we’re in agreement :-) what I said is an Orwell’s 1984 quote. My overly simplified explanation of the quote is that the governmental entities in the novel were able to maintain absolute authority because of a manufactured conflict. In essence, two sides intentionally maintained a stalemate at war so that each of them could keep absolute control over their populace using fear of the other. In reality, both groups were controlled by the same people-- an autocratic ruling class.

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

and all that

Oooooh I have some ideas! Some of these are paid/premium (but NOT micro transactions) and some have mild ads. But I share the distaste for data-mining, money grubbing, brain-melting-ad-ridden games, so I’m certain they are on the least intrusive end of the spectrum.

I really love biology (I’m a biologist…) so these are both pet games and usually breeding/evolution games!

• Fish Tycoon – This one specifically. A classic! Breed and care for cute fish!
• Niche breed and evolve – so neat and pretty educational about evolution/genetics. There’s a slightly more complicated/difficult pc game if she decides she likes the nichelings/universe.
• Pocket Frogs – Simple, low stress collecting game. it would take years to collect all the frogs, and there’s a relatively active community of people who trade sets of frogs to other people to help them complete collections. Would be fun to play with her friends at school!
• Reigns Her Majesty – a game about running a kingdom as a queen. When you die, you become your heir and retain some progress from your last lives. It doesn’t fit the exact criteria you mentioned, but I think she might like it anyway!

because the very first thing you say in this post basically amounts to “I think I have the authority to decide the basis on which we determine who deserves to vote”

like, yeah, most people can navigate to their secretary of state websites. And it’s not really your responsibility to have to link the pages anyway.

But doing it for that reason aligns you philosophically with people who think that the illiterate, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the critically ill, etc. somehow don’t deserve to vote. It aligns you ideologically with other people who think they can decide who deserves to vote, with people who want to disenfranchise others-- in essence, it aligns you ideologically with many Republicans

Using Jesus as a reference is unfortunate, yeah, but any other world calendars have to pick a nearly equally arbitrary way to contextualize the start and end year.

Take your pick: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Year_in_various_calendars

I personally use “2024 CE” for “common era”, with BCE referring to “before common era”. This allows us to communicate relatively clearly with other people who use the Gregorian calendar without explicitly endorsing the birth of Jesus as the important event defining the switch-over between CE and BCE… A bit of a cop out, but

Anyway have fun, there are lots of options

Edit: also the one you’re referring to in your post is the Holocene Calendar

As an education professional: what the hell, dude? It’s not unfortunate that we aren’t just dropping struggling students without first carefully examining why they’re not succeeding.

You might be right that you can’t let some students detract from the class for other students, but the solution there is advocating for better funding and more staff to be able to give every student what they need, whether they’re above or below the expectation for their age.

Saying it’s “unfortunate” that students don’t fail (read: ruin their whole god damn lives) as often anymore is blaming our most vulnerable YOUTH for the systemic problems of our society. It’s not their job to be what the school environment wants them to be, they don’t even have a choice about whether or not they are there. It’s our (as educators, and as tax paying and voting community members) responsibility to make sure they get the education they need to be functional members of our society.

We even have huge bodies of research to reinforce this. It’s not a secret that the school environment excels at making nice workers, not critical-thinking and well-adjusted adult humans.

Take it up with the school board! Take it up with the local, state, and federal government! Take it up with the voters!

Just curious, when you say “those products are still on the shelves”, do you mean they’re selling product from the lot numbers that were recalled?

You should be able to tell the grocery store employees and have them remove it if they’re selling recalled products, but also I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re only selling products that are no longer part of those recalled lots

Edit: WAIT you said “still not on the shelves”, sorry! Ignore my comment lol

I feel like I’ve seen this take a lot more in the past ~5 years than I did before. Not just that zoos are unethical, but that any animal ownership (or really interaction of any kind) is inherently abusive.

You’re certainly entitled to feel however you want about animal ownership and act accordingly, but personally I feel like it’s honestly kind of a weird take?

Humans are obviously not the only species that develops symbiolotic relationships with other organisms (in a diversity of power dynamics), but we are also not the only species who take on specifcally ownership or shepherd roles for other species (like spiders with frog pets, or fungus farmer ants, among many many other examples). Thus, the ontological position this opinion must operate from is that humans are somehow distinct and superior to nature, such that we have separate and unique responsibilities not to engage in mutualistic ownership with other organisms, on the basis that like, we’re somehow “above” that? That we’re so enlightened and knowledgeable that we exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms?

Of course, a lot of our relationships to animals can be described as harmful in other terms without needing to take this specific stance. Like, our relationship with many agricultural animals can be critiqued through the harm done to their individual well-beings and through the harm their propagation does to the global environment. Or irresponsible pet owners can be critiqued for how their unwillingness to control the reproduction or predatory abilities of their pets can harm local ecosystems, like an introduced invasive species might. Or valid criticisms of many zoos when they prioritize profits over animal welfare, rehabilitation, ecosystem restoration, and education. Or that the general public picking up wild animals is a problem because it disturbs their fragile ecosystems and traumatizes them, especially when done on the large scale of human populations (but distinctly not for ecological study, wild animal healthcare, education, etc., like Steve Irwin et. al) But none of these are specific criques of the mutualistic ownership relationship itself as much as problems with the way we handle that relationship.

Idk, I’m interested to understand your opinion, especially if it has detail I’m missing beyond “we shouldn’t have pets, zoos, or farms because we’re better than that”!

Just because it isn’t as bad a joke would imply doesn’t mean it still isn’t really quite bad

Base 12 vs base 10 is pretty much the only objective advantage of USC, and it only uniquely occurs in USC for small construction-scale tasks (i.e. the inch-to-foot scale).

I don’t think people critiquing USC are unaware of what this video is saying. We just think it’s still worse.

source: 8th gen American who would rather switch to SI

That’s valid! I agree. I think in this case it would be reasonable for the model to give multiple (or like, at least one, jeez) images with white queens. I don’t disagree with anyone in that sense. I just also don’t think it’s worth pitching a fit when the dumbass model that has been trained to show more racial diversity produces (frankly comical) hallucinations.

The ethos of the trainers is a good one. Attempting to counter the (demonstrated, measurable) bias of many models toward whiteness is a good choice. I prefer that the trainers choose to address the bias even if it (sometimes, in early versions) makes the model make silly mistakes like this. That’s all.

• it’s true that this would mislead children, but the model could hallucinate about literally anything. Especially at this stage, no one-- children or adults-- should be uncritically accepting what the model states as fact. That said, I agree LLMs need to improve their factual accuracy

• Although it is highly debated, some scholars suggest Queen Charlotte might have had African ancestry, or that she would be considered a POC by today’s standards. Of course, she reigned in the 17-1800s, but it isn’t entirely outlandish to have a “Queen of Color”, if we aren’t requesting a specific queen or a specific race

• People of color did live in England in the middle ages? Like not diverse in the way we conceive now, but here are a few papers discussing the racial diversity at the time. It was surely less intermingled than today, but it’s not like these images are impossible

• Other things are anachronistic or fantastical about these images, such as clothing. Are we worried about children getting the wrong impression of history in that sense?

• Of course increasing visibility and representation of all kinds of marginalized people is important. I, myself, am disabled, so I care about that representation too-- thanks for pointing out how we could improve the model further. I do kinda feel like people would be groaning if the model had produced a Queen with a visible disability, though… I would be delighted to be wrong on this front :)

It’s also like, I guess I would prefer it to make mistakes like this if it means it is less biased towards whiteness in other, less specific areas?

Like, we know these models are dumb as rocks. We know that they are imperfect and that they mirror the biases of their trainers and training data, and that in American society that means bias towards whiteness. If the trainers are doing what they can to prevent that from happening, whatever, that’s cool… even if the result is some dumb stuff like this sometimes.

I also don’t think it’s a problem for the user to specify race if it matters? Like “a white queen of England” is a fine thing to ask for, and if it isn’t specified, the model will include diverse options even if they aren’t historically accurate. No one gets bent out of shape if the outfits aren’t quite historically accurate, for example

Oooh it’s even cooler than that!! You’re spot on, acid is the problem. And acid from food, candy, coffee, etc. is harmful for enamel for sure.

But sugary stuff that isn’t acidic also rots teeth. Why? Because the bacteria in your mouth do what’s called lactic acid fermentation. Basically, when they take a sugar molecule and want to make “usable” energy out of it (in the form of something called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate), they end up creating lactic acid as a byproduct. In essence, the stuff living in your mouth makes acid out of sugar.

We also need to break sugar down into ATP, but we do something called cellular respiration instead. It uses oxygen and creates CO2 as a byproduct! That’s why we need oxygen to breathe, and why we breathe out carbon dioxide. But, when you work your muscles hard (lifting weights, sprinting), you might use the ATP in your muscles faster than your body can make it with cellular respiration. In that case, your cells will also do lactic acid fermentation! That’s what we’re feeling when we “feel the burn” (well, that and micro-tears in the muscle, in some cases).

Source: I’m a biologist! And I love sharing weird facts like this! Thank you for the excuse to write this out :-)

Other commenters have good suggestions also, but one option I haven’t seen mentioned would be to buy a powdered acid and make your own dilutions

It’s easy to get citric acid in a dry form (like the crystal coating on sour candy), you can get 10 lbs (enough to make many gallons) of it for like $30-50 online. I put a small scoop in my dishwasher to keep my cups from getting foggy from our hard water, and I use it to descale our kettle and in our laundry, too.

Just be careful, acid dilutions are no joke. Whether you get the cleaning vinegar or make a citric acid solution for yourself:

• use nitrile or latex gloves when working with the acid solutions

• wear something to protect your eyes, glasses are probably good enough but goggles are better

• if you have an acid solution and want to dilute it, pour the acid into the water, not the water into the acid!!!

• flush your skin or eyes with water immediately if the acid gets on you or your clothes

These rules might seem like overkill but better safe than sorry!

Citric acid is slightly stronger than acetic acid so if I were you I’d make like a 20% solution to have a similar effect to the cleaning vinegar (so like 100 g powdered acid to 400 mL water). You might have to mix it on the stove so that the water is simmering to get the acid to dissolve.

Again, be careful! But as long as you’re smart about it, take your time, and prioritize safety, you can definitely use this for descaling and cleaning (and cooking!)

Junk DNA is repeating codons, or codons that occur in areas that are outside of the “start/stop” codon triplicate pairs.

Those sequences do things and have effects. In fact, the coding regions are often less functional than the non-coding ones.

They aren’t there for structural reasons, all DNA is the same 4 codons linked together over and over, all the different chromosomes are different sizes.

Sometimes they ARE there for structural reasons? Read: enhancers, or CTCF binding sites? Among many other myriad examples of functional noncoding regions? Also, nucleotides =/= codons. There are 64 codons.

All of this DNA is reported when the cells divide, that’s the only time those regions between the stops and starts actually come into play. This is very easily proven, we know the structure of the reading proteins down to the molecule (indeed there are starts and stops and triplicate base pairs that design these transcribing proteins).

That’s bull. You’re out of your depth. A contemporary college molecular biology course would show your examples to the contrary.

The “important” junk DNA that has significance while not being in a “start->stop” zone are the codons that occur before the first start codon on either side of a DNA strand, when DNA is replicated the protein that starts replicating it has to start at 1 end of 1 side of the DNA in order to be able to read it

I feel like a broken record but Enhancers! lncRNAs! siRNAs! Binding sites! Other gene regulatory regions! Epigenetic nucleosome modifications! Chromatin remodeler sites!

except it needs to find the end first, and to make sure it’s all the end it “clips” the first 6 (? Maybe more maybe less, it’s been decades since I’ve studied this)

Oh, there’s your problem. A lot has changed. You refuse to see the sea change happening around you because it means you’re out of date.

Sorry for the wall of text, but there’s plenty of examples of blatantly junk DNA, and there are known methods of how it occurs. Anyone who says every codon pair has a purpose has a screw loose and is ignorant to the mechanics of evolution.

I was happy to reply to you and engage pleasantly originally but you are only engaging with people that know less about biology than you do. You are not an expert if you last studied biology decades ago and can’t remember the details. You certainly aren’t enough of an authority on the subject to question a contemporary article published in Science or the work of other researchers currently in the field.

I really, really encourage you to read these papers thoroughly. You are the target audience-- people who learned the machine model of the cell and who are gripping it so tightly that they are blind to the nuance that we’ve uncovered. I also encourage you to not write insults about people who disagree with you, especially people with more domain knowledge than you have.

This is a funny comment though, because “junk” DNA is involved with epigenetic regulation and cellular behavior.

“It’s there so it must have function”, “it’s still in the genetic code so it must have been selected for” is the least nuanced take,

“It’s there just randomly and therefore is junk”, and “evolution does not select for efficiency” is an improvement,

But “it’s there and it’s doing something despite not having a bespoke, prescribed function” and “evolution is a cascade of emergent effects and random chance, none of our genome is non-functional even though it is random” is the most up to date take

You seem like a biologist, why not go read some of these papers? Like the one I linked by Dan Nichols? Most people don’t have the background necessary to understand the language (no shade) but you seem to!

I would encourage you to read the linked Science paper and Dan Nichol’s paper, Is the Cell Really a Machine?

You feel that if a codon isn’t meant for something, if it doesn’t have a purpose– then it is junk. This is a mindset that is reflective of the machine model of the cell. We used to expect that each protein was bespoke for a function, each transcript necessary.

The whole paradigm shift at hand is this model falls flat, even for coding regions. I think you’re actually very spot in here with the prokaryotic DNA or the plant genomes (love me some violets for their weird genomes). Some parts of a genome will rapidly change and appear to serve no real purpose, but the next bite is the important one: even if it seems like there isn’t a purpose, like a top-down prescription for functionality, those regions are still doing something while they are present.

For example, some long non-coding regions affect the likelihood that a person will develop Parkinson’s disease, or in the case of plants with various polyploidies, the relative expression of their genes won’t necessarily change, but the absolute expression may.

Basically, you aren’t wrong that these regions dont have a purpose, because no genes have a purpose. The cell isn’t a machine.

No, because they are anything other than inactive

So I think I can make the claim that I am an expert in this, at least compared to 95%+ of biological researchers. My research foci include epigenetic and emergent interactions like the ones discussed in the article, and although I am not going to back this up by identifying myself, please believe me when I say I’ve written some papers on the topic.

The concept of junk DNA is perhaps the problem here. Obviously there are large swaths of our genome that do not encode anything or have instructions for proteins. However, dismissing all non-coding DNA as “junk” is a critical error.

Your telomeres are a great example. They don’t contain vital information so much as they serve a specific function-- providing a buffer region to be consumed during replication in place of DNA that does contain vital information. Your cells would work less well without telomeres, so calling them junk is inaccurate.

Other examples of important non-coding regions are enhancer and promoter regions. Papers describing the philosophical developments of stochasticity in cellular function note how enhancers are vital for increasing the likelihood of transcription by making it more likely that specific proteins floating in the cellular matrix interact with each other. Promoter regions are something most biologists understand already, so I won’t describe them here (apologies for anyone who needs to go read about them elsewhere!). Some regions also inform the 3D structure of the genome, creating topological associated domains (TADs) that bring regions of interest closer together.

Even the sequences with less obvious non-coding functions often have some emergent effect on cellular function. Transcription occurs in nonsense regions despite no mRNA being created; instead, tiny, transient non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are produced. Because RNA can have functional and catalytic properties like proteins, these small RNAs “do jobs” while they exist. The kinds of things they do before being degraded are less defined than the mechanistic models of proteins, but as we understand more stochastic models, we are beginning to understand how they work.

One last type of DNA that we used to consider junk: binding sites for transcription factors, nucleosome remodelers, and other DNA binding proteins. Proteins are getting stuck to DNA all the time, and then doing things while they’re stuck there. Sometimes even just being a place where a nucleosome with a epigenetic flag can camp out and direct other cellular processes is enough to invalidate calling that region “junk”.

Anyway I’m done giving my spiel but the take home message here is that all DNA causes stochastic effects and almost all of it (likely all and we haven’t figured it out yet) serves some function in-context. Calling all DNA that doesn’t encode for a protein “junk” is outdated-- if anything, the protein encoding regions are the boring parts.

OF content creators date non-creators all the time, just like other sex workers. There’s more to relationships than sex, and content creation isn’t the same thing as actual sexual intimacy and connection