A kid of mine is teaching himself piano by skipping all the basics and jumping straight to the pieces he wants to play, which are all someone's arrangement of video game music, at an intermediate challenge level.
goals
A bunch of other stuff would have to work out in similar ways, like: each fertilization would also have to be an independent event. (But that makes sense too!)
I got curious this morning and it took me someplace surprising :)
When I was a kid, I read somewhere that the ratio of twins to single births was something like 1:83, and the ratio of triplets to twins was the same.
I found this really striking. What a coincidence... right?
Well, today I'm not convinced we have numbers as precise as that factoid suggests. But this one mechanism is responsible for like 2/3 of cases of multiple births, and it kinda predicts the proportions would be the same. Each extra dominant follicle is an independent event.
How often are multiple eggs released? It depends on timing: relative to the distribution of follicle activations in time, the endocrine signal has to turn around quickly.
If you were engineer-brained enough, without knowing more, you could make an abstract model, estimate the parameters, and simulate this.
It's apparently a normal enough thought that someone did it!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.23.707552v1.full
So the fastest follicle to start developing sends signals that suppress the rest.
The process typically "selects" a single follicle, releasing one egg per cycle. Sometimes the system slips and multiple follicles develop and release eggs; this is how you get fraternal (dizygous) twins.
It's a race. The pituitary produces FSH, follicle stimulating hormone. Some follicles are activated. They start producing estradiol. That signal causes FSH production to stop.
If FSH drops too early in a follicle's development, it will atrophy and die (via apoptosis, programmed cell death). A follicle that is far enough along when FSH drops becomes the dominant follicle.
https://theluckyegg.com/2023/04/29/dominant-follicle-selection-in-ovulation/
The human ovaries have a few hundred thousand follicles, each containing a single egg. But each cycle only one egg is released. Obvious consensus problem. How does the body solve it?
The body is a distributed system.
just had a passkey actually work, i clicked on the key and it logged me in
The Fourteenth Amendment says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."
Kavanaugh's strongest argument is that the 4 exceptions listed in _Wong Kim Ark_ don't make a ton of sense. Yes. But look at the text of the amendment. If anything, 4 is too many.
Anyway. Not his most Federalist Society moment. Hard to respect.
I'm not even a lawyer, so I'm bound to screw this up. But FWIW.
Kavanaugh argues that significant illegal immigration is a new development and therefore it's hard to say how the Fourteenth Amendment relates to it.
He thinks _Wong Kim Ark_ was wrong to say there are 4 specific examples of cases where the Citizenship Clause doesn't apply, a closed set. Courts should be able to discover more exceptions where people don't get citizenship, and children of illegal immigrants are one of those.
I try to read the Supreme Court opinions I disagree with most strongly. I might not make it through the dissents in Trump v. Barbara. They are long.
The plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment settles the question for me, but I'm grimly curious what could have possessed four Justices to disagree.
I got a book of Tennyson from the library and I'm kind of looking forward to giving it back.
Hi fedi. Are there any microbiologists, mycologists, botanists, or other scientists or science enjoyers #OnHere who would have some reading recommendations for me in understanding the succession of life in forefields and other sterile environments?
I am a filthy scifi writer so I am actually interested in this process in the setting of exoplanet regolith but I feel like understanding the research we have on similar environments on Earth is the only real place to start.
Please boost 💜 Thank you!
#AskFedi #ScienceSideOfFedi #AskMastodon #Microbiology #Mycology #Botany #Biology #Scifi #FediPaperClub
The title is inaccurate. The number of problems in the book is closer to 200, since the main text is full of "examples" and each one is a problem you should try tackling on your own.
Some of these individual problems are delightful.
It's an easy recommend; if you like this sort of thing you'll quite like it.
A few words about the book:
It's a brief (74-page) introduction to number theory followed by a list of puzzly problems to solve, with solutions.
These are math-competition-style problems, and the subtitle of the book is "From the Training of the USA IMO Team". Since it's written for young competitors, it doesn't assume you know a bunch of college-level math, just algebra. But uh ...it assumes you're pretty sharp.
I would like to buy you a book.
This year I read _104 Number Theory Problems_ by Titu Andreescu et al. I didn't buy it, I just put the PDF on my phone.
You could just do the same. But if you would like a physical copy instead, DM me your address (and please consider it a personal favor to me).
Got a family member entering week 3 of trying to get a biopsy scheduled after a concerning ultrasound.
They have insurance, but every organization they interact with (the radiology office, their medical records contractor, the oncologist's office, their nurse practitioner's office) seems deeply mentally ill, unable to summon the executive function to communicate effectively or at all, with each other or anyone else
TIL MISRA C rules don't require you to do anything about signed integer overflow
Tentatively, I think it should require `-fwrapv`. so the language actually behaves the way all your programmers think it behaves