June 09, 2016 at 01:32AM

Today I Learned: 1) Gromia sphaerica is a curious protist. It's a single-celled, shell-walled amoeba that grazes the sea floor. I don't think it's the largest single-celled organism, nor the largest protist, but I'm pretty sure it's the largest *something*, as it can range from a few millimeters in diameter to a few *centimeters* in diameter. Remember, this is an amoeba. It's particularly noted for leaving trails on ocean floors that look an awful lot like the kind of tracks commonly found from the precambrian. Until the discovery of these trails, those tracks were considered strong evidence of soft-bodied multicellular life in the precambrian, as there aren't other unicellular organisms that can leave those tracks. G. sphaerica's tracks open up the possiblity that the precambrian was actually dominated by unicellular organisms, pushing back the theorized onset of multicellularity significantly. Gromia sphaerica looks exactly like a floured lump of dough. 2) When performing a Gillespie simulation, it can sometimes make sense to cache the prpensity arrays of states your system visits. If your system spends a lot of time in a relatively small neighborhood of state space, this can save a lot of propensity calculation time. 3) Rumor has it that you can make small but consistent profits by buying natural gas options in the summer, when prices are low, and selling in the winter, when natural gas demand is high and prices are high. Can anybody confirm or disconfirm?