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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Is it wrong to enjoy art made by bad people? I think it’s a very complicated question and the answers will definitely have a lot of variation between people. What if it really is a good art? Or just enjoyable? Should everyone avoid it? People still listen music by Michael Jackson, for example, are they bad because of it?

    My own approach is that qualities of what someone creates don’t need to be inseparably tied to the personality or views of the author. Everyone can enjoy what they like without the obligation to find out details of the author and adjust their preference based on that. It’s fine to make them aware of the problems, it’s not fine to make them feel bad because they like something that is not wrong on its own. If you dislike the author enough for it to spoil their works for you, good for you. I also feel this way about some authors. But don’t require it from other people.

    That’s my take. I’m curious, what’s yours?



  • I’m afraid that you don’t quite see all the complexity involved. I’m not saying I see all of it, but I can see there is more to it than you think.

    What about bacteria? Not only don’t they don’t often use sexual reproduction, so they don’t need a pair of parents to produce offsprings, but they exchange plasmids and therefore DNA with little regard for species.

    Plants are a complete mess of genome duplication, aneuploidy and whatnot. In these aspects, they are sort of scary to me.

    Also, what about formation of a new species? Do you think there is a clean-cut time when they stop producing offspring? Also, what exactly do you mean by fertile? Where do you get a partner to test if the offspring is fertile?

    These are just a few problems that came to my mind right away. I’m sure there’s loads more. I’m afraid that the notion of well organised, easy to categorise world just doesn’t match the real world. Species are more or less a continuum. Incidentally, so is life. We have no good definition fornlife either. Just use whatever definition is useful at the moment and don’t forget to specify it when necessary.


  • Hasn’t Beal’s list been taken down quite a while ago? I remember making a copy of it before they removed it. It was a great source, but sometimes it needed some context. I think all of Frontiers in ended up on the list for reasons, but their review process was mostly alright, for example. It was this kind of lack of clearly definedrules and explanations that let them to taking the list down. Is it back up?












  • There were some compatibility problems that required genetic engineering of the pig. I don’t remember specifics, but there was talk about potential dormant viruses in pig DNA that need to be removed first, possible problems with glycolsylation (sugar chains on the proteins outside of cells) and maybe more. The article also mentions that the pig had some human genes, I’m sure those help compatibility too. So many changes would be next to impossible to do until relatively recently, before use of CRISPR-Cas9. Also, it must’ve taken some time to certify the procedure. That’s why it took so much time since the topic was hot.