I wish he’d stop holding back and tell us what he really thinks of the man.
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Oh, don’t we need him now…
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The “like” comes with a presumption that you meant Hunter S. Thompson, not Nixon!
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But we need a centrist Democrat to run against Trump!
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Free downloadable fonts based on the handwriting of David Bowie, John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg, and Kurt Cobain.
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At least Nixon had the decency to be ashamed of himself.
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Hey there, @MissyPants and any another others near Toronto!!!
Just got the weekly email for Choir!Choir!Choir! (home base: Toronto). Apparently Rick Astley has discovered them and contacted them to say he can show up tomorrow night for their weekly Wednesday show at Clinton’s on Bloor. Can you imagine singing “Never Going to Give You Up” with Astley himself? And yes, of course they provide a link to the YouTube video, because part of the point is that you’re supposed to show up already knowing the song. So they’ve openly Rickrolled everyone on their mailing list!
Tickets go on sale at midnight (which probably means less than 10 minutes from now) on Eventbrite.
If anyone goes, you have to tell us all about it!
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I’d respectfully posit that we don’t keep up with history near well enough – and it’s killing us.
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Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
- Mark Twain
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That is one epic twitter thread. I need her to teach me how to tweet.
Just too good!
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These guys are mentioned, all too briefly
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neat!
but, OK, I’ll out myself as a pseud here, but w/r/t
By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about
the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all
biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of
civilizations.
Way back when I was a (pseud incoming!) high school bio and chem student, my teachers brought up that life on Earth was carbon-based because the atoms were lego-like in their ability to bond in myriad of ways, some particularly conducive to life. BUT it was speculated that life didn’t have to be exclusive to carbon. I seem to recall that silicon was also thought to hold potential in this regard for being able to make lots of bonds (?)
All I’m getting at is that the quote emphasizes “universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres” but everything in the article presupposes carbon-based life (i think?) Or can it be safely assumed that non-carbon-based life would not be able to either create civilization or alter the biosphere as we know it?
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It’s been speculated – silicon has 4 available bonds, similar to carbon. I think you can get up to about 7 Si-Si in a row (with hydrogen or other atoms on the other two available bonds), but that’s about it. Nothing like the size of even a small protein. Instead, silicon tends to form a crystal, e.g., quartz (reacted with oxygen) or rock (reacted with oxygen & metals). And we can create pure silicon crystals for computer chips by removing the oxygen.
You can get a much larger molecule by alternating silicon and oxygen:
-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O- and so on, which is silicone. There’s some speculation that “proteins” could be based on that, but they may require a much higher temperature for chemical reactions needed for life, so may not work in water (and I don’t know how it could be soluble in water, though that may depend what’s attached to the other bonds available). So one problem is, what would the solvent be for all the reactions to proceed? Or could some other process allow the chemistry to work? Clay, maybe?
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