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7th implied fact: the baby’s religion somehow plays a role in your deciding whether or not to hit it with a bat.
What is up with the bird at the end?
A bot strips away all spaces and letters that aren’t A, T, C or G, then treats the rest like a genetic sequence and checks it against some database.
Presumably, it runs through many terabytes of data for each comment, as the Gallinula chloropus alone has about 51 billion base pairs, or some 15 GiB. The Genome Ark DB, which has sequences of two common moorhens, contains over 1 PiB. I wonder if a bored sequencing lab employee just wrote it to give their database and computing servers something to do when there is no task running.
No, I won’t download the genome and check how close the “closest match” is but statistically, 93 base pairs are expected to recur every 2186 bits or once per 1040 PiB. By evaluating the function (4-1)m × mℂ93 ≥ 493 ÷ (pebi × 8), one can expect the 93-base sequence to appear at least once in a 1 PiB database if m ≥ 32 mismatches or over ⅓ are allowed. Not great.
This assumes true randomness, which is not true of naturally occuring DNA nor letters in English text, but should be in the right ballpark. Maybe fewer if you account for insertions/deletions.
The FAQ on the user’s page says:
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They are not a bot, just neurodivergent
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They’re using BLAST
ie, this
https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
They did not code anything beyond a very simple regex function that strips down posts to a t c g, and then they copy paste it into the above website, then copy paste the output.
Hell, you can see they aren’t even removing apostrophes and quotes, not even forcing it to all lower case or all upper case, removing spaces and line breaks…
… as a former database admin/dev/analyst, I was losing my fucking mind at the notion that someone with direct access to a genomics DB, would just hook it up to tumblr, via an automated bot, and spam the db with non work related requests, all on their own, when they can barely modify a string correctly.
Thank fucking god this is just using a publicly available, no doubt extremely low fidelity, watered down search via an API.
… You need literal, state of the art, absurdly expensive, power hungry, and secure supercomputers to be able to do genomic comparisons.
Probably one of the dumbest things you could do, quickest way to get fired, and then never be able to work in the field again, would be for a random genomics lab worker who does not know how to code to open up a whole bunch of security holes and cost god knows how much money (and damage if you write bad code) running frivolous bs searches in their state of the art genomics db… for a tumblr bot.
Wow. Just wow. Someone is still using CGI.
Wayback Machine’s earliest capture is from 2008.
It’s a cutesy, public facing, extremely limited and low fidelity ‘demo version’ of a genomic search, basically made as a PR / Science Education promotion gimmick… by government contracted web/backend devs, in 2008.
Honestly its a miracle its still functional at all.
Not a bot, just neuro
Hilarious every time.
I mean, I am also autistic, so thanks for perpetuating the social stigma against neurodivergent people, I guess.
I thought it was funny. I’m a typical. Have had several relationships with neurodivergent people, including my wife.
I do find a lot of the quirks funny or cute. Was just giving my girl shit about the Princess and the Pea because she is extremely particular about her pillow situation. The pillows and stuffies have names. That shit is funny and it makes me grin when I have to help sort the pile.
Why do you find it offensive?
Well, your story about finding certain attributes about your wife is an entirely different context, and you didn’t use the term as a pejorative.
The person I am responding to used the term as a pejorative, in reference to how a neurodivergent person could easily be confused with an automated bot.
This is inherently dehumanizing.
It’s dismissive, it equates neurodivergent people to being sterile, non emotional beings who only exist to perform complex technical tasks.
This in and of itself is a common stereotype of certain kinds of people with certain kinds of neurodiversity, but neurodiverse actually refers to a much broader range of… different styles of cognitive function, different disorders, whatever you want to call them.
So, now on top of using the term as a pejorative, contextually perpetuating a specific dehumanizing stereotype… it also equivocates a diverse group of people into an oversimplified conglomerate, which in and of itself perpetuates other stereotypes by erroneously associating aspects that may (or may not) apply to a specific subset of neurodiverse people… to all of them.
I guess I see where you’re coming from. Labels can hit different, especially when the label doesn’t fit all the recipients. Being labeled can cause offense. Especially if it’s derogatory. I don’t think it was meant to be derogatory by op, but it certainly wasn’t very sensitive.
The difficult part is that it’s a spectrum. Especially when it comes to level of function. Profound autism is a totally different animal from high functioning people. And there is a whole spectrum of differences in how the divergency manifests between individuals.
Savantism and savant-like actions are fascinating to a lot of typicals, myself included. That level of focus and ability to make the connections or internally churn the information is not an accessible state for most of us. It’s like seeing real magic.
(Obviously, not all neurodivergent folks have savant-like behaviors, most likely just a minority. No idea of the prevalence.)
So, a neurodivergent person inputting letters scraped from Tumblr posts into a genome search engine is funny as hell because it’s such a strange thing to do and produces an interesting result. Why would someone do that? Why would you even think to do it in the first place?
My wife does absolutely hilarious shit all the time. Our house is full of laughter. She’s wickedly sarcastic and full of black humor.
So, given that I think some of the behaviors are awesome while being hysterically funny, what is an inoffensive way to engage in humor about neurodivergent folks, in your opinion? Are there any preferred terms that are shorthand for: “Autistic person pulled some fucked up logic trick or other stunt”?
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That’s hilarious, but I needed the explanation too. Thanks!
The genomes have likely been indexed to make finding results faster. Google doesn’t search the entire internet when you make a query :P
Implied fact: a baby is capable of having a religion, despite its inability to comprehend the concept.
Implied fact: by distinguishing the baby as Christian, there must be non-Christian babies in close proximity.
Actual Implication: You’re supposed to care more about the Christian baby than a non-Christian babies.
