brendan.furneaux

Thanks, I am now looking into this myself. In my case the most recent ancestor born in Canada was my father's father's father, born 1884. My father is still alive, so he could potentially apply for the Citizenship Certificate, and for him it would just be his grandfather. Also my great grandfather was still alive in 1947 when Canadian citizenship was first defined, which may be an important link in the chain.

However, it seems (based on AI search) that in the early 1900s when my ancestors became US citizens, dual citizenship was not allowed by either the... (read more)

I confess I live on the academic research side, not the consumer medicine side, but the obvious solution to me is "go get a long-read genome so you can phase your mutations."  Is that an option?  The relevant technology keyword is "PacBio", or given that you already have a short-read assembly, "Nanopore".

Maybe I am missing some previous rationalist discourse about the red sky saying. I remember reading it in books as a child, and do not know (except that it is listed here as a useful heuristic) whether it is actually true, or what the bundled incorrect causal story is. I have always interpreted it as "a red sunrise is correlated with a higher chance of storms at sea." That claim does not entail any particular causal mechanism, and it still seems to me that it must be either accurate and therefore useful, or inaccurate and therefore not useful, but it's hard to imagine how it could be inaccurate and useful.

I'm not sure I understand how "red sky in morning, sailors take warning" can be both inaccurate and useful. Surely a heuristic for when to prepare for bad weather is useful only insofar as it is accurate?

These are very cool results. But please, the big cat in the demo image is a leopard, not a tiger. It's clear that even the SAE feature space knows this, because the images generated are never striped (as tigers always are), and are instead either spotted (as most leopards are) or all black (which is not uncommon in leopards, Wikipedia claims 11% and I expect them to be over-represented in image databases; while even so-called "black" tigers still only have very broad, partially merged black stripes with some light color between).

Minor quibble: Hamilton the musical is based on the biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. So while Lin-Manuel Miranda did arguably know a lot about Alexander Hamilton once he had read the book, I would say that his unique contribution was not (musical theater composition) + (Alexander Hamilton facts), but specifically the idea that a biography of a historical figure most well-known for being killed in a duel with a former vice president was, in fact, material that could be adapted into a musical. (And furthermore that it should be a rap musical... (read more)

Ergot is toxic and eating contaminated bread has been a historical problem, but the results of ergot poisoning, contrary to pop science/history accounts, don't seem to be much like the results of LSD, although there is a neurological component. It is plausible that the evolutionary "purpose" of the alkaloids is to poison animals that eat it, but whether the benefit to the fungus comes from decreased predation, improved dispersal, or something else is unclear.

Certainly there exist fungi which produce psychoactive compounds in order to alter the behavior of ... (read more)

Also: Did Albert Hoffman hit the most powerful variant on the first try? No, he was systematically investigating similar compounds for pharmacological properties (not psychedelic properties, just regular drug discovery). LSD is just the one that had significant novel effects at low doses, and so it is the one which became famous.

The extreme potency of LSD is indeed a critical part of the story; synthesizing it is difficult in part because it's very hard to produce it in any large quantity without incidentally ingesting active doses through the air. According to Wikipedia, the threshold dose to feel effects is about 25µg. Not milligrams, like the active dose of most medicines, _micro_grams. I am sure chemists over the years have gotten accidental doses of 25µg of many tens of thousands of chemicals without ever noticing it. Albert Hoffman's original accidental dose was consistent... (read more)

LSD as such does not occur in nature, so it has no evolved biological role. It is a semi-synthetic chemical, meaning that it is synthesized in a lab by chemical reactions, but that the usual starting material is biological (typically ergotamine, which is, as you allude, found in ergot).

Regarding the effect of longitude, rather than fiddling with the offset, I think you want two terms, sin(lon) and cos(lon). Together they model a sinusoid with any offset.

Ok, now I understand the type of maneuver you are talking about. That definitely does make sense. I wonder if our hypothetical probe has knowledge early enough about the orbital trajectories of the stars close to the black hole, such that it can adjust its approach to pull off something like that without too much fuel cost. Of course it's a long trip and there is plenty of time to plan, but it seems that any forward-pointing telescope would tend to be at significant risk while traveling at 0.8c into a galaxy, let alone 0.99c before the primary burn. Howev... (read more)

In the typical case, there are (at least) two meaningful bodies other than the spacecraft doing the maneuver; in real-world use cases so far, typically the sun and a planet. An (unpowered) slingshot maneuver doesn't change the speed of the spacecraft from the frame of the planet, which is the object that the spacecraft approaches more closely, but it does change the speed in the center-of-mass frame, and it works by transferring orbital energy between the planet-sun system and the spacecraft. But the key is that in order to change your speed as much as p... (read more)

I suspect another issue is that it's too dangerous to fly at 0.99c as you are entering a galaxy. There's too much gas and dust.

If I understand correctly, the Penrose process as such (i.e., actually extracting energy from the black hole's rotation) only works if your exhaust is expelled fast enough, relative to you, that is is put on a negative energy orbit, which necessarily falls into the black hole. I'm not sure how you could perform a retrograde burn in which your exhaust somehow enters the black hole but you don't, since in a retrograde burn your exhaust is getting extra orbital velocity.

I am still really curious whether it helps to execute the retrograde Oberth maneuver with... (read more)

Ahh, that makes more sense.

I don't understand how a slingshot maneuver off of a central black hole would work. My understanding was that a slingshot never slows you down in the frame of the object you are slingshotting around, it only changes your direction. Since the central black hole is presumably stationary with respect to the rest of the galaxy, this wouldn't help you in slowing down. Slingshotting around an intermediate mass black hole (if such things exist) out in the galactic disc seems like it would be more useful.

Or maybe there is something about general relativity that changes things?

It seems implausible that everyone who grew up in Britain in the 1960s would have genetic variants that no one else has. Their parents and children would have grown up in different decades, whether in Britain or elsewhere, and they would also have those variants.

I hate to make a comment just to be pedantic with a definition, but it honestly confused me the first time you used the word "dichotomy" in this post to refer to a division into three, rather than two, categories, and then disturbed me every subsequent time. It's possible that this is informed by my training in biological taxonomy, where we also use the contrasting word "polytomy", meaning a division into more than two parts. In this case, you could use the less common "trichotomy", meaning division in exactly three, including the same nuance as "dichotom... (read more)

I have also found this with Bohnanza; although the rules say that the most points win, my group has always made it a faux pas to actually count points before the end of the game. Everyone plays to maximize their own score, rather than to beat the opponents, and it is definitely the case that people who accept "bad" trades tend to do better than people who walk away from the negotiating table. (At the same time, people who can instead negotiate the "bad" trade into something better do the best of all.)

I would say that Agricola (by the same author) and its ... (read more)