Seconded, I use a Define 7 and it’s fantastic. Best big black box I’ve ever owned.

So Google Search, even back in 2000, was an AI?

And they’re all out of ideas!

This you?

Insert Tubgirl.flv

If you don’t know, I don’t know if I’d suggest looking it up.

I grew up believing the same until somewhere in high school, when I started taking science seriously.

… a jumble of local maximums and chance.

I really like how you phrased this. I’m totally stealing it.

Oh no, rate of mutation is definitely a thing and is controlled by several factors. A big one is generation time, which is what it sounds like, the time between each generation. The copying of DNA is a source of mutations. This is why many controlled experiments on evolution are done with bacteria, who have super low generation times. For example, depending on temperature, the generation of many salmonella species is around 20-30 minutes. That lets you crank out massive numbers of potential mutations, then introduce a selective pressure, like an antibiotic the species normally isn’t resistant to or an energy source it normally can’t utilize, and see what happens.

To answer your question, yes, a higher mutation rate would confer an advantage. To a point. Most mutations are deleterious and usually lead to death, a few are benign and do nothing (at that point), and a very rare few are immediately advantageous. As long as the rate of mutation isn’t so high that the deleterious mutations combined with whatever other pressures are wiping out the population, more mutation means more chances to have the right trait to deal with a novel pressure or, very rarely, do something better.

To preface, I’m a microbiologist, so I have skin in the science game. I hate how these articles often have science illiterate authors or authors who are imprecise with their wording. They repeat misinformation on basic topics that science educators have been striving to correct for decades, perpetuating the cycle.

…the study shows once again how evolution throws up multiple solutions to basic problems…

In this case, it’s the “mysterious force of evolution that whips up solutions to problems”. Evolution doesn’t create solutions. There is no guiding force behind evolution.

Evolution through natural selection selects for existing solutions that were generated randomly through mutation, increasing the frequency of that trait because those without either die or are outcompeted. What happens if a trait is required for survival but no organisms have it? They all die. That’s why over 99% of all multicellular species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. If you include microbes, make that 99.99999%.

Right now, many are! Fight back and retake our rightful place as people with rights above those of corporations.

It’s like having a super power. I remember being stuck in the Santa Fe airport in the late afternoon waiting for my massively delayed flight to arrive. After three hours or so, it’s past dinner time and people start becoming unglued. One family even has pizza delivered and manages to convince airport security to run it through the security gauntlet for them. I had been fasting for awhile so I was fine, where a year prior I would have been scrambling for food with the rest of them.

It’ll be like the flat earthers who used a $20k laser gyroscope to prove the earth is flat, but instead proved the earth is round. Of course, being consummate morons, they then just ignored it.

Removed by mod

It was never true and both were originally said by Michael Pollan, an incredibly privileged white man.

For the record, my maternal grandmother heavily utilized canned and processed foods in her cooking. Her mother did the same and all six of her sons died from heart disease in their forties, fifties, and sixties.

My paternal grandmother was similar to my maternal grandmother. Her mother was incredibly poor, so she relied heavily on processed meats and wheat products. All seventeen of her children developed type 2 diabetes, yes ALL of them, the complications of which killed my grandmother and at least three of her siblings. Remember that it was commonly taught that sugar gave you energy and was healthy for you! My nonna and bisnonna loved white bread and sugar in their sauce and it killed them.

It only rings true if you never question its wisdom.

Same here. We have about 10 pounds of chocolate in a storage bin that’s slowly growing stale.

That’s how my milk used to come when I was a little kid.

OP is Italian. The u in the Italian word for university, universitá, is said with a vowel ‘ooh’ sound instead of a consonant ‘you’ sound. I’d wager they remember their English ‘a vs an’ rule phonetically and, with the words being so similar between languages, mixed the pronunciation up. I’m a native English speaker and that’s 100% how I fuck up my Italian.

Agreed. I’ll never understand why people who don’t actually want children have children.

Testicular torsion. As a teenager, I woke up early in the morning with the worst back and stomach pain I had ever felt in my life. I remember thinking I might be sick, vomiting, then passing out from the pain. My parents found me later that morning because I was delirious and moaning. They took me to the hospital and it was fixed.

Just kidding! My parents are shit bags so they told me I just had the flu and I was being dramatic. After my testicle swelled up to over double the size later that day, they called our family doctor who said I probably had a hydrocele and he’d look at it when he got back from vacation. For the record, mine was textbook testicular torsion, my doctor was as idiotically negligent as my parents.

The pain again became excruciating that evening and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, so I started yelling and demanding my parents take me to the hospital, which they did the next morning. There was TV to be watched, they couldn’t bother with taking care of their children. The ER determined my testicle was quite dead. Surgery was scheduled for that evening and I’ve had one testicle since. Get fucked, mom and dad.

Meta: the post itself is mildly infuriating.

It’s like overzeetop said, it’s a ring with a split on one end and a springed handle on the other. It slides into grooves on the top and bottom sides of the griddle.

When the waffle is done, you gently squeeze it to get it out of the groove, in the progress gripping onto the waffle, then the ring portion will separate slightly when you let go. It’s non-stick so the waffle typically just falls out.

I took a picture of mine. Don’t judge, we haven’t run the dishwasher yet.