Encounter #56

Fat electrons, fat electrons, and coming in the short cans.

Show Notes

The world's smokiest ball

You only wish your balls smoked like this.

Glenwood Canyon mudslides halt Amtrak train, spur Bustang reroute

California Zephyr has been suspended between Grand Junction and Denver since late last week.

Chris-chan arrest

#887 - Chris Chan After Party - Killstream.Live

Who is Chris Chan? Everything we know about Sonichu creator

One of the most fucked up lolcows in all existence.

Chris-Chan / CWC / Christian Weston Chandler | Know Your Meme

Petition · Get Chris Chan on Dr. Phil · Change.org

‘River Dave’ jailed for squatting in N.H. cabin for decades - New York Daily News

Free River Dave!

• Old man in New Hampshire who has been living in the woods for decades
• Grows his own food, cuts his own firewood
• Some guy in Vermont, who wasn't aware of Dave, is trying to demolish his cabin

Just 7% of our DNA is unique to modern humans, study shows - Los Angeles Times

mmmrtl on Hacker News

This explains it better than the actual news article.

The popular factoid is correct, but the confusion here is that these are different measurements. Humans and chimps' genomes are similar in that if you align all the bases [A,C,T,G] that can be unambiguously aligned between the two genomes, 98.8% of the bases are identical. For modern humans to Neanderthals, that number is 99.7%, and between two random modern humans, it would be ~99.9% on average.

This paper is asking a subtly different question - how much of the modern human genome is strictly human, not by simply lining up bases and running a diff, but looking at the inheritance of chunks of DNA ("haplotype blocks", size determined by processes of recombination, etc.) to try to understand how much and which regions of the modern human genome came from interbreeding with Neanderthals or Denisovans. There was variation in the pre-human population before the human/Neanderthal split, which means that if you compare just a single human to a single neanderthal, you'll find unique variants to each. However, most of those variants will have existed in both the human and neanderthal populations, so they should count neither as uniquely human nor neanderthal (knows as Incomplete Lineage Sorting, or ILS).

The chunks in modern humans that derive from Neanderthals or Denisovans are different in different people and broadly across population groups (e.g. highest percent introgressed in Melanesians, lowest in Africans). But across all the modern humans in the study, there are regions where Neanderthal/Denisovan inheritance or shared variation (ILS) was never seen - that's 7% of the genome ("deserts"). And just 1.5% of the genome was in chunks where moderns human commonly have a unique mutation compared to Denisovans/Neanderthals.

An ancestral recombination graph of human, Neanderthal, and Denisovan genomes | Science Advances

The research article.

Particle physicists discover mysterious structure in Great Pyramid – here's how they did it

The known chambers of the pyramid and the newly discovered void.

Muon - Wikipedia

The elementary particles, per the standard model.

Anime

Kemono Friends

Grape-kun - Wikipedia

Good night, sweet prince.

Higurashi: When They Cry - SOTSU

BEATLESS

Welcome to our grim gynoid future.

Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers? - by Brian Potter - Construction Physics

There's a reason we don't see robots laying brick all over the place. There's a hell of a lot more to it than just mechanically placing bricks and spreading mortar.

CS50's Introduction to Game Development | Harvard University

A free course from Harvard on game development. Who even knew that Harvard offered game dev?

Fuck Amazon and fuck Kindle

• E-books are not real books.
• Amazon keeps trying to make coldacid buy their Kindle bullshit by suggesting that the books he wants have to be shipped from overseas with big markups.

I know you have this book stocked, Amazon. It's only two weeks old.