, even if the article itself is just a stub. I’m thinking that finding all those pictures and links must take quite a bit of time and energy.

Katamount (formerly Gussie Jives)
Katamount (formerly Gussie Jives)
6 years ago

@Jenora

Aye, got an eclectic mix about. Haven’t heard much in the way of problems with car vandalism, but then that wouldn’t surprise me.

Wow… I’m going to be side-eyeing Levy columns twice as hard now.

@Weird Eddie

Yeah, Boopsie’s treatment was… well, troublesome. I get the impression she was originally created as a foil for both BD and her feminist friend Nicole, but Nicole gradually faded away as a regular and Joanie became the Walden resident “libbie”. Honey putting up with Duke’s antics didn’t sit well with me either.

Then there was the bizarre Boopsie/Hunk-ra thing. O.o

I did enjoy Roland’s treacherous adventure through Ronald Reagan’s brain.

Shadowplay
Shadowplay
6 years ago

Long but interesting article on DCCC shenanigans regarding candidates.

The tl;dr version – they’re fucking up primary candidate selection by considering ONLY fund raising ability instead of ground game.

Brony, Social Justice Cenobite

@Surplus to Requirements

There’s been some mutational-clock research suggesting that the LUCA may have lived as much as 9 billion years ago β€” no Earth at all for the first half of that.

Can I see your source? Feel free to request the same in return.

I do take astrochemistry seriously here, but I see it as playing a secondary role to the chemistry present on Earth after it’s formation. You can get purines and pyrimidines and other complex chemistry but nothing like a self replicating organism with the ability to maintain and reproduce what it is.

There are problems with common assumptions in phylogeny too. Apparently Woose, the person who created the prokariote, eukariote, and archea division, did so based on 16s sequences. Things just got more interesting.

But what I think is really telling, is that the first evidence of liquid water in the geological record is followed promptly by the first evidence of life, both at about 4GYa. Life showed up instantly once there was liquid water in sufficient abundance. That suggests it was already all around us, falling out of the sky, and the moment surface conditions allowed it to establish a toehold, it did.

It’s important to keep in mind that they find carbon isotope ratios consistent with biological carbon fixation. Otherwise I’m excited that we can tie that specific chemistry to as early as 4.4 BYA as well. Especially in light of the cool early earth hypotheses that gives reason to consider liquid water at a still respectable 230C and 27atm. 80% of the water is thought to be geological in origin with impactors making up the difference.

Show me a world whose geological record shows it had liquid water for an eon or two before life showed up, and I’ll show you the true ancestral homeworld, where all the zillions of wrong combinations got tried before something that could self-replicate cropped up, and there was nothing already out there to drop in, colonize the place, and eat all the interesting molecules before that could happen.

I give you earth of 4.4 BYA, the entire bottom of the ocean would have looked like this (with variations based on the local magma).
comment image

It has the moon much closer to provide tides, a source of repetitive aqueous chemistry on mineral surfaces. It has more uv until the magma dynamo stabilizes and the Earth’s magnetic field appears at about 3.7 BYA.

I’m currently looking at purine and pyramadine biosynthesis and thinking early chemistry and metabolic simplification. Amino acids are required to make purines and pyrimidines. So many interesting patterns in here.

https://
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pathways.png

Brony, Social Justice Cenobite

@Weird
Here the url for the ribosome as missing link paper.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778?via%3Dihub

Brony, Social Justice Cenobite

@Sheila
You are welcome.

Brony, Social Justice Cenobite

Also dibs on rLUCA. Maybe. It seems likely a grad student might have had a reason to put them together.

Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
6 years ago

@ Katamount;

I would have really liked to see the Nicole character developed further, but I suspect Trudeau did not have the background to see the usefulness of a true second-wave feminist… he was, after a Yale-ie who came out of an exclusive private secondary school. Over the decades, i really appreciated the development of Boopsie’s character into a very sharp intellectually capable woman. And, she kinda dragged B.D. along the path, too. I remember Roland Hedly’s trip through the brain of Reagan… “we’re approaching the hippocampus… is that (aaiieeee!!!) a neuron firing!! LOOK OUT!!!

Also, Reagan as MTV’s “Max Headroom”… and a fourty-year battle of wits with the witless Donald that still continues!! If Trudeau was still writing dailies, it would be non-stop dissing of the dumpster-in-chief!!!

B.D.: “Palin can be tutored, Boopsie, she’s got plenty of time”
Boopsie: It’s not an SAT test, BD, you can’t just spend 40 years unaware of how the world works and suddenly you’re qualified to be president because someone crammed you with a few bullet points”
BD: “why not, Bush did?”
Boopsie: “take a few minutes with that, BD… I can wait”

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
6 years ago

@Katamount:
I don’t know what could make me side-eye Levy columns even more than I already do. Her ‘socialist Silly Hall’ lines because of her hatred for David Miller’s politics pretty much set the tone, so that I was entirely unsurprised when she became one of the reasons why the Toronto Sun was jokingly referred to as ‘the daily love letter to Rob Ford’.

I live in the Oakwood Village area, with Little Jamaica to the north, Little Italy to the south, Little Portugal to the west, and Forest Hill to the east.

As a friend and old roommate used to say, “We live in the middle of a very steep demographic slope.”

My comment has been “I live in the area that used to be the suburbs over a hundred years ago.”

@epitome of incomprehensibility:
Yeah, I’ve been hearing about that; it’s been pretty obvious that a lot of the ‘Quebec Values’ was a cover for anti-Muslim sentiments, assisted by the fact that so much of the Christian paraphernalia was basically background noise to them and unnoticed.

It’s almost a form of ‘regulatory capture’: in this case bigots taking a concept that was supposed to reduce bigotry and using it as a weapon against their preferred target.

And now I’m remembering that one of the first serious cases along this line, something that the Quebec Values Charter would probably forbid, would have been the Baltej Dhillon case where he fought for the right to wear his Sikh turban despite it violating the official RCMP dress code back in the 1980s. And the hue and cry that created.

Chris Oakley
Chris Oakley
6 years ago

Not to get off topic, but is David okay? He hasn’t posted anything in weeks.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
6 years ago
Katamount (formerly Gussie Jives)
Katamount (formerly Gussie Jives)
6 years ago

@Weird Eddie

That’s a good point about Trudeau’s Yalie sensibilities perhaps limiting him in those early years. Still, even at 22 when he first got published, there was plenty of barbs in that intellectual quiver of his.

Sadly, I haven’t kept up as much in the later strips; basically I just had a handful of treasuries from random years. Ones from around the first Gulf War where Boopsie is in full Hunk-ra mode… just felt like Trudeau had no idea what to do with the character. *shrug*

One character I remember getting a kick out of as a kid was Phred The Terrorist. I was a little young to fully grasp the “Viet Cong terrorist as a sports player” analogy, but his reaction to being traded to the Pathet Lao was quite amusing. Plus his banter with BD was gold. πŸ˜€

@Jenora

My comment has been β€œI live in the area that used to be the suburbs over a hundred years ago.”

Yeah, ain’t that the truth. I’m over on the east end of the riding in Davisville Village and… yeah, sitting between Little Jamaica and Forest Hill must be a weird experience (although probably no weirder than being near Leaside). πŸ˜› I mean, I’m cognizant of the fact that I live in an upper-middle class area that is predominantly white, but I live in a three-story apartment complex converted from a townhouse (which still costs an arm and a leg), so it’s not like I’m living it up in the big houses across Bayview Avenue. Or even the smaller houses around me that still go for $1.5 mil+.

And then there’s the Bridle Path folks just past Lawrence. Less said about those McMansions, the better. And yet I still have to remind myself that the Lawrence Park area used to be the estates of the Upper Canada elite, including Sir Clifford Sifton, Interior Minister to Laurier (his gatehouse still stands at the end of Dawlish Avenue on Bayview). Of course, Spadina House and Casa Loma used to be out in “the sticks” of the early 20th century.

I need to tour Casa Loma again, actually… been too long. Plus I have a soft spot for E. J. Lennox’s architectural style.

Valentin - Emigrantski Ragamuffin
Valentin - Emigrantski Ragamuffin
6 years ago

Russian jets were in black sea. I don’t know why American jets even there.

recently Russian jets fly near British air however.

I don’t know if Trump has Russian handlers.

Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
6 years ago

@ Kat

Here’s a reprint of the 30April, 1975 strip Phred the Terrorist Phred and B.D.

In later years, (I followed the strip for 40 years), Phred became a successful businessman, he and B.D. met up later (’90’s-ish), kept in contact.

Trudeau still draws Sunday Strips, and the WaPo is re-running the old strips at random, they’re into the 80’s now, in fact some of the Hunk-Ra strips ran a couple weeks ago. You should check it out on Sundays, (link) as he goes after the Cheeto-in-Charge, as well as satirizing other Repugnican’t/conservative foolishness

The current thread savages the dumpster for the Marla Maples scandal.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

I see that someone has morphed out from under their ban already.

Meanwhile,

@Brony: (warning, long)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381

There’s an io9 article that summarizes the arguments, pro and con:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/moores-law-predicts-life-originated-billions-of-years-476129496

[T]he researchers ultimately conclude that genome complexity has increased exponentially by doubling, not every 18 months as seen with Moore’s Law, but every 376-million years.

That’s the key result. From it is inferred this:

Genome complexity reaches zero, which corresponds to just one base pair, at time ca. 9.7 billion years ago… Β±2.5 billion years.”

Of course, the smallest possible self-replicating RNA will be longer than one base pair:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world#RNA_as_an_enzyme
https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46793/title/Using-RNA-to-Amplify-RNA/

I couldn’t find out the length of “24-3” (or of the class I RNA polymerase ribozyme, likely similar-sized) but it looks like 200 base pairs might be a lower bound. That’s about eight doublings from 1, so the time of the first replicating RNA could be around 7.5 +/- 2.5 GYa. The error margin is wide enough it could have evolved ten billion years ago, or only a short time before Earth formed.

The big question mark is whether the speed of complexity compounding has remained roughly constant. An environment of high temperature high pressure water would likely have sped it up (chemistry speeds up at higher temperatures), which could move it to 4.4Gya as you suggested.

Or, on the other hand, the fact that RNA is stabler in water ice than in liquid water might suggest the reverse: life evolved in surface catalysis not on rocky minerals but on or in ice, likely in comet-like objects or on a colder planet, in which case DNA was actually RNA’s way of adapting to a warmer, liquid-water environment where RNA is less stable!

So, it’s hard to say based on the complexity results whether life originated here, though the above provides ample fodder for interesting science fiction speculation. πŸ™‚

On the other hand, the time it would take to generate the first replicator is also worth considering.

Current RNA polymerases (protein ones) can synthesize RNA at a speed maxing out at 80 nucleotides per second per polymerase enzyme. Assuming an RNA-made polymerase wasn’t slower and that the “replicator search” was dominated by chemically similar processes, or even by ribozymes assembling and modifying ribozymes more specifically, and that a minimal replicator weighed in at around 240 nucleotides, one potential replicator could be generated per second per 240 nucleotides actively participating in the search, or so.

The biosphere now contains about 610 gigatons of carbon. That’s 5.533826914e+17g and that times Avogadro’s number divided by 12 is 2.77712378269334855e+40 — so the biosphere is using about 2.8×10^40 carbon atoms right now. Assuming that hasn’t changed, and noting that there are 10 carbon atoms in the bigger nucleotides (purine base ones), that’s enough to make 2.8×10^39 nucleotides. Dividing by 240 yields about 10^37 as the maximal number of attempted replicators present at a given time and 3×10^36 attempts per second as the rate of replicator search.

The number of possible sequences of length 240 is about 3×10^144. Dividing gives 10^108 seconds to try every combination. Of course the search would have been random rather than systematic, slowing it down, but there might be many replicators at size 240 and some at smaller sizes. Still, the order of magnitude of this number — 3×10^91 Gy — is so large that it’s almost inconceivable that it could be found in less than the whole duration of the stelliferous era if the search was confined to a single planet! A higher temperature environment speeding the search whittles a bit off, and adds a perhaps low likelihood added assumption. Most other speculations don’t help much either. Making the replicator 2/3 as big (180) both makes the search space smaller by that exponent, and makes the speed of the search larger likewise, so that assumption lets us take the cube root of the above time estimate — giving us about 10^30 Gy. Still way long.

There is, obviously, one way out of the conundrum, which is anthropics. Assume lots of Earthlike planets: then the search spans all of them, and of course the one that found a replicator is the one that gave rise to us. But then the question becomes, how soon after that planet had liquid water should that replicator first show up?

We’re back to the observation that a replicator showed up on Earth instantly once it had liquid water, at least by comparison with typical geological processes (let alone 10^30 — or more — Gy). I think that is the strongest evidence that — unless it’s way easier to find a replicator by blind chemistry than we have reason to believe — life drifted to Earth from an earlier ancestral home. And then that complexity based estimate of 5 to 10 Gya seems rather plausible.

Estimates of the number of habitable (liquid water bearing) planets in the Milky Way hover in the tens-of-billions range — assume 10^11. That chops the search time down to “about 10^19 Gy to produce one in this galaxy”. Still huge, and there’s no way life drifted here from farther, not in under 14Gy. The total size of the universe (beyond just the observable subset) is not known, so no upper bound can be placed on galaxy count to constrain anthropics on that level. Presumably the number is large enough that some galaxy would luck into a replicator in only a few Gy after its birth, and of course that’s the one where we find ourselves. Well, actually, “of course” we would find ourselves in one that got a replicator fast enough that intelligent life could arise before the end of the stelliferous era. That era is expected to last 10^14 years (10^5 Gy). We know a replicator can give rise to intelligence in 10 Gy or less. So we’d expect based on the “difficult lock” thesis found in Fermi paradox studies that if the replicator search is the only “hard step” and takes much longer (10^19 vs. 10^5 Gy) we’d show up 10Gy after the midpoint of the interval — so, we ought to have found ourselves near the 50 trillionth anniversary of the Big Bang, not merely the 14 billionth.

Even cosmically speaking, we showed up “instantly”. I wonder why? I don’t for an instant believe there can be a religious/supernatural explanation. But it does suggest something disturbing: that the real life-bearing span of the cosmos is only twice the time until the first replicator, and so is 10 to 20 Gy rather than 10^5 Gy. This is actually narrowed by the fact that it’s still here at 14 Gy. If the null hypothesis (nothing unusual speeds up replicator searches), then something will destroy the whole universe a lot sooner than we thought, not long after the end of the Sun’s lifespan and possibly sooner. The Big Crunch seems ruled out on the data, so the likely contenders would have to be a Big Rip, a “mangled worlds” quantum disaster, vacuum decay, or a “Big Whimper” — something curtails the search for replicators not long after the start of the stelliferous era. Or perhaps it’s a “Big Blindsight”: Peter Watts was right, nonconscious replicators will eventually dominate, and the likely time of that domination is the near future, perhaps even because we unleash a destructive AI or nanotech alife that doesn’t experience qualia and eats its future light-cone. Scary.

On the other hand, if there are natural micro-wormholes, or life (at least nanoscale life like an RNA replicator) can get from aged universes to new ones, panspermia could explain the early appearance of a replicator in our galaxy. Something survived from an earlier cycle, perhaps…

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

Just occurred to me: “Something curtails the search for replicators not long after the start of the stelliferous era” might not necessarily be a disaster after all. The search stops when a replicator is found — or arrives. Whether conscious or not. So there is one good scenario that stops the replicator search soon after the first replicator is found: it gives rise to an intelligence, and that intelligence is able to spread to every galaxy in its Hubble volume, bringing life with it, greening the cosmos. Then the expected time for us to wake up is at the median time for a Hubble volume to get a replicator, plus 10 Gy.

10^24 stars are estimated to exist in the Hubble volume. About 2.5×10^12 are estimated to be in the Milky Way. Ergo the Hubble volume has about 4×10^11 Milky Ways worth of stars, planets, and so forth. That chops the 10^19 Gy search figure down to 2.5×10^7 Gy per Hubble volume … still putting this Hubble volume as outlier-fast in generating a replicator.

That’s a relief, in a way. Whatever the reason for our earliness, it’s not anything that’s restricted to the speed of light! That rules out good and bad Hubble-volume-colonization, plus vacuum decay, but it does leave Big Rips and mangled worlds. If the vacuum metastability lifetime’s a lot shorter than we thought that puts vacuum decay back on the table — in which case, maybe ours is actually an unusually long-lived Hubble volume.

It also means it’s “not our fault”. If life ends up curtailed in possibilities within the next few Gy, it’s for cosmic reasons far beyond us.

Unless FTL travel is possible. In which case it likely means we, or someone, colonizes the heck out of everything, fast and quickly expanding beyond one Hubble volume. Then the earliest replicator in any Hubble volume ends up taking over the whole ball of wax within a few Gy. And then we can estimate the size of the entire cosmos, for the first time ever: about 25 million Hubble volumes, give or take a few million.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

Of course now I realize the above ignores that FTL should usually permit time travel. In that case the universe could be not much bigger than the Hubble volume, because colonization would go back in time to the start of the stelliferous era. So life could arise “for the first time” in 12-25 million gigayears, give rise to a starfaring intelligence, and this goes back and plants a colony on some planet in the Milky Way and near the Big Bang. That colony fails for some reason, the Milky Way lies fallow, and microorganisms left behind spread and eventually give rise to us. Which, however, could be expected to short-circuit the loop. Novikov consistency then predicts the first replicator to be “as early as possible”, and ditto intelligent life smart enough to make starships and time machines, and it seeds its own ancestors.

One other angle to look at is multiverse theories. The most plausible of these is quantum many-worlds, in which case our Hubble volume exists in superposition with every possible Hubble volume, all occupying the same space at the same time. Since there can be a history where we show up early, of course there is one. But where can a randomly chosen conscious observer expect to find themselves? That would be the peak of the “cosmic demographic curve”, the distribution of conscious entities over time, averaged across all possible histories. If that curve peaks at 14 Gy it suggests again that most timelines that get intelligent life are barren again by 28. Not a good sign.

On the other hand, other multiverse mechanisms give different results. If universes are being produced constantly by some process, and that process exponentiates — and this is true for at least one semi-plausible cosmology, chaotic inflationary cosmology — then there are exponentially more young universes than older ones at any given time (meta-time?), and that would bias conscious observers towards being young, because by at least some measures “most” of them are at the dawns of intelligence of their species, even if most of those species prove long-lived. If, say, we’ll become widespread in the Milky Way and numbering in the quadrillions in another ten thousand years, why are we now and not then? We’re early among humans! But if during that ten thousand years chaotic inflation, itself happening in a super-fast-expanding universe, produces quintillions of new bubbles for each that already exists, then quintillions of bubbles will “mature” to the point of having freshly conscious intelligent life during that same time frame, and we’re more likely to be among the quintillions of billions of new, pre-starfaring conscious beings in those than among the mere quadrillions of humans of 10,000 years in the future…

Shadowplay
Shadowplay
6 years ago

@Surplus

You see why “Let there be light” still has its fans? πŸ˜›

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

And closer to our usual topic, and equally disturbing:

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/958121487805878275

Constitutional crisis time. The rule of law is at the breaking point.

Shadowplay
Shadowplay
6 years ago

Urgh. Go back to first replicators. Far more interesting. πŸ˜€

(I can follow most of it. Glaze a bit at the numbers part – numbers and I have a very adversarial relationship – but love it when people go all in on a passion πŸ™‚ )

Though I’m surprised there weren’t more fuss about the biggest attempt at killing off the rule of law from last night. The requested ability to fire bureaucrats for undermining the public trust or failing the people.
That’s a slope you don’t want to go sliding down.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

And in the good news department, Canada has officially changed our national anthem’s wording slightly to make it gender-neutral!

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/1/30/1737448/-It-s-all-about-loyalty-to-a-demagogue-mp-2018-State-of-the-Union

Yeah, pretty scary. Concentrating power in the Cabinet, effectively. Any federal investigator could be fired, thus making Trump and his cabinet immune to the law. That in turn renders the legislature and the judiciary moot, so there goes not only rule of law but also separation of powers. What’s left is an executive-only state, which is a dictatorship in all but name. Nothing then stops Trump suspending elections, or outlawing Democrats and third parties to turn them into shams, etc.

I’m wondering where, exactly, the line is past which the use of force is justified in removing a President who has become a threat to the republic. And whether it’s already been crossed…

Chris Oakley
Chris Oakley
6 years ago

@Jenora

Just read David’s post. Thanks for alerting me to it.

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