The supply of motivation is elastic — Study Web

 WHAT? MY SHOCKED FACE YET AGAIN?   EXCLUSIVE: COVID-19 ‘has NO credible natural ancestor’ and WAS created by Chinese scientists who then tried to cover their tracks with ‘retro-engineering’ to make it seem like it naturally arose from bats, explosive new study claims.

So…  Here’s my prediction:

Altering genomes using our current technology is highly dependent on these things known as “restriction sites”.

Briefly– bacteria are infected by a class of virus called bacteriophages, and have evolved enzymes that find specific sequences in double-stranded RNA which are indicative of a viral genome, and cleave them there.

We use these to manipulate DNA to splice into bacteria in labs, by putting artificial restriction sites on the DNA to be inserted and identifying a part of– usually — a plasmid, which is a free floating strand of genetic material outside the main bacterial genome that allows the bacteria to do extra stuff (a lot of antibiotic resistance is carried on specific plasmids and can even be acquired by living bacteria that integrate DNA from dead ones.)

Restriction enzymes make “L” shaped asymmetric cuts, so if you have two pieces of genetic material cut with one enzyme, the two can interchangeably dimerize with each other.

Radical departures from the closest relatives in nature positioned near known restriction sites would be– and probably are — extremely suspicious.

 Famous musicians pick their favorite Bob Dylan songs.  Would mine be “Highway 61”?  “Mr. Tambourine Man”?  “Tangled Up in Blue”?  “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”?  Too many choices.  Bob is today 80 years old.  The most overrated is perhaps “Desolation Row”, with its pretentious lyrics?

The supply of motivation is elastic — Study Web

Study Web is the space students have constructed for themselves in response to the irl system that just isn’t working. Unable to find a place or person to turn to with their academic and career anxieties, they find internet strangers—strange kin—to speak to, or simply share the same space with, online. Lacking the intrinsic inspiration to study for hours each day, online advice and group accountability provide a solution. Feeling isolated, virtual study partners create a sense of fellowship. On Study Web, while stressed, students have accepted their lot—they’re not investigating the rightness or wrongness of the pressurized environment of the Gen Z student or asking whether college is worth it at all. 12-hour Study With Me videos are seen as something to aspire to rather than rebel from. Students accept the premise that school and studying are non-negotiables. Where they come from, where they live, their beliefs and value systems are not barriers to community-building; they suffer in common.

And Study Web is huge, and weird:

The Study Web is a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students. Videos under the #StudyTok hashtag have been viewed over half a billion times. One Discord server, Study Together, has over 120 thousand members. Study Web extends far past study groups composed of classmates, institution specific associations, or poorly designed retro forums discussing entrance requirements for professional programs. It includes but transcends Studyblrs on Tumblr that emerged in 2014 and eclipses various Reddit and Facebook study groups or inspirational images shared across Pinterest and Instagram. Populated mostly by Gen Z and the youngest of millennials, Study Web is the internet most of us don’t see, and it’s become a lifeline for students from junior high to college.

By Fadeke Adegbuyi, this is one of the best pieces I have read all year.

Facebook is not listening to your offline conversations with friends, but here's how it knows to show you ads about those convos. "If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that."

An oral history of A Different World.

What If We Just Stopped Calling the Cops? "For decades, the solution to Black Americans' distrust of cops has often been to not call them. Now white people are catching on too."

Amazon is buying MGM for $8.45 billion.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:  An explosive new study claims researchers found ‘unique fingerprints’ in COVID-19 samples that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory. “Gain of Function involves tweaking naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious, so that they can replicate in human cells in a lab, allowing the virus’s potential effect on humans to be studied and better understood. Dalgleish and Sørensen claim that scientists working on Gain of Function projects took a natural coronavirus ‘backbone’ found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new ‘spike’, turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible SARS-Cov-2. . . . Their new paper says these features of SARS-Cov-2 are ‘unique fingerprints’ which are ‘indicative of purposive manipulation’, and that ‘the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small.'”

UPDATE: