Sort of riffing on this subject, since rikishi are nearly all Asian: Asians are more vulnerable to diabetes than people of other ethnicities. Health authorities have recommended screening Asians with a BMI above 23 for diabetes. BMI, of course, is purely a function of weight and height.

> limiting screening at BMI ≥25 kg/m2 would miss 36% of Asian Americans with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. In the same study, Araneta et al. (39) found that screening Asian Americans at a BMI cut point of ≥23.5 kg/m2 identified approximately 80% of those with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes. Among Japanese Americans, lowering the BMI screening cut point to ≥22.8 kg/m2 achieved 80% sensitivity.

https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/38/1/150

https://aadi.joslin.org/en/am-i-at-risk/asian-bmi-calculator

I'm confused here. Someone shared with me a file via dropbox, xlsx, and right at the top of the sidebar where I can leave comments, there's a download button.

Credit card churning, manufactured spending, and points accumulation. These activities remind me of cryptocurrency in that there's profit to be made among those who participate, but it's also wasteful of time and energy. Here, credit card reward maximization rewards the status-seeking aspect within us. There's the thrill of getting something valuable (business class tickets and luxury hotels) for seemingly nothing.

In some sense, it's just being a savvy consumer, but I'd feel better if there were some sort of carbon tax placed on air travel.

Barilla sells for $1.25 to $1.50 for 454 grams (1 lb) in the US; that's getting close to $2 per lb. De Cecco is premium stuff here. I've seen $4 per lb, which is like $9 per kg.

Barilla is also one of the more generic and blander pastas; once you switch to the higher end, bronze extruded brands, it gets immeediately clear why they cost more. It's still better than some non-Italians brands that are made in normal wheat flour instead of durum wheat semolina, and look so pale and dull they maks you wonder why you didn't cook rice instead.

But presumably the GP isn't keeping the rice cooker on keep warm for days. All the moisture would be lost. Safer to refrigerate cooked rice.

Whether they are or not: it is absolutely something that is fairly commonly done. Sealed cookers can do it pretty well, the rice is essentially fine for that long (safety aside).

I think that's exactly what GP is doing

That's empirically not true. Yeast do just fine with the starches in the flour. Here's a simple recipe without sugar (and the oil is optional too): http://www.thebreadkitchen.com/recipes/simple-whole-wheat-br...

To sound geopolitically sophisticated. To pretend at the language of statecraft.

Well the other way to think about the problem is that protein structure can be robust to sequence changes. Among natural proteins, proteins that look similar can differ up to about 70% in sequence identity (since evolution had a hand in making sure the structure stayed folded as the sequence diverged from its ancestor). So long as some critical members of the sequence are preserved, the protein folds roughly to the same structure. AlphaFold does take advantage of this since part of the algorithm looks for sequence alignments with known proteins.

Huh, I had no clue that this was the case, do you have examples of specific proteins that are like differ in sequence to a high degree but are similar in function?

Viruses! RNA viruses like SARS-cov-2. They make the cell reverse transcribe their RNA cargo into DNA, and then the cell produces more viruses.

Most RNA viruses are not incorporated into DNA. SARS-CoV-2 is what's called a "positive sense" RNA virus, which means that it is directly translated by cellular machinery to produce more virus copies. It should have no interaction with cellular DNA.

Retroviruses are a subset of RNA viruses that utilize the strategy you're referring to. This requires additional machinery be coded for to allow reverse transcription to DNA and then subsequent integration into host DNA. The vast majority of RNA viruses are not retroviruses.

That usually (right?) doesn't lead to staying in the host's DNA, but I understand that some of our DNA is virus DNA so it DOES happen. Viruses per se aren't exactly rare, so maybe he specifically meant this phenomenon.

But also - that's reverse transcription, not reverse translation. Maybe Lupe made this point a little too late in his description.

EDIT: Sorry, moved around the above after rethinking

For $260, you can experience what it would be like to sleep on a park bench while 36,000 feet in the air.

When you're halfway thru a packed 12 hour flight in economy, a park bench will seem like a 5 star hotel! You'd curl up on the cabin floor if they let you, or beg the flight attendand to zap you with a taser to knock you out.

Sleeping on the floor sounds better. That’s what my mate apparently does if it’s only 2 passengers.

You need to be on fairly bad airline tho where stewardess don’t care.