Using Jesus as a reference is unfortunate, yeah, but any other world calendars have to pick a nearly equally arbitrary way to contextualize the start and end year.

Take your pick: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Year_in_various_calendars

I personally use “2024 CE” for “common era”, with BCE referring to “before common era”. This allows us to communicate relatively clearly with other people who use the Gregorian calendar without explicitly endorsing the birth of Jesus as the important event defining the switch-over between CE and BCE… A bit of a cop out, but

Anyway have fun, there are lots of options

Edit: also the one you’re referring to in your post is the Holocene Calendar

Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I think this (and the van gogh incident) is a great and appropriate protest.

It causes a knee-jerk reaction to be mad that they are harming a precious piece of history and culture, which is a perfect juxtaposition to how the climate change harms our precious natural resources and will harm ourselves, and

It achieves this without actually causing permanent damage to the subject artifact, and

It is incendiary enough to remain in our public consciousness long enough for it to affect the discourse.

I only wish there was a more direct way to protest the people most responsible for the worst effects (oil executives, politicians, etc.), but the truth is that the “average middle-class Westerner” (most of the people who have access to enjoy these particular cultural relics) is globally “one of the worst offenders”. While I firmly believe that individuals have less power to enact change than corporations and policymakers, this protest does achieve the goal of causing reflection within people who have the power to make changes.

shoulda said “yarrr, ye dumb bastard!”

Oooh it’s even cooler than that!! You’re spot on, acid is the problem. And acid from food, candy, coffee, etc. is harmful for enamel for sure.

But sugary stuff that isn’t acidic also rots teeth. Why? Because the bacteria in your mouth do what’s called lactic acid fermentation. Basically, when they take a sugar molecule and want to make “usable” energy out of it (in the form of something called ATP, or adenosine triphosphate), they end up creating lactic acid as a byproduct. In essence, the stuff living in your mouth makes acid out of sugar.

We also need to break sugar down into ATP, but we do something called cellular respiration instead. It uses oxygen and creates CO2 as a byproduct! That’s why we need oxygen to breathe, and why we breathe out carbon dioxide. But, when you work your muscles hard (lifting weights, sprinting), you might use the ATP in your muscles faster than your body can make it with cellular respiration. In that case, your cells will also do lactic acid fermentation! That’s what we’re feeling when we “feel the burn” (well, that and micro-tears in the muscle, in some cases).

Source: I’m a biologist! And I love sharing weird facts like this! Thank you for the excuse to write this out :-)

Other commenters have good suggestions also, but one option I haven’t seen mentioned would be to buy a powdered acid and make your own dilutions

It’s easy to get citric acid in a dry form (like the crystal coating on sour candy), you can get 10 lbs (enough to make many gallons) of it for like $30-50 online. I put a small scoop in my dishwasher to keep my cups from getting foggy from our hard water, and I use it to descale our kettle and in our laundry, too.

Just be careful, acid dilutions are no joke. Whether you get the cleaning vinegar or make a citric acid solution for yourself:

• use nitrile or latex gloves when working with the acid solutions

• wear something to protect your eyes, glasses are probably good enough but goggles are better

• if you have an acid solution and want to dilute it, pour the acid into the water, not the water into the acid!!!

• flush your skin or eyes with water immediately if the acid gets on you or your clothes

These rules might seem like overkill but better safe than sorry!

Citric acid is slightly stronger than acetic acid so if I were you I’d make like a 20% solution to have a similar effect to the cleaning vinegar (so like 100 g powdered acid to 400 mL water). You might have to mix it on the stove so that the water is simmering to get the acid to dissolve.

Again, be careful! But as long as you’re smart about it, take your time, and prioritize safety, you can definitely use this for descaling and cleaning (and cooking!)

When I say “the cell isn’t a machine”, it is in specific reference to the machine model of the cell, which is a previously established conceptual framework in the field of molecular biology. If you want to understand why that model is falling out of favor today, you’re invited to read the article linked by OP and/or the articles I have linked in other comments.

The gist is that the cell is more complicated, flexible, and emergent than any machine has ever been and will be for the foreseeable future, and the idea that we can simply map the functions of each molecule in the cell to get a perfect “circuit diagram” of how everything plays together is defunct.

I don’t have time to mess with this thread any more. You can either accept what myself (an expert in this field), the author of this publication (which happens to be one of the most prestigious journals in the world), and others who do this research daily are saying about this, or you can not. Frankly, if you are an expert also, the field, the research, and the truth barely cares about our opinion-- it certainly doesn’t care about non-expert opinions on the internet.

Junk DNA is repeating codons, or codons that occur in areas that are outside of the “start/stop” codon triplicate pairs.

Those sequences do things and have effects. In fact, the coding regions are often less functional than the non-coding ones.

They aren’t there for structural reasons, all DNA is the same 4 codons linked together over and over, all the different chromosomes are different sizes.

Sometimes they ARE there for structural reasons? Read: enhancers, or CTCF binding sites? Among many other myriad examples of functional noncoding regions? Also, nucleotides =/= codons. There are 64 codons.

All of this DNA is reported when the cells divide, that’s the only time those regions between the stops and starts actually come into play. This is very easily proven, we know the structure of the reading proteins down to the molecule (indeed there are starts and stops and triplicate base pairs that design these transcribing proteins).

That’s bull. You’re out of your depth. A contemporary college molecular biology course would show your examples to the contrary.

The “important” junk DNA that has significance while not being in a “start->stop” zone are the codons that occur before the first start codon on either side of a DNA strand, when DNA is replicated the protein that starts replicating it has to start at 1 end of 1 side of the DNA in order to be able to read it

I feel like a broken record but Enhancers! lncRNAs! siRNAs! Binding sites! Other gene regulatory regions! Epigenetic nucleosome modifications! Chromatin remodeler sites!

except it needs to find the end first, and to make sure it’s all the end it “clips” the first 6 (? Maybe more maybe less, it’s been decades since I’ve studied this)

Oh, there’s your problem. A lot has changed. You refuse to see the sea change happening around you because it means you’re out of date.

Sorry for the wall of text, but there’s plenty of examples of blatantly junk DNA, and there are known methods of how it occurs. Anyone who says every codon pair has a purpose has a screw loose and is ignorant to the mechanics of evolution.

I was happy to reply to you and engage pleasantly originally but you are only engaging with people that know less about biology than you do. You are not an expert if you last studied biology decades ago and can’t remember the details. You certainly aren’t enough of an authority on the subject to question a contemporary article published in Science or the work of other researchers currently in the field.

I really, really encourage you to read these papers thoroughly. You are the target audience-- people who learned the machine model of the cell and who are gripping it so tightly that they are blind to the nuance that we’ve uncovered. I also encourage you to not write insults about people who disagree with you, especially people with more domain knowledge than you have.

This is a funny comment though, because “junk” DNA is involved with epigenetic regulation and cellular behavior.

“It’s there so it must have function”, “it’s still in the genetic code so it must have been selected for” is the least nuanced take,

“It’s there just randomly and therefore is junk”, and “evolution does not select for efficiency” is an improvement,

But “it’s there and it’s doing something despite not having a bespoke, prescribed function” and “evolution is a cascade of emergent effects and random chance, none of our genome is non-functional even though it is random” is the most up to date take

You seem like a biologist, why not go read some of these papers? Like the one I linked by Dan Nichols? Most people don’t have the background necessary to understand the language (no shade) but you seem to!

I would encourage you to read the linked Science paper and Dan Nichol’s paper, Is the Cell Really a Machine?

You feel that if a codon isn’t meant for something, if it doesn’t have a purpose– then it is junk. This is a mindset that is reflective of the machine model of the cell. We used to expect that each protein was bespoke for a function, each transcript necessary.

The whole paradigm shift at hand is this model falls flat, even for coding regions. I think you’re actually very spot in here with the prokaryotic DNA or the plant genomes (love me some violets for their weird genomes). Some parts of a genome will rapidly change and appear to serve no real purpose, but the next bite is the important one: even if it seems like there isn’t a purpose, like a top-down prescription for functionality, those regions are still doing something while they are present.

For example, some long non-coding regions affect the likelihood that a person will develop Parkinson’s disease, or in the case of plants with various polyploidies, the relative expression of their genes won’t necessarily change, but the absolute expression may.

Basically, you aren’t wrong that these regions dont have a purpose, because no genes have a purpose. The cell isn’t a machine.

No, because they are anything other than inactive

So I think I can make the claim that I am an expert in this, at least compared to 95%+ of biological researchers. My research foci include epigenetic and emergent interactions like the ones discussed in the article, and although I am not going to back this up by identifying myself, please believe me when I say I’ve written some papers on the topic.

The concept of junk DNA is perhaps the problem here. Obviously there are large swaths of our genome that do not encode anything or have instructions for proteins. However, dismissing all non-coding DNA as “junk” is a critical error.

Your telomeres are a great example. They don’t contain vital information so much as they serve a specific function-- providing a buffer region to be consumed during replication in place of DNA that does contain vital information. Your cells would work less well without telomeres, so calling them junk is inaccurate.

Other examples of important non-coding regions are enhancer and promoter regions. Papers describing the philosophical developments of stochasticity in cellular function note how enhancers are vital for increasing the likelihood of transcription by making it more likely that specific proteins floating in the cellular matrix interact with each other. Promoter regions are something most biologists understand already, so I won’t describe them here (apologies for anyone who needs to go read about them elsewhere!). Some regions also inform the 3D structure of the genome, creating topological associated domains (TADs) that bring regions of interest closer together.

Even the sequences with less obvious non-coding functions often have some emergent effect on cellular function. Transcription occurs in nonsense regions despite no mRNA being created; instead, tiny, transient non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are produced. Because RNA can have functional and catalytic properties like proteins, these small RNAs “do jobs” while they exist. The kinds of things they do before being degraded are less defined than the mechanistic models of proteins, but as we understand more stochastic models, we are beginning to understand how they work.

One last type of DNA that we used to consider junk: binding sites for transcription factors, nucleosome remodelers, and other DNA binding proteins. Proteins are getting stuck to DNA all the time, and then doing things while they’re stuck there. Sometimes even just being a place where a nucleosome with a epigenetic flag can camp out and direct other cellular processes is enough to invalidate calling that region “junk”.

Anyway I’m done giving my spiel but the take home message here is that all DNA causes stochastic effects and almost all of it (likely all and we haven’t figured it out yet) serves some function in-context. Calling all DNA that doesn’t encode for a protein “junk” is outdated-- if anything, the protein encoding regions are the boring parts.

What organization are you researching with? Why is the submission via Gmail?

How are you handling participant data (mostly email addresses, it seems)? Can participants opt out and revoke access to the data after submission?

Do you have a conflict of interest? Do you or any of your colleagues have an affiliation with Dolby or other companies involved in the research?

Did this proposal pass IRB? I’m guessing it’s exempt, so probably yes, but do you have the approval number?

What do you plan on doing with the model? Are these data for training the model or for testing it?

I know those questions sound a lil aggro, and to be clear, I don’t think there are necessarily right answers. Maybe you’re an undergraduate or hobbiest, like… I don’t think IRB is super important for a cute cat study. But I do think this kind of info should be included in recruitment calls as a standard!

Cheers, seems cute and fun

deleted by creator

Wikipedia link to radium girls

I think you got the right idea but that description is missing the big points.

They were painting watches and their employers told them to use their lips to make fine points on the brushes, meaning they ingested a ton of the paint. The employers told them it was harmless despite evidence to the contrary. They chose not to use other options because wiping the brush on their lips increased productivity and they were paid per watch.

I don’t think you meant to imply that they were doing it for trivial reasons, but I do think mentioning that they were doing it for a job and that their employers were intentionally deceiving them is important context!

OP asked what it means to not have faith in humanity, and the person who responded to your comment had a nuanced take on the answer. Is that really a tangent?

(btw your top comment is a very good answer)

Oh, good point! Yeah, in our old house (copper plumbing) plumbers usually did repairs with cpvc, not sure why.

Huge disclaimer that I’m not a plumber or even close to a plumber, but I did have a house and think about houses:

Isn’t the current “standard” plumbing PEX plumbing, which is basically just a bunch of hoses?

Like I think you’re on to something but the industry beat you to the punch 😉

You’re right and it’s still hard no matter what, but remember that most of that time you’re going to be sleeping.

If you get 8 hrs of sleep going to bed at 10pm and waking at 6 am, you could split the fast evenly in the morning and night (eat your first meal at 10 am and you’d stop eating at 6 pm) or you could stick it in the morning or evening (last meal at 2 pm, OR first meal at 2 pm) or some combo in between.

It’s even easier if you’re a lazy person like me who sleeps ~10 hrs a day!

Still, absolutely no judgment if it still sounds hard or impossible. Everyone’s eating styles are different :-)

I think there’s a lot of evidence that for most things (like “new tricks”) there isn’t any learning disadvantage for older dogs.

However, leash reactivity/aggression is not about teaching a dog a new trick (or even a new behavior) as much as it is trying to change an underlying emotional response to stimuli. I don’t know anything about your dog, and there are lots of reasons why dogs can react like that on leash (fear, intense desire to play and socialize, actual aggression), but usually if the dog is freaking out they are past the point where the “logical” part of their brain can make decisions for them.

The human analogy is that people of all ages can learn new skills, like how to cook a new recipe or build a cabinet or something. But if a person has a fear of heights, they can’t just learn the skill of not being scared of heights. That requires rewiring the base emotional response, which takes time and has a high rate of failure.

For dogs I worked with, we usually asked ourselves if we thought the dogs reactivity was lowering their quality of life. That is to say, does your dog need to be calm on leash to live a happy life? If you live in a city and she needs to navigate past dogs every time she goes to the bathroom, I’d say it’s worth trying to make that less stressful for her. If she lives in the suburbs or in a rural area, and she barely ever encounters other dogs anyway, why bother? The human analogy is: if a person works on skyscrapers for a living, they probably need to not be scared of heights, but many people are scared of heights and live totally fine and happy lives from the ground. Of course, a human can have some control over their environment and career, but dogs don’t have that luxury. We work with them where they are.

It’s also worth noting that even the best “rewiring methods” take a long time and usually only work to reduce the fear, not eliminate it. We do it because it will really improve the dog’s quality of life, not because we (selfishly) want a perfectly behaved dog to bring everywhere and do everything with.

A side note is that there are critical periods for dog socialization and development just like in humans. I haven’t looked into this in a while but me memory is that it occurs at like 8-12 weeks of age. Puppies in this period learn about how to interact and communicate with other other dogs in the same way we learn language early in life. If they aren’t socialized in this period, they usually struggle to effectively socialize for the rest of their lives. Still, this isn’t necessarily the cause of leash reactivity, so I’m just throwing it in as a side comment if you want to learn more.

AND lastly, if you do decide you need or want to work on your dog’s reactivity, I strongly recommend Grisha Stewart’s BAT 2.0. I am not affiliated with her in any way, but this is the technique recommended by reinforcement-based training organizations and has the most likelihood of reducing reactivity in my personal experience. The textbook is like literally hundreds of pages long and covers a ton of case-scenarios. It would take time to read and learn to do the protocol, and you need a BAT leash (a 15 ft leash) and lots of practice managing it, but I have seen dogs go from freaking out and screaming from seeing another dog >100 yrds away to being able to (tensely) stand to the side of a sidewalk and contain their panic as a dog passes. It won’t make a reactive dog confident and bomb proof, but it can make a huge difference when applied carefully and consistently, especially with other methods like look-at-that/counterconditioning, Karen Overall’s calmness protocol, and engage-disengage games.

I’m not sure about the time scale you’re referring to, but I have some expeirence with dog training and I’ve been interested in dog training history lately, so maybe I have insight for you. Also, I want to qualify this whole tirade by saying this is a USA-centric breakdown; other countries have different cultural histories with their dogs, and while the underlying animal behavior is the same, I can’t speak to whether dogs in other countries are “well” or “poorly” trained.

Prior to the 1900s, dogs weren’t really thought of as companion animals the way they are now. Dogs were usually from working lines-- hunting dogs, setters, pointers, terriers, ratters, herders, shepherds, guard dogs, sled dogs, etc. They were considered somewhat adjacent to livestock. In these situations, dogs were often “trained” by their breeding. You don’t have to tell a working line rat terrier to kill rats, they just do. Sheepdogs will herd children if there aren’t sheep around. Just try keeping a working line husky from pulling in a harness… you can do it, but it’s working against it’s nature. Mostly around this time, a person had multiple dogs of breeds with natural instincts to do the job they wanted them to do, and the dogs did it. The ones that did it best were bred by their owners, and the next generation was better than the last. It’s also important to note that the major written documents describing dog training at this time mostly emphasized rewarding the dogs with meat and praise when they are good, and ignoring them when they are bad.

During and around WWII, there was a new interest in training dogs for policing, warfare, and personal protection. It became more common to have one-dog-one-handler arrangements, and since most working lines of guard dogs were more “bark at intruders and bite strangers” kinds of dogs instead of “dutifully and silently stand by until ordered to kill” dogs, there was an interest in developing training methods to achieve the desired result without needing to breed new working lines.

From this desire during WWII, two schools of thought arose. One was the “traditional” method (not very traditional after all…) which arose from trainers like William Koelher. These methods emphasized discipline, “corrections”, and punishment. The other school of thought had its roots from behaviorists like Marian Breland Bailey (an advisee of BF Skinner) that illustrated the power of operant conditioning and positive reinforcement. They both started around the same time (1930s-1960s) but for one reason or another the traditional methods were more popular, and the reinforcement methods were seen as lesser “tid-bit training techniques” based in “the prattle of ‘dog psychologists’”.

It turns out they were both working with a similar framework-- dogs learn by associating an action or stimulus with a positive or negative outcome. The argument was whether positive or negative outcomes were better at inducing learning gains. At this point, mountains of research shows that positive reinforcement wins out every time, meaning that the behaviorists were more correct than the traditionalists.

Still, as I mentioned, the traditional methods were more popular for a long time. People still think they need to “be an alpha” or leader to their dogs, that they need to discipline the dog so it respects them, that punishing the dog is the way to achieve good behavior. Choke and shock collars, leash corrections, and “alpha rolls” are still common training techniques despite the evidence that they are counterproductive. Additionally, you’ll remember what I said about the behaviorist/reinforcement methods being more aligned with training techniques recorded before WWII-- when farmers were training herding dogs, they weren’t "alpha roll"ing them, they were giving them meat when they did their job and ignoring them when they didn’t.

Anyway that’s a whole fucken essay in itself, but the point I’m trying to make is this: prior to WWII, dogs were trained by being paid in daily food and by having the chance to breed. Many working dogs are still trained like this, perhaps giving you the impression that dogs “used to be trained well”. Companion dogs are a more modern development and there continues to be two schools of thought about how to train them. People who look deeply into evidence-based dog training methods train their dogs with positive reinforcement-- these dogs are usually what we consider “well trained” dogs, and overwhelmingly these dogs exist in affluent areas where dog owners have the money to pay for expensive trainers, and where they have the free time to train the dog consistently. As class disparity grows, it is becoming more common for people in poorer areas to lack access to the education about the best methods, so they tend to default to “traditional” methods that were more popular in the 20th century. These dogs are… less “well trained”. Even if someone wants to put in a lot of effort to learn how to train dogs, they might just not have access to the most up to date knowledge. Additionally, there’s evidence that dogs trained with these methods are more susceptible to a lack of generalization than reinforcement trained dogs, which is to say they might act fine in most situations, but they act worse (more fearfully, less predictably) in novel scenarios. That’s part of why you might see “well trained” dogs who suddenly and disasterously act out.

One last side note: often dogs who are reactive (the term for dogs who freak out and start screaming when they see a person or a dog or a bike, etc.) are not necessarily untrained. Reactivity is a fear response; you can imagine they might be like a normal human with a spider phobia. They might be 100% perfectly behaved in every situation… except for when a dog walks by. In this situation, the other dog is like a spider.

Traditional training might suggest that you try to order the dog to stop freaking out and punish them if they don’t stop when they see another dog, but that’s like punishing someone with a spider phobia for freaking out when they see a spider. The reinforcement methods instead try and convince the dog that other dogs (spiders) are actually harmless. This is shown to reduce reactivity much more than punishment. Still, reducing reactivity is like really really hard, just as fixing phobias in humans is. Even if someone is working very hard with training and using the best available techniques, the dog might still freak out when they see another dog (thus looking like they “aren’t trained”, according to your post).

And LAST last note, maybe the difference you’re perceiving is from covid? A lot of people got a lot of dogs but couldn’t take them out to socialize and train them due to lockdown. Additionally, during covid a lot of adoption agencies literally ran out of dogs, meaning that dogs that would usually be euthanized because of behavioral issues were instead adopted out to families. Compounded with a lack of socialization, and the fact that many people still use “traditional” training methods, maybe you’re just seeing a lot of reactive, fearful dogs? Hopefully that will improve over time!

Anyway thanks for reading my whole fucken essay, lol… I wrote this while on a plane so I guess that’s why I was bored enough to write this much. Hope you get something out of it!