Marble adding machine

What people said

jasode · 2021-12 · Reference

>I find the coding analogy for DNA or cell biology in general to be rather problematic. It's fine as a very rough and oversimplified analogy, but if you try to apply it to the details I think it hurts more than it helps. [...] , but inevitably they will move out of the bounds of where the anlogy works unless they actually know the underlying biology. I think the author's "digital" explanation for DNA is more helpful than problematic because we can just understand where that knowledge can be appropriately applied. Focusing on the higher abstraction of DNA as "information" or "data" is important in bioinformatics: [LINK] And analyzing DNA as "information" and not just analog chemistry is also important in CRISPR gene editing. Yes, the engineers creating machines used CRISPR editing need to know more "analog" aspects of biology but other scientists can focus on the "digital data" perspective. I think a similar digital-vs-analog split happens in computers. Consider the following different physical (analog) realizations of computation devices: - wood gates ( [VIDEO] ) - vacuum tubes - silicon wafers of transistors - optical gates using light Can we extract a useful "information data" perspective that transcends all of those vastly different devices? Yes, we call it "computer science". We're discovering that many "computer software" ideas also apply to DNA. Scientists can look at the human genome as 750 megabytes of code and try to "reverse engineer" it. It's like forensic hackers

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klibertp · 2021-11 · Reference

> They do arithmetic's perfectly. So does abacus. Even something like this: [VIDEO] is capable of doing arithmetic. Does that mean that the marbles somehow understand what addition is? > look them up and spit out answers, Wolfram Alpha does this, and let me tell you: things I couldn't understand listening to lectures and trying to work through handbooks (well, most of them were hand-me-downs from the '60s, so take that as you will), became clear in just a few days of work. I didn't cancel my subscription for 2 years after that, out of gratitude. But, most of the papers out there don't use interactive platforms for publishing. Even though they could. But as you said, that would be too much work, so they simply don't. I accepted it, it's all good now. > Pure mathematicians mostly works on problems that are too abstract for programming. I was pretty sure we're not talking about "pure" math. I mean, we both agree that that particular branch is of interest to a tiny minority. Of course the pure mathematicians can stay inside their ivory tower forever, nobody cares. Notice that I repeated the word "use" multiple times. I was trying to imply having a goal that's not mathematical in nature. EDIT: > Why doesn't CS do the same? You can't expect mathematicians to do that work for your field, as there are too many fields depending on math and too few mathematicians to handle everything. I... don't know. That's a very good question. Yes, teaching math in CS depts is generally outsourced t

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bscphil · 2018-08 · Reference

That Matthias video takes me back - one of the first channels I ever subscribed to back in 2007 because of this cool wooden marble adding machine: [VIDEO]

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