Interesting Links for 12-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. The Five-Year Engineering Feat Germany Pulled Off in Months

(tags:Germany engineering gas energy Russia impressive )

2. Countries that have banned spanking have lower rates of violence amongst children

(tags:children violence spanking )

3. Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer

(tags:Cancer genes GoodNews )

4. Where Do US Teaching Skeletons Come From?

(tags:USA education bodies India )

5. Aspartame makes mice anxious. And their children. and their grandchildren

(tags:food anxiety mice psychology )

6. If you're in London you should go see The Wolves in the Walls

(tags:wolves theatre puppets video London neilgaiman )

7. On White Girls Wearing Braids as Cultural Appropriation

(tags:cultural_appropriation hair race )

8. I object to headlines about Edinburgh Zoo penguins playing adorably in the snow when the video clearly shows them just standing about acting entirely normal!

(tags:headline OhForFucksSake journalism video penguins )

9. This lizard is behaving exactly the same as our cat, Jim

(tags:animals behaviour video )

10. What happens to your smartphone when it gets stolen?

(tags:iphone crime viaPatrickHadfield )

Comments

[fub]

First time your link posts include a link to a post on Mastodon!

[andrewducker]

Good point! Almost certainly not the last!

[calimac]

3) What I was taught nearly 50 years ago is that the relationship between a given base sequence and what the gene would actually do was unknown, and it appears that's still the case. What we can do now that we couldn't then was edit the sequence to make the gene dysfunctional, and it's clever kludging that enables that to fix the problem out in the real world of the patient's body.

4) Weird. All the teaching skeletons I ever saw - I wasn't in medical school, but I did take physical anthropology - were made of plastic. This enabled them to have wires strung through them so they'd hang together. (You know Al Pacino's skeleton joke? "A skeleton goes into a bar, orders a beer - and a mop.")

7) Glad somebody feels this way. The bothersome thing for me about appropriation of my culture is getting it wrong, and members of the culture are also capable of doing that. (It's OK to change it, just as long as you don't claim you're being faithful to the original.)

10) This specifies something that used to puzzle me, which is, if you're going to send a message to your stolen smartphone to disable it, what do you send the message on? However, it doesn't specify this: if the thieves are sending phishing messages to the owner, where are they sending them to, and if the phone is disabled, how do they have its ID to know the owner and have fake ID on the messages?

[andrewducker]

7) I'm also bothered by people doing disrespectful things about something that people feel is special. Dressing up as deliberate stereotypes, or wearing clothing with specific religious/cultural significance feels different to me than "Having a hairstyle".

[calimac]

Yes, that is also true. The examples I was thinking of didn't carry that particular baggage. I suppose they could be thought of as sub-classes of the same more general principle.

[trailer_spot]

1. I'm pleased that after taking more than a decade to build a new airport in Berlin at least sometimes we're still able to finish something fast.

[andrewducker]

It looks like if you put everything else to one side, and focus on just getting the one thing done, you can make it happen really quickly - but at the expense of all of the other projects you had on the go at the same time.

Totally worth it for critical things, obviously.