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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • Gattaca was taking a lot of license for the sake of the movie. A lot of diseases are multifactorial and while genes might play a role, they’re not the only factor and often not even the main factor. The movie ignored things like epigenetics, early life exposures, lifestyle, age, sex, and just plain variance that are all factors that can play into chronic diseases.

    That being said, allowing parents to make decisions based on genetic testing isn’t itself eugenics. Eugenics is a top-level idea revolving around the idea of improving the quality of human genetics as a whole. And that requires an institutional judgement of what are good quality genes and bad quality genes, which necessitates us saying some people are better quality than others and opens up the door to racism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism/etc. Eugenics is always bad, while personal medical decisions based on genetics can be reasonable.







  • Screw those employers. Whenever they send one of their employees in to me to get a note, I give them way more off than they’d normally take.

    You got a cold? The first 5 days suck the most and you’re most contagious during those days, so have 5 days off work. Oh, you only wanted today off and were considering going back tomorrow if you were feeling better? Sucks for your boss, I guess. My medical opinion is based on the disease, not your employee’s self-assessment.








  • Dpkg is the low level tool for Debian packages.

    Apt-get is the original frontend for dpkg. It is a full featured tool that lets the user give commands to dpkg, along with apt-cache, which displays information to the user.

    Apt is a high level tool for user friendliness. It combines some features from apt-get and apt-cache, as well as adds progress bars and other quality of life features. It also strips down some features the average user doesn’t use.

    So neither is a wrapper for the other. They are two similar tools that do the same job. Apt-get is better for scripting due to being a more rigid tool while apt is nicer for end users.


  • Sure you can!

    Get a coin, and flip it 100 times. Record each time it lands on heads/tails.

    Now get a devout believer, and have the believer continuously say devout prayers petitioning God to make the coin read heads. Then, flip the coin 100 times, and record heads/tails.

    Do statistical analysis to see whether there is a statistically significant difference between the control group and the prayer group. Pretty easy to verify if true.