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Amazing! The 2009 Lincoln & Joyce paper you cited catalyzes one bond per hour on average. (Doubling time = 1 hour, but only one bond between oligonucleotides needed to double.)

OP's Gianni et al 2026 paper connects 45 nucleotides, taking 72 days (1700 hours) to yield 0.2%.

The latter effort is like drawing the whole owl.

That is incredible patience. Without access to the full article, I read only the abstract. I wonder if they used simulations to narrow the candidates?



I don't know if ChatGPT translated your rate for the 2026 paper right, but it says you mean:

* 99.8% of the starting molecules fail to form the desired product

* The ones that do, form 0.026 bonds per hour


Agreed!

I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.

I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.

More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.

https://paulgraham.com/power.html


> This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.

Associative array is just a fancy term for map / dictionary. C++ has always had one of those, even before TR1: std::map (which is a tree under the hood). It does have the extra requirement that your key be ordered, which isn't part of the core definition of associate array[1]. But usually it's not a problem even if you don't actually need the ordering.

As I think you're implying, TR1 / C++11 added std::unordered_map, which is a hash table and doesn't need keys to be ordered (just hashable).

[1] It isn't part of the core definition of "map" either, which despite C++'s usage just means the same thing as dictionary / associative array. A lot of those early STL containers are confusingly named: e.g., in general, "list" just means some ordered sequence of elements, so it covers static arrays, dynamic arrays, and linked lists, but C++ uses this term for linked lists, probably the least likely understood meaning. It use of the term "vector" for contiguous dynamic arrays is very odd. But I'm now way off topic...



I'm trying to reconcile your numbers with the Wikipedia "Aviation safety” article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.

Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?


My numbers come from conversations I recall with René Amalberti, a notable specialist in the area, having advised, among others, Airbus. The conversations were around 1993-96, when I was doing my PhD, and thus may be a bit blurry by now. Also, it is perfectly possible the reference values and measurement units have evolved since then.

Still your projection shows that both reference indicators and actual values are in the ballpark of the estimates I cited.

My (and Amalberti's) main point is that safety assessment is not just about minimizing the raw number of accidents, but involves tradeoffs between various concerns, including psychological perception and revenue. Otherwise, the safest airline would be the one that does not fly anyone.


Since slugs are cold-blooded, I wonder if it was captured by the (presumably backlit) doorbell touch panel because of the panel's warmth.


Not a lawyer, but liability waivers may not apply if there is determined to be gross negligence or recklessness.

Making a reasonably-designed API available, only if connected to an inaccessible network, doesn't sound dangerous, but the goodwill gained might be hard to weigh against a miniscule chance of malware, which would revise everyone's opinion of the degree of negligence or recklessness.


Can confirm. US passport photos want a neutral expression and explicitly say (not in the below page, but elsewhere during the renewal process) not to smile.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app...


Strange, one of the example photos has a person smiling. I’ve seen several US passports recently with the person smiling. It must not be an important rule if it’s not clearly communicated or enforced. Especially since some (all?) US states allow smiling in ID photos I would think they would be more explicit about not smiling in passport photos.


Yes! Automobile fuel efficiency is now probably the classical example of Jevon's paradox: some cars are more fuel-efficient; and (therefore?) we in the United States are driving 35% more miles each year in 2024 (3.3e12) than in 1994 (2.4e12).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA

Which makes our total gasoline consumption about the same as or higher than the 1990s, within 10% or so:

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=C...


Nice! One nit: if playing an archive game (from a previous date), when opening the calendar, would you show not the current month, but the month of the game? This would make it easier to go back to other dates.


When I subscribed to Kagi, my block/lower/raise/pin lists were very highly correlated with these aggregate ones.

It makes me think that for Kagi customers, search engine rankings optimize for something other than useful sites such as docs.python.org and cppreference.com


Google Ad team can dictate to the Search team. We have the leaks. Google has sold out.


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