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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think the current very rough estimate is around ¼ of the universe being observable.

    Fun fact: smaller and smaller part of the universe is observable. As the space is expanding, it drives the furtest reaches of observable universe away faster than the light can fly. So the area, from which the light could reach us if it flew for the time since the big bang, is smaller today than it was yesterday. It really drove home for me just how big universe is.





  • Yes. But if you have many complaints from MANY MANY users, it may not mean anything serious, it could still mean a very small fraction have problems. Absolute number means very little without context. That’s the purpose of the previous comment. Please note how it doesn’t say anything about qualities of Windows.


  • I’m afraid that you don’t quite see all the complexity involved. I’m not saying I see all of it, but I can see there is more to it than you think.

    What about bacteria? Not only don’t they don’t often use sexual reproduction, so they don’t need a pair of parents to produce offsprings, but they exchange plasmids and therefore DNA with little regard for species.

    Plants are a complete mess of genome duplication, aneuploidy and whatnot. In these aspects, they are sort of scary to me.

    Also, what about formation of a new species? Do you think there is a clean-cut time when they stop producing offspring? Also, what exactly do you mean by fertile? Where do you get a partner to test if the offspring is fertile?

    These are just a few problems that came to my mind right away. I’m sure there’s loads more. I’m afraid that the notion of well organised, easy to categorise world just doesn’t match the real world. Species are more or less a continuum. Incidentally, so is life. We have no good definition fornlife either. Just use whatever definition is useful at the moment and don’t forget to specify it when necessary.


  • Hasn’t Beal’s list been taken down quite a while ago? I remember making a copy of it before they removed it. It was a great source, but sometimes it needed some context. I think all of Frontiers in ended up on the list for reasons, but their review process was mostly alright, for example. It was this kind of lack of clearly definedrules and explanations that let them to taking the list down. Is it back up?








  • I see. You can open just about anything, something like 18 formats, it’s on their website. I prefer epub, but it can open Kindle’s mobi etc. That’s why I bought it, I got a large library of pdbs.

    I have Touch HD 3, I had some Touch Lux before. I had it for a while, don’t know their newest models. But yes, not only would I buy it again, I already did, just bought a newer version. Unless I was looking for something for hand note taking, I wouldn’t change. What I dislike is that when you break the screen, it’s expensive to replace, so I just bought a new one instead. Nothing you wouldn’t be used to from phones. And I’d very much like to have an option to disable the touch layer of the screen by long press of one of the physical buttons, but it’s a minor issue. What I like is the tunable intensity and colour temperature of the light and I’m quite happy with everything else. You can upload books by sending them as an attachment to a special email. If you don’t like the interface for reading the books, you can even quite easily replace it with Cool reader. I tried it before, but I didn’t do it in the newest one. You can use dictionaries, some are preinstalled, or use notes and highlights, but I don’t have experience with that.


  • I agree with the other reply that pdfs are terrible for e-readers. That being said, Pocketbooks can open them (which is not that common) and it is possible to read them, although it isn’t so comfortable, especially for A4 pdfs. It can also open wide range of other formats and I’m quite happy with it in general. You can connect it to a computer and simply copy your books there, among other means of getting books there. But I have to say I have no first hand experience with competition.




  • You don’t need profit in the sense of making lots of extra money compared to how much money you actually put in. I would be very interested in how much net profit is compared to gross in relative numbers. It’s a lot in absolute numbers, but I suspect not so much in relative. The problem why drug development is so very expensive is that you don’t just pay large sums for the drugs that are developed, but also for all those that are not, because they prove not useful during the testing. And there is way, way more than the successful ones, perhaps 100 to 1? I don’t have numers at hand. So in the end, you have to charge a lot of extra money above the production cost if you want to have enough money to develop any drugs at all.

    Of course, that isn’t true for old drugs. Which is a reason why generics are so much cheaper. And also why patents need to exist.

    I’m sure pharma companies abuse the system as much as they can, but not as much as it might appear at a first glance.