CharonY

I think the strength of the scientific endeavor is that it is amenable to mentioned examination. That tricky bit however being that at least in more complicated areas a certain level of expertise is required for cross-examination is needed and this is where a certain level of trust is necessary.

Sorry, I think my comment might have been a bit cryptic. I just meant to say that viral evolution or the development of mobile genetic elements in general are what has been discussed under the catchy umbrella of "Selfish genes" i.e. genetic elements that propagate without conferring selective benefits to their host (or being detrimental to them). Which is a bit of a different line than thinking of virus as reduced organisms (I think that line of thought was mostly fueled by the discovery of "giant" viruses).

One line of thought assumes that they developed from mobile genetic elements (think transposons, plasmids, integrons and so on), which incidentally fits the original thread (Selfish gne) quite well.

Viruses do not have an active metabolism- they use the host to make their proteins but provide the genetic material (RNA or DNA) to do so

You mean this question? I.e. what molecules would likely be the first? As mentioned (I think) this is an open question. I mostly only remember that there is still an ongoing dispute regarding whether there really was a an RNA world predating a DNA world. There is even more uncertainty regarding molecules that may have dominated before that. As you have noted, it is unlikely that RNA itself is a prebiotic molecule. There is a good report here, but it is a oldish and I am not really up to date on the latest findings. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81263-5 I think some work have been focused on thermodynamic models for early molecules and alternative pathways for formation of early carbon bodies.

In my original reading of your it seemed to me that were arguing that the viral RNA was also a ribozyme or somehow a catalyst, but maybe I misread. I am not disputing that RNA can have catalytic functions.

That is not the common definition of a catalyst, though. The closest is a ribozyme, which are a kind of RNA that have catalytic functions. But those that "only" code for a protein for example have not catalytic functions themselves. Proteins certainly came later as there is evidence that even small peptides can have catalytic functions. But as mentioned ribozymes could also have play a role. In addition, there are some who think that we are looking at the thermodynamics wrong and that at the beginning of life certain reactions may have been energetically favourable even without more complex molecules, but I don't know how strong the evidence for that currently is.

Ah I see. Fundamentally redoxreactions are at the core of it. I could have said oxidative phosphorylation, right? And anaerobic fermentation is basically just a means to recycle reducing equivalents. However, they do not need to go through membranes as such. That being said, it is assumed that fermentation might have created excess of acids (as the and proton pumps may have been an early development to deal with it. These are then potentially the precursor of electron transport chains. However, this is based on student-level reading, I don't know how much these assumptions have changed in the last two or so decades. Ancestral metabolism is not my specialty.

As with other forms of categorization it is obviously a bit arbitrary and at least theoretically based on genetic distance and/or fossil similarity. But obviously that is not trivial and fossils do not show linear progression. This article has a nice discussion https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0237.

IIRC they didn't puzzle over it for long. Rather they were worried that found their could interfere with Curiosity's sampling and analyses.

Photosynthesis proteins as well as ATP-synthases arose a fair bit later. A common assumption is that substrate level phosphorylation was at the beginning. There are other hypotheses around which are based on how other reactions were potentially thermodynamic favourable, but i haven't looked at those for a while.

I think you are just fine. Binary symbols often have these ambiguity and often these things are not universal. Sometimes they have an indicator for the active state, so if pressing a button results in these icon being highlighted or appear it can provide more clarity. I think the the answer is yes. Ultimately many of these decisions are made to make things less cluttered and slick. At the same time it means that it conveys less information. The basic idea is probably that after trying it out once you get the idea. There are whole discussions about resolving ambiguity in UIs. Often the answer seems to be setting design standards, but if folks cannot agree on them, it will remain ambiguous. I also think that smartphones are designed to make us less smart, but I guess that is another discussion :).

I think exactly that make is difficult, though. If we try to quantify, we would start with e.g. creating categories. But what an experimenter create might be based on their own experiences. So let's say you have language that has, say 5 categories for drinking vessels, but only 1 for eating bowls and conversely one that has only 1 for drinking, but 5 for eating, and then you have one that has one or two for each. if you used drinking vessels to build your model the first and last would group together and if you used the eating vessels it would be the latter. If you used both they might separate differently, but adding yet another concept would change the model entirely again. Then some cultures or languages might have sophisticated categorization in areas that do not even exist in others and so on. I.e. whatever you select to look at will influence what your outcome will be. Finding a truly neutral ground where comparisons of divergent languages can be done with this is approach is seems incredibly difficult to me. That being said, I suspect the matter is sufficiently complex that I would require some serious reading (such as the Kemmerer, which I am not familiar with) to contribute anything meaningfully.

I suspect it is quite complicated. There attempts to map rough distance between language using a wide range of metrics and at least from what I understand there really is no good agreement on any overall methodology. In the above example I suspect that depending on what aspect is shown the differences are likely to be all over the place. Language is often context-driven and so are categories created in a given language. Even within speakers of a language there is inherent vagueness. While this paper from Hancock and Volante focusses on linguistic uncertainties, I think categorizations are not as static and/or discrete as they might appear. In the example in OP, depending on what item groupings you provide, they might invoke different contexts for the viewer which may be more cultural than linguistic. Also I am not sure whether the proposed measure handles certain ambiguities well. For example in the above example I am not sure why Germans would use fewer words than the Dutch, considering that equivalent words exist in both languages, though there are many local variations (e.g. Pott) or variations using contractions (Kaffee- or Teetasse/ becher) or more formal usages that are less common (Trinkgefaess). I.e. the measures would vary potentially wildly even within a language region.

Lorenz and Immelmann (Einfuehrung in die Verhaltensforschung) were folks who originally made me want to study ethology. Unfortunately the funding situation turned me off from it (I did learn how to catch finches with bare hands without injuring them so there is at least that). Sometimes I wished I had stuck with the original plan (greener grass and all that).

No worries, it wasn't meant as criticism (and I assumed that is what you meant), but just trying to adjust language a bit as I learned that in public discussions folks get hung up on such concepts and that it can lead to severe misunderstanding of health messaging. But I also found that explaining these things does seem to help to mitigate spread of false or misleading information to some degree. In the spirit of OP one could probably add that with Omicron the even vague hope of herd immunity is even more shattered (if that was even possible). While some folks start claims regarding endemicity, it is important to point out that we are not even there yet. We are still very much in the outbreak phase and it is rather unclear when transmissions will drop to a level where we actually enter the endemic phase. Moreover, given the reservoir of infected people, the risk of new variants remain extremely high and given the spread (Omicron arrived almost everywhere in less than a month) creating an even more uncertain timeline. This is a serious issue for health messaging, as folks demand some level of certainty about how things are going forward, but the current lack of clear answers drives folks to the crazy parts of the internet.

The relationship is a bit complicated, depending on the type of virus. IIRC some older studies on viruses similar to the coronavirus (mouse hepatitis virus is a common surrogate, for example) found that at either very low or high humidity some viruses exhibited better survival at various air temperatures than at moderate humidity. I remember one particular graph from a paper showing a non-monotonic relationship and I believe it it was published around 2010, but I cannot recall the author right now. But specifically for SARS-CoV-2 there was a review suggesting that warm and wet areas might actually reduce spread but the effects were not very strong: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238339

! Moderator Note That is on my, apologies, I thought I had posted a mod-note, but apparently did not. The reason why it is moved to speculations is because it appears that in OP some original assumptions were made that do not seem to relate to existing literature (or if so, no references were given). As such it seems to be original speculation, which can be further developed in the speculations thread as outlined in the guidelines. Speculations do not need to contradict established mainstream, but (as the name implies) allows for speculations in areas where the science is not established. However, if the hypothesis is grounded in mainstream science, it would be great if either references can be given or at least the context is outlined with respect to mainstream science. Some questions could be related to whether how categorization in the brain works and whether it is uniquely related to language? How does it relate to category learning in animals, for example?

You seem to interpret rather than read and forget what actually has been said. You said EHEC required a single cell, I said lit says 10-100. No one was talking about children at this point. I said the real value is likely higher as plate counting often underestimates cell counts (which applies mostly to dried or processed food). Then you came with an unreferenced wiki (which actually states to having quality issues) indicating id1 of around 8 for children. This introduced children for the first time. While it is unclear how they calculated this, as for EHEC you cannot make actually dose response curves and especially not in children, it does not provide evidence of single cell infection beside your gut feeling. I think I should stop taking it off-topic further, especially in the face of strong resilience to information. For those interested, one of my references above actually estimated the minimal infective dose in children as low as 2. But I also mentioned why the methodology (self-reporting) is problematic.

You mean the unreferenced wikipedia link vs the references I have given above? I mean, you do you, but it is funny that the link you provided actually does not support your claim (and it is actually in the range of the references given so no big discrepancy there, really). I will concede that the comment regarding underestimation based on CFUs is a bit technical and is more of an ongoing discussion in the community whereas safety regulations still rely on this method (the alternative techniques we have been using is based on flow cytometry, which is becoming more prevalent in food and water testing). So the estimate of 10-100 cells given above (but not 1) is a fair estimate, if you choose to ignore the above caveat regarding the limits of plate counting. And I do apologize to OP for taking it so far off-topic.

In the graph there were actually three periods when taxes went down. The clearly did not refer to the amount of reduction, but the fact that reductions happened. There are also economic reasons why taxes go up in certain countries in certain periods which is not caused by governmental desires to increase taxes: I am not sure what the graph you posted means. It appears that income is rising faster than taxes since the 2000s whereas taxes where much higher and rose more sharply with income until the 70s/80s? (by eyeballing it)? Also, it looks like the values are not inflation-adjusted, so basically any non-normalized monetary plot would go up over the years.

Could you clarify that? To me a claim of "always increases" would indicate that values only go up. If there are periods where it decreases it would invalidate that claim.

One can only hope. This pandemic has been a bit disillusioning. I suspect I should focus on the positive parts, but it is hard to see things opportunities to do something to slip through one's fingers over and over and seeing no willingness to change the approach.

I mean there were arguments that seatbelts were unsafe and similar things in the past: https://www.businessinsider.com/when-americans-went-to-war-against-seat-belts-2020-5 At this point I am almost convinced that in human history there are no original discussions left anymore. We just keep rehashing old things and convince ourselves that somehow we are making progress.

To me that sounds a lot like ideological waffling. If the issue is laid out as a health order and non-compliance is fined I do not see how blameworthiness is a principle. One could argue whether one should have health orders or regulations at all, as one would put blame on those who violate those orders. But that would seem a bit silly. I also do not see how fines for lack of vaccination lead to denial of health care. Folks have been fined for breaking various rules and I do not see vaccination as something fundamentally different from that perspective. Another example would be drug abuse. It is a behaviour that is under penalty, yet in Canadian law there are provisions that ensure that folks requiring medical treatment because of drug abuse are actually treated like everyone else. So while clearly drug abusers are blamed for their behaviour (and criminally persecuted, no less), the health care system survived it. As such it does look like another case of slippery slope fallacy. It is not to say that penalties for vaccinations may be a great solution and there might be better ways. I just find these specific arguments not very convincing.