jonmrodriguez's comments

I guess it's hard to prove, but I think certain objects are inherently correlated with good/evil. E.g. a torture device is inherently evil IMHO, and a vaccine is inherently good.

Seriously. It's extremely important that we as engineers be ethical about what we build. If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare.

Aw man I loved your comment right up to the point where you gave people a suggestion on how to make better surveillance tech :(

Same thing happened to me. If it's relevant, I'm on the default mobile browser of Samsung Galaxy S5.

I'm not innguest, but I'm curious, why is this downvoted so much? I get that the idea is somewhat impractical, but at least it's original and creative, surely the kind of idea we want to encourage.

Yep, a good search term is "galvanic vestibular stimulation". Here's a good how-to: http://jap.physiology.org/content/96/6/2301

I'd guess it's a remake just based on the fact that the filename has "reformat" in it, and common sense

Turned the side projects into a company.

Application-wise :) Mostly I'm thinking that with cheap 3D-scanning sensors and GPUs, it's finally the beginning of the era for domestic and consumer robots to be viable.

Awesome! Do you have a picture of the fully-built Mario?

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in genetic engineering and robotics!

You can start making money once you can get a customer's payload into low earth orbit. You want to achieve this initial revenue as soon as possible, by making the simplest orbit-capable rocket you possibly can, which would be a 2-stage (probably non-reusable) rocket with 1 engine per stage. An additional trade-off you can make if your company only wants to carry cargo, not people, is you could use solid instead of liquid fuel to simplify your rocket at the expense of danger.

I would start by planning your rocket architecture and your series of equipment builds, ground tests, and test flights, and leaving plenty of margin for when things inevitably go wrong (SpaceX's first 3 launches failed, so I wouldn't assume you yourself can do any better than 3 failed launches before your first success). Plan out the total cost of all of these builds and tests (including healthy (2X?) margin on the cost), and plan how much revenue you can generate once you start having paying customers. Expect to self-fund most of your initial builds and tests, since I'd guess investors won't believe in you until you've at least built a working engine. Also always apply to any possible government-backed competitions or incentive programs that can provide grant or debt-based financing.

Out of curiosity, which companies do you define as being in the "first", "second", and "third" rounds of space startups?

Gene overlap is extremely rare actually! When phiX174 was first discovered, some researchers wondered if such a complexly intertwined system could even have evolved naturally, or if it might suggest that the virus was hand-engineered: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979Icar...38..148Y

Did their naive decompression make the genome longer? If so, it probably didn't fit in the capsid. In our version, we had to provide one of the genes (gene F) in a plasmid in the host cell, in order to reduce the length of the decompressed genome to fit inside the capsid. See this section of our paper:

[The naive] decompression added 909 nucleotides to the wild-type genome. We next addressed practical constraints arising from the length of DNA that can be physically packaged within a øX174 capsid without impacts to reproductive fitness. Previous work has shown that the length of a øX174 genome, when packaged in vitro, must be kept within a few percent of the 5386 nucleotide wild-type length in order to avoid any significant fitness decrease ( Aoyama and Hayashi, 1985). Similar results were shown in vivo ( Russell and Muller, 1984). To reduce the decompressed genome length we removed the first 916 nucleotides of gene F, encoding the coat protein ( Air et al., 1978). We chose gene F because a plasmid containing a restriction fragment encoding wild-type gene F was able to complement two conditional gene F mutations ( Avoort et al., 1983). Additionally, the gene F coding sequence is greater than the total of the combined increases needed to implement the øX174.1 genome design. The truncated gene F version of the decompressed genome was named øX174.1f. To complement øX174.1f when transformed into host cells we designed a medium copy vector expressing gene F under control of a rhamnose-inducible promoter ( Fig. S1).

Hehe funny that you mention phiX174 in the context of programming, that virus is amazing... Part of the reason phiX174 is so small is that it is "compressed" by having overlapping genes; in one area, three genes overlap in the same place! This is possible because there are 6 valid reading frames (direction and start point) for reading DNA: {forward or backward} x {address % 3 == 0, 1, or 2}.

In college I actually got to take part in refactoring that virus' genome into a decompressed version with no gene overlaps. And it worked! The decompressed version is still a functioning phage, and since there are no longer gene overlaps, future genetic engineers will have a much easier time modifying the phage as they see fit.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682212...

That is not true; please be careful to do research before posting so you don't spread misinformation.

If a light source is diffuse/omnidirectional, then it will be blurrier the farther it is from the distance your eye is focusing on.

Only if the light is a ray (a collimated beam with very little spread and very small diameter), such as the ray produced by a laser, then it will be in focus regardless of the distance at which it is produced.

Are you sure that action is always the application of knowledge? When a star gets old and goes supernova, I don't think it's really fair to say that it's because of knowledge or intelligence on the part of the star. Or when a rope gets old and frayed and eventually snaps. Or when an asteroid randomly collides with a planet. Or when lightning strikes.

Awesome, thank you!

Is it possible to create a "negative differential gear" that puts more torque into the wheel that is stuck? (in the hopes of forcing it unstuck)