Sunday, August 21, 2016

August 21, 2016 at 06:06AM

Today I Learned: 1) According to one paper comparing truly wild-type E. coli to a domesticated version (http://ift.tt/2bLJyBI), wild-type E. coli have slower and more error-prone translation than their domesticated counterparts. The authors hypothesized that this was because wild-type E. coli typically live in nutrient-limited conditions in which growth is limited, so there isn't as much selection pressure for accurate, fast translation as there is in a lab environment. 2) ...how to write a Python app to interface with a Facebook and/or Twitter account, at least in the broad outlines. It's amazingly simple, except where it gets hard. The simple part is the broad outline bit -- both Facebook and Twitter have public APIs and Python libraries that can access them, so it's just a matter of installing the library and writing a little simple code to make calls. ...Except where it gets hard. Right now I'm stuck on Facebook authentication. It's easy to manually generate an authentication token through Facebook, which is good for a couple of hours, but that's not a good solution for something I want to run a lot. For that, I probably need to emulate a Facebook login request, which means building a whole HTML form in my Python script. That should actually be doable, but it's more annoying than I want to handle right now. Anyone know a better way to log a bot in to Facebook? 3) Sci-fi author Gregory Benford is also a professional astrophysicist, faculty at UC Irvine, and a frequent consultant for NASA.

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