Recent content by The Firebird

I've seen a few angles to this. Two of my best friends took jobs with European employers; one remote (US based), one on site (Switzerland, then Paris). They were happy with the amenities, which are also better for healthcare, parental leave, etc. But, there were also complaints about how hard...

I guess, as someone who has only been active here over the past several months, I've never gotten where the line regarding "identifiable" is. I've never seen someone call someone out by name. But I often see terms like "that thread", where the context is clear to anyone following the forum. In...

This forum has a different vibe than any I've been in because of the Pineapple thread. There are places where conflict is overt, and places where that kind of criticism is a no go. But I haven't seen a place where subtweets are allowed/encouraged but cordoned off into their own zone. The (+)...

My wife and I now have our car insurance tracking our speed and driving for a discount. It does save money. But there is a major road here that is set at 40 mph where the flow of traffic is 55 mph. We get dinged there, but we'd be causing problems otherwise.

I heard it was used in Nepal to pick a new PM. (I don't know anything about, and am not commenting on the politics involved).

I loved the idea of the fantasy setting search from 3E, and wondered why they never did anything like it. This isn't the same but still very cool!

The current Mars samples were slated for return in the 2030s, but that is up in the air for budgetary reasons. There have been successful analyses of several asteroids which had material returned to Earth recently--Hayabusa2, and more recently OSIRIS-REX. In short they have to be very careful...

Yeah, I find the interplay between determinism and chance super fascinating here. Another idea is the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis. Oxygen (and water) is great energetically; there is competition from fluorine and chlorine but those are both incompatible with carbon biology for other...

I mean that Earth and Mars had similar chemistries that caused life to be funneled down similar trajectories from different origins. Not that life transferred from one to the other. But even that idea is quite interesting...borate is an important stabilizer of ribose, and more common on Mars...

The common cause idea is super interesting to me. We don't know very much about origin of life chemistry and based on what environment it is in different choices could be more likely. Guanine, for example is very abundant (relatively) in meteorite extracts but hard to synthesize in the lab. To...

The original post said "same DNA". I read that to mean same base pairs, the same way "the same proteins as earth" means both "L-amino acids" and "the same 20 amino acids as earth".

An interesting note: the existence of the nucleobases may not get you far because it is quite difficult to react nucleobases with ribose (RNA; probably you get that first). One of the big discoveries in this field found ways to bypass the free nucleobases and instead uses an intermediate that...

You aren't missing anything -- it is the list of literary inspiration Gygax included in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. Goodman Games does a good job with this content. That's their introduction to the list, and they've got numerous articles on individual authors. The material there remains a...

Yep, that was my point. The assumptions it uses are not well grounded.