Owl Lady 🦉

KE HUY QUAN

Photographed by Eric Ray Davidson for GQ Taiwan (November 2023)

Day 10 of barefoot shoes now! Here are some observations:

The ground is so utterly interesting!!! Especially the netherlands where everything is cobble and the footpaths are bumpy (bec the ground keeps sinking perpetually). I was missing this outlet of sensory info with normal shoes. I also like to wrap my feet along the edge of a stair.

Touching my toes to the edges of the shoe no longer feels like a stretch. In time my foot should expand enough that it naturally brushes the sides. I suspect if I wear my old shoe again it will feel very cramped already.

I also now walk more like a cat or a pawed animal for that matter. I see other people put their heel first, while I now put my foot down paw first. Apparently this is good not only for my feet, but also my leg, which should get thiccer, with the joints lasting longer. We shall see.

My socks don't get smelly at all and last for a week or more, though that maybe bec the shoe is new.

Obligatory cat walking gif with fun (unrelated) fact:

posts that make me want to rip my heart out part 5

This is actually really cool! This seems like actually one of the cool things that AI can help with. In comparison, last thing I heard about coding enzymes, they were reliant on gamers and puzzle thinkers to play a video game where they were the ones to try and figure out the best amino code that'll make a working protein (god bless those gamers and thinkers)

AI technology generates original proteins from scratch

Scientists have created an AI system capable of generating artificial enzymes from scratch.

In laboratory tests, some of these enzymes worked as well as those found in nature, even when their artificially generated amino acid sequences diverged significantly from any known natural protein.

The experiment demonstrates that natural language processing, although it was developed to read and write language text, can learn at least some of the underlying principles of biology. Salesforce Research developed the AI program, called ProGen, which uses next-token prediction to assemble amino acid sequences into artificial proteins.

Scientists said the new technology could become more powerful than directed evolution, the Nobel-prize winning protein design technology, and it will energize the 50-year-old field of protein engineering by speeding the development of new proteins that can be used for almost anything from therapeutics to degrading plastic.

“The artificial designs perform much better than designs that were inspired by the evolutionary process,” said James Fraser, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the UCSF School of Pharmacy, and an author of the work, which was published Jan. 26, in Nature Biotechnology. A previous version of the paper has been available on the preprint server BiorXiv since July of 2021, where it garnered several dozen citations before being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

Me: oh yeah, if you think school photography is hard now, try imagining doing this with film.

The new girl: what’s film?

Me: … film. Like… film that goes in a film camera.

New girl: what’s that mean?

Me: … before cameras were digital.

New girl: how did you do it before digital?

Me:… with film? I haven’t had enough coffee for this conversation

If there was a way to run SUPER MEGA AD BLOCKER on this website I fucking would

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