Link roundup: Jul–Sep 2021

Papers
Production of Rainbow Colorants by Metabolically Engineered Escherichia coli
NLDock: a Fast Nucleic Acid–Ligand Docking Algorithm for Modeling RNA/DNA–Ligand Complexes
Natural and Synthetic Cannabinoids: Pharmacology, Uses, Adverse Drug Events, and Drug Interactions
Fifteen quick tips for success with HPC, i.e., responsibly BASHing that Linux cluster

Science
Agroecology Is the Solution to World Hunger
PHD Comics | The COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) explained
How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity
Mechanisms of Long COVID Remain Unknown but Data Are Rolling In
SARS-CoV-2’s Wide-Ranging Effects on the Body
Was that wild weather caused by climate change? Scientists can now say ‘yes’ with confidence
Sorry, Skeptics: New IPCC Report Provides Unprecedented Clarity About Earth’s Climate
Nature | How the coronavirus infects cells — and why Delta is so dangerous
Swimming gives your brain a boost – but scientists don’t know yet why it’s better than other aerobic activities
The search for the grand unification of aromaticity
In the Pipeline | More Protein Folding Progress – What’s It Mean?
Nature | Single chip tests thousands of enzyme mutations at once
The New COVID Panic
Here’s the Right Story for Vaccine Holdouts
1st Prize Short Climate Film Winner: “Three Seconds”
Nature | Why autoimmunity is most common in women
Writing Can Help Us Heal from Trauma

Others
How to Automate Work Using Python
Field Notes of a Sentence Watcher
This Isn’t the Essay’s Title
When C.S. Lewis Reviewed His Buddy’s Book… The Hobbit
The Rotten Tomatoes Equation
Tell Children the Truth
The Big Book of Small Python Projects
Build a Personal Diary With Django and Python
A sarong’s story
Forgetting My First Language
Kim Stanley Robinson: Remembering climate change … a message from the year 2071 | TED
How to fix your job so that you love it, in three steps
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Global Catastrophe Epic: We Will Keep Going
Growing My Faith in the Face of Death
The Joy Of Idle Living
Socratic emergency
At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks – so why do we lose so much time to online distraction?
Why Satan should chair your meetings
Men Without Chests
Typos, tricks and misprints
Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism

the black mountain rises, a reference point
to every human moment, utterly silent.
No one climbs this mountain, there are no trails,
because the place is holy: it does not exist to serve us,
it is not meant to please us, it simply is,
and in this way it is a god.

Mountains do not move, and that is their mountainness.
– Stephen Hollaway

It is as unscientific to blindly trust scientists as it is to dismiss them.
– Opinion: Scientists Must Combat Scientific Dogmatism

“For it must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funnier to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.”
– C.S. Lewis reviewing The Hobbit, The Times Literary Supplement, October 2, 1937

Is a flower beautiful?
Is a fruit perhaps beautiful?
No: they merely have color and form
And existence.
Beauty is the name given to something that does not exist
The name I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me.
It means nothing.
So why do I say of things: “They’re beautiful”?
– Fernando Pessoa

Before 2.5 years, our brains are more fluid and plastic, enabling us to learn and adapt quickly, similar to the state of water flowing around obstacles. After 2.5 years, our brains are much more crystalline and frozen, still capable of learning and adapting but more like glaciers slowly pushing across a landscape.
– Why do we sleep?

Several supervillains have higher degrees—why don’t you?
– PLOS Comp Biol | Ten simple rules for aspiring graduate students

Richard Feynman, in a lecture entitled “There’s plenty of room in the bottom: An invitation to enter a new field of physics” at the annual American Physical Society Meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959, suggested that tiny, nanoscale machines could be constructed by manipulating individual atoms. Proteins are precisely such machines.
– Phys Rev E | Building blocks of protein structures: Physics meets biology