I do find it curious the fact that "computer" even as a concept (e.g. the Turing Machine) occupies a very small place in the minds of computer scientists today. (This is similar to how little the modern Number Theory is concerned with, well, numbers.)
>- Noticing that thinking constantly about things using language puts reality into categories that are essentially made up.
This is a revelation of even higher magnitude for me.
Especially if you are multilingual, you notice how many of your ideas about the world are shaped (or at least influenced) by the language you use, which might be helpfull to some, and limiting to others. I think this is what Wittgenstein wanted to express in his famous quote: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
But they don't contain a lot of the fats/acids that come from meat that are hard for the body to synthesize/metabolize. I'm not saying only eat meat/fish, but there's more than just protein.
I did not claim that legumes are some kind of wonder food with the ideal balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.
Of course you need to eat different kinds of vegetables/fruit/plants.
As for fats, nuts are a good choice. But you can also buy all kinds of oils, if you are afraid that an all vegetable diet will leave you with too little of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils
great eli5. I attended a lecture by one of the Wendelstein-7X engineers a month ago, and the main reason why they would construct such a thing (took 10 years), from what I figured, was that a tokamak is operated in short pulses, whereas the stellarator runs smoothly.
Wiki: However, stellarators, unlike tokamaks, do not require a toroidal current, so that the expense and complexity of current drive and/or the loss of availability and periodic stresses of pulsed operation can be avoided, and there is no risk of toroidal current disruptions. It might be possible to use these additional degrees of design freedom to optimize a stellarator in ways that are not possible with tokamaks.
I think just the opposite is true. Biology can not explain life without physics, there might not be a complete understanding yet, but physics and math are the only tools that will get us there. Chemistry too, needs physics all the time. I think separating science is a historical relic, everything we know is physics and math, even if it might be hard to recognize in some biological phenomena. But after all, they tend to be rather complex. I am not sure what indistinguishable from physics is supposed to mean, but it sounds philosophical to me.
It must be noted though that life is an emergent phenomenon, therefore the idea that it requires physics to explain it is clearly reductionist. For instance, if you were to simulate chemical (let alone higher-level) processes characteristic to life using a computer, you would definitely not need to start with Schrödinger's equation. Even organic chemistry can be modeled based on high-level "axioms" of its own, and those axioms, or principles, do not even have to be the same as those used in modeling general chemical phenomena.
I did not indent to convey that the empirical findings in biology/chemistry are not important. I agree that you do not necessarily need a quantum description to understand biological phenomena, but sometimes (eg single electrons in photosynthesis , bond breaking/formation) you do.
Molecular simulations however were not what I was picturing when I wrote my comment. If I understand you correctly, you think because of the emergent character of biological systems, the physical approach is too reductionist. But the emergence we observe is due to (non equilibrium) thermodynamics, which is studied primarily in statistical physics. I guess what I want to say is that we should be aware that many interesting problems are found at the borders of disciplines which were shaped by historical happenstance. Example: there is immense overlap between chemistry and solid state physics, still they are considered as distinct disciplines.
I am not a communist, but I must point out, that it works exactly the same way with capitalism too.
If you got some time, there is a great documentation called 'The Century of the Self', which shows (among other things) how modern marketing in western countries started and evolved.
The section in wikipedia that discusses this mentions that it is not clear that his employment by tobacco firms motivated his behavior:
From wikipedia:
'To quote his biographers Yates and Mather, "It has been suggested that the fact that Fisher was employed as consultant by the tobacco firms in this controversy casts doubt on the value of his arguments. This is to misjudge the man. He was not above accepting financial reward for his labours, but the reason for his interest was undoubtedly his dislike and mistrust of puritanical tendencies of all kinds; and perhaps also the personal solace he had always found in tobacco."'
I believe this is thesis of the original article as well.
There is still an open debate among statisticians as to whether employment of statisticians by tobacco firms causes statisticians to disbelieve in tobacco-caused cancer.
