I often cackle maniacally when I solve something in a particularly effective way.

To be fair, it also rusts when not under the rain.

Those who saw tigers where there were none were more likely to pass on their genes than those that didn’t see the tiger hiding in the foliage.

And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.

Should probably be in the top five, frankly.

I trust NASA

They’ve killed 21 astronauts so far (not counting X-15 pilots), most of them through criminal negligence…

They’ve launched dogs, monkeys, and whatnot before.

Sure, those were still way more skilled than Boeing executives, but there’s also uncrewed launches, so that’s no excuse.

Call them payload or cargo or ballast instead of astronauts if you want, what counts is launching the fuckers into space and (hopefully) not bringing them back.

The thing, though, is… you take a virus, put it in a petri dish by itself, and it does… nothing.

It doesn’t have a metabolism, it doesn’t look for a host, it doesn’t do anything… it’s just an inert clump of organic matter. (Then again, probably the same could be said for, say, spores. Or pollen. Or raw DNA or even RNA. Are those alive…?)

But plug it into a cell and… well, it sort of breaks apart, injecting it’s RNA or DNA into the cell, and… that’s it for that particular instance of the virus.

Sure, the cell will then take that genetic payload and unwittingly use it to fabricate as many copies of the virus as it can… but at that point the original virus instance is just an empty protein husk… is it still alive…? Does “being alive” maybe not apply to individual virus particles, but to this whole process…?

Maybe being alive is not just a binary, but a scale (or something more complex) where you can fit anything from crystals or prions to us and who knows what else, maybe whole ecosystems, maybe the Gaia concept of a living world…

But we humans certainly do seem to like our black and white binary choices, even if viruses might be a triangular peg we’re trying to fit into either a round or square hole…

Do it reproduce?

Not by themselves, no. They need to take over a cell’s replication machinery for that.

Do it evolve?

Yes, as they are subject to natural selection.

Do it try to survive?

I don’t think so, they don’t try anything to do anything, they just are… but the same can probably be said for most actually living organisms, including many relatively complex ones, so I don’t think it can be used as a way to determine if something is alive or not.

Yes, of course, but I was trying to point out how claiming it means titanium doesn’t really work as an excuse to pronounce it “tie”; it’s either “tee eye” or “titanium”, but “tie” makes no sense.

Yes, exactly. It’s either tee eye or titanium, but I can’t see how it can possibly be tie.

I read the Ti in the periodic table as “titanium”, not as “tie”… I mean, if you don’t read them as the names of the elements, what would you even read, say, Pb or Hg as…?

Jraphics Interchange Format. 🤷‍♂️

Why rename the files when you could just categorise and index them…?

This seems unnecessarily destructive.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

— Sir Terry Pratchett, The Globe (The Science of Discworld, #2), 2002