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Author Topic:   Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 128 of 653 (509933)
05-26-2009 7:18 AM
Reply to: Message 124 by BMG
05-26-2009 2:42 AM


Re: Birds=Reptiles?
It's just a matter of definition. Reptile in the traditional usage would not include birds, but if you wanted to define it as a monophyletic clade it would have to. Which to use is just personal preference.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 390 of 653 (785419)
06-04-2016 1:47 PM


Mitochondrial haplotypes
I stumbled across a conceptual problem when caused me to abandon a reply to Faith, and was hoping someone with more genetics knowledge would be able to help.
How is it that people can be said to have a specific haplotype at any locus for a mitochondrial gene. You don't only inherit one mitochondrion from your mother, but several. These will presumably accumulate mutations as they go, causing the mitochondria within a single cell to diversify. I can understand a selective sweep homogenising the cell's mitochondria again, but does this happen often enough that there's never time for diversity to establish itself?

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 420 of 653 (794788)
11-25-2016 4:38 PM
Reply to: Message 419 by dwise1
11-25-2016 3:33 PM


Re: Why is My Smartphone's Time Off?
Does GMT even exist anymore? The term still gets used, just as locals still call the old WWII Naval Air Station Santa Ana lighter-than-air base the "LTA" even though it was a Marine Corps helicopter station from the 1950's to the 1990's. Or how some will still use the verb "tape" when they take a video. We get too attached to old obsolete terminology.
The historical use of GMT leads to a mildly confusing ambguity today. Here we use Central European Time. In the summer, CET changes by an hour. Through an incredibly sensible piece of international agreement, all of Europe changes their clocks simultaneously. In Portugal, which keeps the same time as the UK, West European Time changes by an hour at exactly the same time as CET does. However, due to the historical legacy of GMT as an international reference time, GMT does not change. Instead the UK switches to BST (British Summer Time). This kind of technicality bothers no one most of the time, except when a client based outside the UK asks me to call them at 15:00 GMT in June, and I'm left baffled if they mean British time or UTC.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 449 of 653 (810445)
05-29-2017 2:59 PM
Reply to: Message 445 by CRR
05-15-2017 3:10 AM


Re: Human current effective population size
Good Question. In the past with limited mobility the planet's human population was probably broken up into several smaller effective populations with limited gene flow between them. E.g. pre Columbus there was not much flow between America and europe. Although the world is still somewhat separated people are much more mobile these days and there is more gene flow possible. Just think about the recent mass migrations from the Middle east and Northern Africa to Europe. I think the effective population today would be the total world population of 7 billion people.
That's not what effective population size means; and there is more than one. The effective population size needs to be relevant to some statistic or other. The effective population size is the population size you would expect based on that statistic in a idealised Fisher-Wright population.
A Fisher-Wright population is of a constant size, has discrete generations that only reproduce once and is made up of diploid hermaphrodites who mate randomly. Humans are of course very different to this, so our effective population size should be significantly smaller than the actual population.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 450 of 653 (810446)
05-29-2017 3:47 PM


Frog identification
I am not good at telling frogs apart and not having much luck finding helpful guidance on the interwebs. I've ordered myself a field guide, but for the time being, any helpful herpetologists able to identify this little fella? Photographed in North Holland:

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 481 of 653 (847634)
01-24-2019 2:09 PM
Reply to: Message 480 by ringo
01-24-2019 11:18 AM


Re: Please name this fallacy
A classic example is, "We prayed for rain and it rained, so prayer works."
That's a classically named fallacy - post hoc ergo propter hoc.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 486 of 653 (857382)
07-08-2019 9:18 AM
Reply to: Message 483 by dwise1
07-08-2019 3:45 AM


Re: Brits: "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, ... "
I've never thought of it as a Python specific phrase, but I am younger than the series so not really qualified to judge.
Google ngrams is interesting. Neither of the phrases 'nudge nudge wink wink' nor 'wink wink nudge nudge' appear in their corpus. However, 'wink wink' and 'nudge nudge' both do. 'Nudge nudge' appears rarely in the 50s and 60s; then takes of exponentially in the early 70s, which implies a big influence from Python.
'Wink wink' was more common; popping up sporadically in the 19th and early 20th centuries; having a huge surge in popularity in the late 30s/early 40s which for some reason died out at the end of the war; then taking off exponentially at the same as 'nudge nudge'.
Note that many of the cases found prior to Monty Python are in the American corpus; so I don't think this is necessarily a distinctive Britishism.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 560 of 653 (865808)
10-31-2019 8:24 AM
Reply to: Message 555 by RAZD
10-10-2019 12:59 PM


Re: A reminder about heating, and power strips
Be safe. Avoid extension cords to heaters if you can. Use outdoor extensions if you need one.
Better yet, just put a jumper on.
Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


(1)
Message 568 of 653 (865863)
11-01-2019 10:39 AM
Reply to: Message 564 by RAZD
10-31-2019 5:52 PM


Re: Bandwidth usage: photobucket
Move to imgur. No such restrictions, and at the moment there isn't even the option to pay for an account. Not quite sure what their business model is, but it's useful for now at least,

This message is a reply to:
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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 574 of 653 (869262)
12-27-2019 5:33 AM
Reply to: Message 570 by dwise1
12-25-2019 6:36 PM


Re: Question about Social Use of Liters
A cursive l means litre.
cL means centilitres.
Possibilities:
You're misremembering or misinterpreting something
You saw a menu written by an idiot.
There are different conventions in different parts of Europe regarding the units used for measuring different drinks (for example, it's common here to order 2 decilitres of wine, while that word is never seen in many countries - they would order 20 cl or 200 ml). But nowhere does cl mean litre nor an l mean millilitre.
Are you sure the glass was 0.9 litres? That's pretty unusual in and of itself. I've never seen a 900 ml glass of beer anywhere.

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Replies to this message:
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caffeine
Member (Idle past 1024 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 580 of 653 (869349)
12-29-2019 6:33 AM
Reply to: Message 577 by dwise1
12-27-2019 5:35 PM


Re: Question about Social Use of Liters
Then you must not have spent much time in Bavaria. Though instead of shorting you with just 900 ml of beer, they'll serve you a full Ma (one liter).
I've seen both 750 ml and litre glasses in various countries - it was the 900 ml that struck me as odd.
I have a litre glass - but only for the novelty. The beer goes warm and/or flat by the time you get to the bottom (or maybe I just drink too slow!)

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