Oh that’s great news! We’re accelerating our development towards burn outs! Wait …

It’s a meme because it first makes you laugh, and then it makes you think.

As of April 2021, PLOS One charges a publication fee of $1,745 to publish an article.

I mean, seriously, I would like to publish to one of these, but who has the money to do that?

That’s so many ungrounded thoughts and opinions though! The topic of this comment thread has changed like 7 times, I’m just having fun at this point. =D

same for me :D

Sometimes that’s just trying to justify why fictional Earth with time machines still has dictators and not a huge past interventionist problem,

In fiction, the best way to resolve this I feel is to assume that nothing can be changed from before the first time machines were invented, because the first time machine sets something like an “anchor” that all other time machines can jump to.

I look at time in general a lot like water in a river. It flows from the river to the sea (no pun intended) only in one direction, but once it reaches the sea, it can move relatively freely in all directions. I think that time will lose its sense of unidirectionality at some point, but that’s solely my own hypothesis. I have zero evidence to back that up. It’s more or less based on the idea that time represents progress, and at some point our world will be “fully developed”, just like a child grown into an adult or an acorn grows into a tree. At that point, there is no more progress, and therefore, time kinda stops or becomes meaningless. Just that it happens at a cosmological scale, affecting all of humanity.

Well, there is people that write assembly language code directly.

Yeah, sunlight on clouded days doesn’t hurt us either.

But mirrored light does not affect vampires?

I think the advantage of thinking of DNA as some kind of program code is that we can draw inspiration about what can/can’t be done from IT. And the other way around, nature’s DNA code might give inspiration to computer language development.

DNA is a long molecule that is made of many individual smaller molecules (called nucleotids) that come in four variants (called A, T, G, C). So a DNA molecule is a sequence that can be represented as ATGCTGCCTA…

This is a sequence of characters in this representation, but it’s also a sequence of something resembling characters in reality. The cell has a component called “ribosome” that can take this sequence of characters as input and uses it kinda like a blueprint, and produces a protein (enzyme) depending on the blueprint. That enzyme can have many varying functions. So yes, this is a complex system.

The flow of information goes mostly in one direction: that is, from the cell nucleus’s DNA to mRNA (intermediary step) and then to the ribosomes, where proteins are produced. Still, many parts of this process resemble script and communication (the transport of information), which I call “language”.

Thanks for elaborating. I think you have some interesting thoughts in that.

Perhaps we’ll nail down entropy as a real property instead of just a statistical observation.

I like this one. I have been thinking about how we have introduced imaginary things like magnetic field as something real in the past, in order to find a missing link to explain interactions.

But maybe we’ll find that causality isn’t so solid, with time-like paths everywhere, and determinism only at medium scales.

Especially this one hits.

I have been thinking about these “chains of causes” for a bit now, and I’ve come to jokingly call them “threads of fate” or more provokingly “world lines”. I like the idea that much of the world is in chaos, but sometimes, strong causal links relate some parts of the past with some parts of the future, just like an invisible chain; just like a ray of sunlight through all the fog.

Yeah well I guess it depends on whether you call bytes on a computer a language.

What if those bytes represent characters that compose language that carries meaning? Because precisely that happens in DNA. An individual fraction of DNA might not carry much meaning, but in its sequence (ATGCCAT…) it encodes blueprints, and therefore meaning.

well it’s more like a script, a book or library basically. It’s not so much the transport of information, but the storage of information.

DNA is language, my dude. it’s like programming code.

In fact, not even everybody has to understand it. If I say something that I think is true, but in a language that only I can speak, then it would be okay for me to say it anyways, even if nobody understands it. That is because while it’s important to always speak the truth, it’s not always important to be understood by others.

Sorry for taking so long to write a response. I had to think a bit about this.

So, I don’t think it feels very satisfying to the average physicist to just say “well, atoms sometimes just spontaneously emit photons”. It’s a model that correlates well with our measurements, but there’s no proof that it is true.

In some sense, the purpose of science is to make sense of the world, and it surely isn’t the most satisfying thing to be left without an ulterior explanation. That is why I think it is important to repeatedly ask why, until one finds the primordial source of causality.

I guess this is somewhat historical? Norway had wandering “singers” that went around and told stories, in exchange for a meal. The stories were partially educational, partially entertainment. Basically infotainment of the time.

Edit: I think the name was “scalden” iirc.

But then, to follow up on your statement, what is the cause of all causes?

In other words, where does the chain of causes begin?

Language is […] always in flux

And, more importantly, I will use language as I please; I don’t have to justify my use of words to anyone. That is why I don’t see why people complain about using words “the wrong way”. Even if it is, I will still insist on my right to produce whatever gibberish my mouth is willing to put forward.

Edit: In other words, right to be wrong.

where people can end up saying dumb shit like “Evolution is just a theory.” I will physically fight people on that, If need be.

Then again, why bother? If people want to say dumb shit, what concern is it of yours? It’s the same when people say “the earth is flat”. It’s not, but I would never fight someone over it. That’s just not worth my time in most cases.

Yeah I like that.

I use “theory” for theoretical things, like theoretical physics and math, that can be proven (in a mathematical way).

I use the word “model” for practical things, like practical physics. Models don’t need to be proven, but their accuracy can be more or less helpful, depending on the context.