I feel inappropriate near all the very universal questions here, but as a paleontologist specialised in some reptilian groups, the question would probably be “where the fuck do turtles come from?!” The thing is that fossil evidence points to different answers when compared to genetic evidence, and thez separated long enough from other extant groups that we keep on having new “definitive” answers every year
Genomics makes this answerable though? It’s just a matter of whether DNA is preserved or not in fossils. Genomics is more reliable than comparive anatomy. Comparative genomics can accurately place turtles in animal phylogeny. Sorry if I misunderstood your post. Or am I wrong here?
In phylogeny, genomic is just another tool. The point is that turtles are os course animals, but they do branch off of different reptile groups if you look at morphological evidence (which includes fossil data) or at molecular (genetic) evidence (which only includes extant species). This is not something frequent, as usually molecular evidence tends to strengthen previous morphologically established evolutionary relationships. And even though molecularists are more numerous today, their methods are neither better or worse than anatomy.
Phylogeny is not as straightforward as some people make it seem, and especially molecular phylogeny tends to rely on abstract concepts that can’t always be backed up by biological evidence (I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s very often very good, juste that a lot of people doing it do not understand the way it works, and thus can’t examine the process critically).
And so turtles’ origin are still very much an active debate!
Maybe we’re not talking about the same thing? I was thinking about the diapsid debate, where genetic evidence is overwhelmingly strong in favour for diapsid evolution Mitochondrial DNA evidence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC24355/ Micro RNA evidence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21775315/
Tbh a core multi gene ML tree to all other reptiles would prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, maybe someone’s done that already but I haven’t been able to find it.
The diapsid part is very likely indeed, as fossil skulls of early stem turtles do show some temporal openings ( https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110218-024746 ) The point is more where do they nest within Diapsida, more closely to the Lepidosauromorpha, or to the Archosauromorpha, and where precisely if within one of those clades. The point is that can’t quite be proven using only extant species, whether by DNA or morphological evidence. And concerning ML, the methodology is often criticised, not because it’s bad, but because it’s opaque and thus it is difficult to justify and understand as a process
Probably not the most complex, but in programming, the salesman problem: intuitive for humans, really tough for programming. It highlights how sophisticated our brains are with certain tasks, and what we take for granted.
Also, related xkcd.
I once accidentally worked myself into trying to solve the traveling salesman problem. I was doing some work on a very specific problem, and I got to a point where I couldn’t figure out a way to efficiently link up a bunch of points. The funny thing is that I knew about the TSP, but I just didn’t realize that the problem I was trying to solve was a case of the TSP. After a couple of days trying to figure it out, I realized what it was, and that it was futile.
It was a good lesson to always try to find the most abstracted version of the problem you are trying to solve cause someone smarter has either tried and failed or tried and succeeded.
When I was a graduate student, I studied magnetism in massive stars. Lower mass stars (like our sun) demonstrate convection in their outermost layers, which creates turbulent magnetic fields. About 1 in 10 higher mass stars (more than ~8x the mass of the sun) host magnetic fields that are strong and very stable. These stars do not have convection in their outer layers (and thus can’t generate magnetic fields in the same fashion as the sun), and it is thought that these fields are formed very early in the star’s life. Despite much effort, we haven’t really figured out how that happens.
I love how you stopped to explain stuff like what a big star is, but not the funny magnetism itself
deleted by creator
I solved this in undergrad.
P = NP when N=1. I don’t understand what the big deal is.
Also P is 0 when N is 0
deleted by creator
I’m an IT auditor. “What the fuck?” is the main question, we ask it daily
It’d be interesting to see that answered scientifically.
I do other audits, mostly safety and environmental, and my big question is usually “nobody made you write this, why would you write this down if you don’t want to do it?”
Oh so so much of "dude you mande this rule up, you reviewd this document, why is this process nothing like this?!
Can you explain? Are you referring to catching people doing stuff they shouldn’t have been doing?
For most regulations, the laws and rules say something like “companies must ensure X doesn’t happen”, and the companies themselves have to come up with a way to do that.
Let’s say the law says “companies that transport apples must be able to show which batch went where”.
Company A says “to comply with the law, whenever we move a shipment, we store the shipping order on our computers”
Company B says “to comply with the law, the truckdriver will film the place they left, count the apples when leaving, then email the entire dashcam trip, and count the apples on arrival”.
Neither process is wrong, they both follow the law. But when I go to Company B, I promise you they’re going to fail the audit. They’re (probably) not doing anything illegal, but they’re going to fail their audit because no truckdriver is going to count a truck full of apples.
They made that rule, and they really didn’t have to.
there are 2 types of rules, or controls as we call it: Legal requirements and internal policies. The first one is clear there are legal requirements in place and you have to be in compliance with. The second one is where I get the most wtfs. Internal policies are rules the company itself crated and said had to be followed. For example let’s say you are the IT manager of your company and you discover that everyones password to you system is 1234. You go out and look for market best practices and create a policy saying “All passwords must contain 6 numbers and 2 letters”. For this to be official you write it down and “publish” it internally.
Now, me as an auditor go there, look at the rule you created and check if it’s really in place or if you just wrote because. A lot of times it’s not. The company creates the rule but forgets or just postpone implementing it
I work in IT and haven’t had to go through an audit yet knocks wood
Any war stories you can share?
Mostly cybersecurity strugles. If you invest millons in a castle with a gigantic lock and a pit full of piranas, would you leave the service entrance open and give everyone in town the key? Yeah, more commom than not.
But an IT audit is only necessary if your company goes public or is the owner wants it, maybe if you are a tech company.
I’m only a professional scientist in the loosest sense of the term but for years we’ve tried to figure out why Joe can’t leave the break room to fart and who the fuck does he think he is?
He’s the president!
We still don’t understand quite how the brain works or how consciousness comes from neurons.
Super interesting! I watched an explainer last night about a theory that consciousness arises from space-time collapse quantum wave functions in microtubules.
The vast majority went straight over my head but the host stated that the theory was seen as completely insane by their peers and just recently it’s gaining credibility because of some new research in the past few weeks.
Any thoughts on this?
Sounds like they really don’t want their lives to be deterministic. I’m skeptical of anyone who jumps to quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. Would love to know what research you are referencing.
Thanks! Very interesting. Looks like we have some quantum activity going on after all. Though, there is a large chasm between observing activity and proving its necessity for our consciousness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
Is this theory what you’re referring to? Just curious because it always seemed interesting to me but I’m not educated enough to even know how to approach the subject beyond going, “huh neat.”
Ahh jeez the Penrose theory. This theory gets less neat the more you learn about it.
I’m in the building sciences. The biggest unanswered quimestion we come up against al ost daily is “what the fuck was the last guy thunking?”. And we avoid, daily, admitting we were the last guy somewhere else.
Former intoxicology tech, was both guys daily lol.
How many sciences have you built?
This sounds like software engineering in a nutshell.
Software engineering is the study of constantly calling your predecessor an idiot.
Especially when you are that predecessor
Rules of Tech Support:
Rule T18 - You are incompetent. You just don’t know it. At least, that’s what your replacement will think.
Rule T18A - You will have to deal with techs who are incompetent.
Rule T18B - Sometimes, you really are incompetent.
Origin of life matters to a lot of people I think. RNA vs other self-replicating molecules? Moon-based tidal PCR? Cell formation etc.
If the solution to a problem is easy to check for correctness, must the problem be easy to solve?
For instance, it is easy to check if a filled sudoku grid is a valid solution. Must it therefore be easy to solve sudokus?
Most people would probably intuitively answer “no”, and most computer scientists agree, but this has still not been proven, so we actually don’t know.
I think my favorite troll statement to a mathematician/comp scientist is:
“Actually, P > NP - there exist problems where it’s harder to verify a solution than to arrive at one”
That’s actually the simplest and clearest description of the P/NP problem I’ve ever read.
Well, there’s counterfactual examples of this, so it must not be true.
In pretty much every single relationship worldwide, one person can very easily determine if the recommendation from the other for where to eat or what to watch is correct or not.
And yet successfully figuring out where to eat or what to watch is nigh impossible.
I think there’s a
fighterfurther* problem, it may be true and we just don’t know the easy way to do it.
Isn’t it proof enough? Using the Sudoku example: there are certainly different levels of difficulties, depending on how many numbers are set in the beginning and other parameters. Checking if the solved answer is correct, is always the same “difficulty” - thus there is no correlation between the difficulty of the puzzle at the beginning and checking the Correctness. Some people might not be able to solve it, but they certainly can check if the solution is right
For the purposes of OPs problem (P v NP), it considers not particular solutions, but general algorithmic approaches. Thus, we consider things as either Hard (exponential time, by size of input), or Easy (only polynomial time, by size of input).
A number of important problems fall into this general class of Hard problems: Sudoku, Traveling Salesman, Bin Packing, etc. These all have initial setups where solving them takes exponential time.
On the other hand, as an example of an easy problem, consider sorting a list of numbers. It’s really easy to determine if a lost is sorted, and it’s always relatively fast/easy to sort the list, no matter what setup it had initially.
Isn’t it proof enough?
Unfortunately no. The question is a simplification of the P versus NP problem.
The problem lies in having to prove that no method exists that is easy. How do you prove that no matter what method you use to solve the sudoku, it can never be done easily? You’ll need to somehow prove that no such method exists, but that is rather hard. In principle, it could be that there is some undiscovered easy way to solve sudokus that we don’t know about yet.
I’m using sudokus as an example here, but it could be a generic problem. There’s also a certain formalism about what “easy” means but I won’t get into it further, it is a rather complicated area.
Interestingly, it involves formal languages a lot, which is funny as you wouldn’t think computer science and linguistics have a lot in common, but they do in a lot of ways actually.
You can solve any sudoku easily by trying every possible combination and seeing if they are correct. It’ll take a long time, but it’s fairly easy.
What if the sudoku is 1 milllion lines by 1 million lines? How about a trillion by a trillion? The answer is still easy to check, but it takes exponentially larger to solve the board as the board gets larger. That’s the jist of the problem: Is there a universal solution to a problem like this that can solve any size sudoku before the heat death of the universe?
Well it just so happens that the definition of “easy” in the actual problem is essentially “fast”. So under that definition, checking every single possible solution is not an “easy” method.
Most people would probably intuitively answer “no”, and most computer scientists agree, but this has still not been proven, so we actually don’t know.
I disagree, I think most computer scientists believe that P != NP, at least when it comes to classical computers. If we believed that P = NP, then why would we bother with encryption?
I think you’ve misunderstood 😅. Answering “no” to that question corresponds to P != NP (there are problems that are easy to verify but not easy to solve), while “yes” means P = NP (if a solution is easy to check, the problem must be easy to solve). So I am saying most people and most scientists believe P != NP exactly as you say.
Reading comprehension is hard my bad.
Edit: wait no, it’s “easy” I’m just dumb.
Predictability in a chaotic system across various scales of time and space.
How to accurately estimate signal crosstalk and power delivery performance without FEM/MoM simulators.
For people and companies that can’t afford 25k-300k per year in licence and compute costs, there is yet to be a good standard way to estimate EM performance. Not to mention dedicated simulation machines needed.
That’s why these companies can charge so damn much. The systems are so complex that making a ton of assumptions to pump out some things by hand or with bulk circuit simulators often doesn’t even get close to real world performance.
If someone figured out an accurate method without those simulations, the industry could also save a shit ton of compute power and time.
No one really knows how osmosis works.
I had to derive osmotic pressure for my statistical mechanics exam in my bachelor’s. So in what sense don’t we know?
We don’t know what molecular mechanism creates the pressure.
Isn’t it just water carrying stuff across a concentration gradient?
No? Water can’t carry anything across the membrane.
Oh. Then how does the stuff get across the membrane? Does the membrane allow stuff to move over a concentration gradient without the water?
Gravity is just stuff falling, but there’s complexity there, as well.
As someone on the outskirts of Data Science, probably something along the lines of “Just what the fuck does my customer actually need?”
You can’t throw buzzwords and a poorly labeled spreadsheet at me and expect me to go deep diving into a trashheap of data to magically pull a reasonable answer. “Average” has no meaning if you don’t give me anything to average over. I can’t tell you what nobody has ever recorded anywhere, because we don’t have any telepathic interfaces (and probably would get in trouble with the worker’s council if we tried to get one).
I’m sure there are many interesting questions to be debated in this field, but on the practical side, humans remain the greatest mystery.
