Roger Moore

Proud peripheral blood stem cell donor (2007); RIP Melinda.
Employed for my whole career at City of Hope, where I work in the Integrated Mass Spectrometry Shared Resource. #TeamMassSpec
All opinions are my own and are worth what you paid for them.
Hobbies include photography and sourdough baking.
Graduate of Caltech (1994)

Location (home): Pasadena, CA
Occupation: Scientist
Pronouns: He/Him/His

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Last Notes

2026-04-22 01:03:05 UTC

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They call it a ballroom, but it's really more like a banquet hall. That's why Trump talks about how many people it will seat; he expects guests to sit, not dance.

2025-09-17 21:33:31 UTC

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I'm a little surprised it's taken the Right this long to turn on Mormons. They've always been an awkward fit. Yes, Mormons share a lot of the same social values with the rest of the Right, but they also have a long history of being a persecuted religious minority, and the spiritual heirs of their persecutors still run the religious Right. Mormons seem like another minority that thinks they're OK with the Right but will be persecuted in turn when their time comes.

2025-08-28 18:35:33 UTC

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Exactly right. There are really a couple of key points:
1) We lose nothing by fighting this in the courts. Maybe the Supreme Court will eventually rule against her, but that's no reason to give up and let them get the same outcome with no effort.
2) It isn't our choice anyway. If she wants to fight for her job, that's her call. The very least we should do is shut up and get out of her way.

2025-08-12 21:47:24 UTC

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I couldn't draw nearly as good a map as the AI, but I have memorized all 50 states, so I wouldn't get any of them grossly wrong. Even if I hadn't memorized them, I would be more likely to leave a name blank than fill it with gibberish the way the AI has done here.
I think this gets to a really important part of what people who dislike LLMs have against them. The ones we've seen are much more likely to make stuff up than admit they don't know.

2025-06-28 02:47:28 UTC

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News flash: many American Jews vote for local officials based on their local policies, not their stance on Israel. It's almost like they're Americans who happen to be Jewish rather than Jews who happen to be American.

2025-06-27 15:11:23 UTC

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Shorter: Chief Justice Roberts has applied for a legal name change to Roger B. Taney II.

2025-06-22 21:25:25 UTC

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Saying "Y is a distraction from X" is a disingenuous way of arguing about priorities. Rather than making an actual case for why we ought to care more about X than Y, they just assume X is so much more important that only a gullible person or one with misplaced priorities could possibly pay attention to Y. It's both a dishonest way to avoid actually making a case and insulting to anyone who cares about Y.

2025-02-07 17:16:28 UTC

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Also, don't give your cat raw milk or raw food. Both have been vectors for avian flu infection.
@npub1eh4…05sd

2025-02-05 16:45:43 UTC

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This gets to an important point about resisting Trump: we are not alone. Every one of Trump's atrocities has a target, and that target is going to fight back. Those people already fighting back can form a nucleus of resistance. If you want to fight Trump's attempt to gut the federal workforce, you can help the federal employee unions rather than having to start from scratch.

2025-01-27 23:02:00 UTC

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I think the previous poster's comment that we could do the whole project in a week now is misleading. Yes, we can sequence an individual genome that quickly now, but a lot of that is because we can compare the newly acquired data to the template provided by the original HGP. Everything we do with human genetics now builds on that project.

2024-12-28 17:56:27 UTC

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This kind of thing is common to authoritarian leadership, and it's a big reason authoritarian governments never achieve the efficiency they supposedly get from unitary decision making. The leader is forced to divide power and pit his subordinates against each other so none of them has the power to overthrow him. Legitimate leaders don't need to do this because their legitimacy protects them, but criminal boss Trump does it by force of habit.

2024-12-12 16:25:41 UTC

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It seems like a market opportunity for a mom and pop shop with the right skills. They could sell machines with Linux preinstalled or offer to breathe new life into boxes that can't upgrade to Windows 11. On top of that, they could offer the kind of service for Linux that places like Best Buy do for Windows. Maybe offer some kind of intro to Linux for home users class.

2024-12-12 14:42:58 UTC

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Another very important issue is the degree of third-party support available. If someone's Windows computer has problems too big for them, they can take it to Best Buy or equivalent and get it worked on there. There isn't an equivalent commercial support and repair system for Linux, which makes it scary if you don't happen to know a Linux guru.

2024-12-12 02:46:24 UTC

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Some of the equipment I use isn't yet officially supported on Win11. I think the LTSC versions of Windows 10 will continue to get security updates for longer than the consumer version, but I wonder if the manufacturer is ever going to support 11 or if they'll switch to Linux.

2024-11-21 17:01:43 UTC

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The lack of monitoring is what will be really deadly. How will we even know there's a problem if nobody is tracking foodborne illnesses and figuring out the cause? The public will remain uninformed because nobody will be assembling and publicizing the information.

2024-11-16 17:41:51 UTC

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More seriously, this shows exactly how Trump won. He succeeded in making the election about what Biden was doing rather than what he was going to do. So people worried about Palestine voted for Trump out of anger at Biden without considering Trump was going to be worse. People worried about inflation voted against Biden without considering Trump's tariffs would destroy the economy. And so forth.

2024-11-16 15:52:30 UTC

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Wait, wait! The guy who was constantly praising Netanyahu is making pro-Israel nominations? Who could have predicted that?

2024-11-12 00:57:04 UTC

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I think a lot of people are reassured by the idea of dirt because it lets them think the problem is just one bad guy pulling the strings. It's much scarier to consider there are tens of millions of our fellow citizens who love what Trump has done and just wish he had more time and power to carry through on all his threats.

2024-11-11 21:13:58 UTC

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I don't think Republican elected officials are going along because someone has dirt on them. They're going along because they want the world Trump is trying to create. So do a lot of the people who voted to put them in power. That's the really terrifying thing: lots of people saw what Trump did with his power and said, "Yeah! I want some more of that!"

2024-11-11 04:00:22 UTC

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He needs recess appointments because he wants to appoint people too extreme for some Republicans. Leadership can guarantee Congress goes into recess for long enough to make appointments, but they can't guarantee everyone goes along when Trump appoints rabid pro-Putin people to run DOD (or whatever other craziness).

2024-11-04 17:03:08 UTC

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My theory is that contemporary right wing politics is so bizarre and self-contradictory that you have to be willing to accept a lot of bullshit to believe in it. That makes true believers a tremendous resource for grifters. This is especially true of the right wing media, where their devoted viewership is preselected for people willing to believe nonsense. That's the main reason the left has failed to create a parallel media system.

2024-11-04 16:32:15 UTC

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Everyone on the right steals from their own organization, and they've been doing it for a long time. There's a whole ecosystem of grifters attached to the far right wing of the party whose goal is to produce just enough results to keep the money flowing. It's the natural consequence of the right-wing attitude that money is everything.

2024-10-29 21:27:38 UTC

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I'm not sure, but I'd guess it has to do with the CNO cycle. In the CNO cycle, carbon and nitrogen absorb protons to transmute into nitrogen or oxygen. Some of those nuclei are unstable and undergo reverse beta decay, so 13N > 13C and 15O > 15N. The key is that going to the unstable nuclei is less favorable than going to stable ones. So 14N + 1H > 15O is slow compared to 15N + 1H > 12C + 4He. The net result is stars have a lot more 14N than 15N.

2024-10-29 20:01:19 UTC

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American pennies are mostly zinc, which is somewhat more common than copper on a cosmic scale- unsurprising, since even numbered elements are generally more common. $2 undecillion would only be about a thousand solar masses of pennies, so there should be enough copper and zinc in the observable universe to make them. Unfortunately, if you tried, they'd collapse into a black hole, so you wouldn't be able to spend them.

2024-10-16 00:11:11 UTC

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Running the government like a business is one of those things that makes less sense the more you think about it. We want the government to do things businesses can't or won't do, so running it the same way makes no sense. It's just a slightly more subtle way of saying you hate the idea of government.

2024-10-09 03:35:40 UTC

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It's kind of like working. Yes, it's admirable that some people are willing to work three jobs to make ends meet, but it's a policy failure that they have to. Every job should pay a living wage.
Similarly it's admirable that people are willing to wait in long lines to vote, but they shouldn't have to. We need to demand adequately staffed and supplied voting places and ideally universal vote by mail.

2024-10-09 03:31:31 UTC

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My point is not that people shouldn't wait in line to vote but that the existence of the lines is an attempt to discourage people from voting by making it excessively painful. Yes, you should stay in line and vote, but when you vote for local and state leaders, vote for ones who think voting should be fast and convenient.

2024-10-09 00:33:52 UTC

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Long lines are a result of not having enough resources to deal with the number of people who showed up. It's not like this is the first time they've run an election, so they should have predicted a busy day. A long line once might be a sign of unexpected turnout; repeated long lines are a sign someone isn't providing adequate resources.

2024-08-20 20:01:14 UTC

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They didn't do anything to Nixon for interfering with peace negotiations with North Vietnam or Reagan for cutting a deal with Iran to delay releasing the hostages, either. Of course those things were done covertly, because Republican voters back then mostly put their country ahead of their party. Today's Republicans will cheer Trump for undermining his country if they think it will help get him elected.

2024-08-12 15:10:01 UTC

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If he becomes President, he can order DOJ to settle, so it's potentially a worthwhile payday, too.
#TrumpCorruption