Notices by 🎓 Dr. Freemo :jpf: 🇳🇱 (freemo@qoto.org), page 8

@jasper Could be, I mean if she was paid for that purpose it wouldnt surprise me, but thats not the feeling I get.

Are you equally mad at Obama and his wife being friends with Bush for the same reason and call out Obama as being in league with Bush too then?

@inverness01

No worries, sounds good. Enjoy yourself.

@MarcusJ65 @ThomasWic

@inverness01

I have no doubt you've shared your opinion sincerely, and I respect that, even if i disagree.

@MarcusJ65 @ThomasWic

@ae Im not, it could be another mineral with cubic configuration. The coloring does look off

@ae in america these are called Apache Tears. A beautiful and poetic name fitting to the history of Native Americans

@iankenway Its funny how every time someone wants to break up consolodated power (such as we have with the EU) every prediction is of doom.

Those in power do everything they can to stay in power.

I think anyone who cares would want a deal made, not a no-deal. But tat isnt in the EUs best interest as no-deal keeps the power the UK once had over itself in the EU since it prevents a brexit. Thats in their best interest.

What is far more likely to happen is if the UK leaves under a no-deal scenario the EU will quickly change their tune and any deals of mutual benefit will quickly be made.

These sort of doomsday predictions make absurdist conclusions. In this case the assumption that no post-brexit deals will ever be made, which is non-sense as we know deals with the EU are made all the time with non-member states.

@Surasanji you got this :)

Someone asked me why DNA and RNA are acids. I am **not** an expert in chemistry but I did study the basics of organic chem and do dabble a bit so I wanted to share the answer here.

Simple answer: Anything that lowers pH is an acid, RNA and DNA lower pH, therefore it is an acid.

Complex answer:

Nucleic Acids are called acids because, well, they lower pH, as anything that is an acid would. pH is, in simplistic terms, the concentration (logarithmicly) of H+ ions in a solution.

A unrelated side note with acids that dont directly donate a H+, your Lewis Acids, they still increase H+ in an aqueous solution because it effects the balance of H+ and OH- dissociation of the water itself. As such the H+ measure is still accurate. However Nucleic acids are not a Lewis Acid, they are a Bronstead-Lowry acid, which means they directly can dissociate and provide the H+ ion directly in an aqueous solution. But I'll get to that.

The individual parts of any molecule can be either acidic and basic, but a molecule overall will usually be one or the other depending on which dominates, RNA is no different, there are three major components to RNA, I attached a picture to show them. The components are a phosphate group, a sugar, and a nitrogenous base (the part that encodes data, your citosine and guanine and shit). Here is the cool part, the word base when talking about the "bases" of a strand is specifically chosen as the the word because they are themselves bases (on their own they would raise pH). Similarly the phosphor group, is also acidic, this should be obvious by its similarity to phosphoric acid. It is a proton donor for the same reason phosphoric acid is a proton donor.

So the only question remaining is why does the acidic phosphor group dominate over the Nitrogenous Base? Well for starters the the phosphate group has a pkA of near 0 , the Nitrogenous Base has a pkB of around 9.8 (depends on the base), so already the phosphate group is going to dissociate more readily than the Nitrogenous Group. However RNA strands are actually far more acidic than the individual Nucleotides that compose them happen to be. The reason for this is that RNA folds back in on itself with the bases associating with each other much like two halves of a DNA strand would. This causes the bases to be on the interior of the molecule while leaving the phosphate groups all around the outside. Since the bases are not exposed to the aqueous solution they do not dissociate as readily as they otherwise would while the phosphate groups are free to dissociate. Thus the RNA exhibits significant acidic properties.

By the way the acidic nature of RNA and DNA is intentional and functionally important. It means that the pH of the solution can be adjusted to effect the charge on the nucleotides and thus move it around. In a neutral pH solution the phosphate groups will have a negative charge. This results in the phosphates pushing each other away. This in turn can cause them to line up on opposite sides with their bases facing each other as well as help to straighten out a strand's backbone.

#biology #science #chemistry #organicchemistry

@sda Not really, nothing wrong with people clarifying for you, not sure it has to be your job :)

@billstclair I've never written production haskell. Just some toy libraries here and there that were fun, useful, and I hope optimized. But as far as I know never used in any production systems.

This looks sorta epic, gonna try it

https://github.com/kowainik/summoner

@thegibson I usually just let a monkey loose in the server room and see what happens.

@Absinthe

An idea for such a challenge: write a program that prints a list of "perfect numbers"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number

@serra

@billstclair A sample of my Haskell:

https://anaconda.org/freemo/markov-chain/notebook

@noelle I'm in the EU, Netherlands, so we use entirely different systems (IBAN or iDeal). Sorry :(

@noelle I just looked that goes through paypal as the only option too? I was going to send a tiny bit to help but i have neither paypal nor venmo sadly.

@noelle librepay is subscrption based right?