ImaCake

42 ms·

601.
The world’s species are playing musical chairs: how will it end?(nature.com)
3 points by ImaCake 5y ago|2 comments
602.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Sufficient space to say things cuts both ways. I see it all the time in scientific papers. Brevity forces you to say what you need without extra things, this can be efficent and even end up being very clear. But it is easy to screw up your
603.
by ImaCake 5y ago
There is of course a classic xkcd about this [0]. I think these help a little with perspective. But my favourite is the rise in syphilis cases leading early psychologists/psychiatrists to think we were in civilizational decline because
604.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I do research assistant work in biology. The best way to get one of these rare jobs is to email the professor directly. They then have a "chat" with you (don't be fooled, this is the formal interview!) and then several weeks
605.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Thanks, this is a valid criticism of my point. I maintain that it is a bad idea that people had it better as hunter gathers considering it is not an option to return to the forest, and we are doing pretty well by sedentary settlement standa
606.
by ImaCake 5y ago
A lot of people still don't! For those of us who do, WFH gives us a bit more flexibility about how we spend the time in front of a screen and maybe a chance to fit in exercise where there used to be a commute.
607.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I think the article has worth if you are unfamiliar with these ideas. You don't think to question your fasion until someone exposes you to the right concepts. For someone who is interested in anti-consumer mindfullness then this articl
608.
by ImaCake 5y ago
>Lots of persons seem to be "uninterested in serious personal development" I don't think being uninterested in disengaging from consumer capitalism is akin to being uninterested in personal development. Being pro-mindfulln
609.
by ImaCake 5y ago
Really strict moderation is the key. It does work on the parts of reddit that use it. r/AskHistorians is a stellar resource, although the price is that it is not a forum.
610.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I use a dining room table chair and never have any problems. It's not a very fancy one either!
611.
by ImaCake 5y ago
>returning to the forest Which is basically a myth at this point. For most of the last 5000 years most people have had a much lower quality of life than people do today. It's not like things were nice before we sat infront of comput
612.
by ImaCake 5y ago
A few years ago I suffered from an autoimmune issue for about 3 months. It took most of that time just to convince a doctor to give me meloxicam, which is just strong panadol/aspirin really. Having a chronic fever for a few months real
613.
by ImaCake 5y ago
>There are people that drink what the study says to drink, every day? Not sure, honestly. They seem to pull this data from a WHO database on health statistics [0]. In stricter terms, you are asking if their estimate of what people drink
614.
by ImaCake 5y ago
The error you are making is that the authors are calculating risk . That is, very broadly, the chance of getting cancer goes up if you drink. The authors do not claim that drinking == cancer. That is ridiculous and would rightly be ignor
615.
by ImaCake 5y ago
>They start by assuming a causal relationship that we simply don't know actually exists They assume this causal relationship based on decades of randomised controlled trials (the only ethical way to get this information in humans).
616.
by ImaCake 5y ago
There's a lot of people dismmising this study. But I don't think people realise how much history and scholarship is going into this. I am not a cancer biologist, so neither do I. But I can provide a little bit of insight so that p
617.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I use both! `tail` in one window for the log file from whatever program I am running. And `watch -n 0.1 ls -lh` in another to keep an eye on the file I am writing to. Sometimes I'll put a watch on the harddrive just to make sure I am n
618.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I don't think it is as big a discovery as CRISPR. These are very cool, but in a basic science sort of way. The unknown proteins may be massively useful for methane processing, but no one knows that at this point. There are similar, alt
619.
by ImaCake 5y ago
It was as much about science as Napoleon's invasion of Egypt was. Sure, plenty of very important science happened. But that is not why Napoleon did it. The legacy of that invasion however is remembered in the West pretty much only for
620.
by ImaCake 5y ago
I live in Australia, which generally has decent (but slowly eroding) workplace protections. But I managed to get fired and walked out of the building with zero notice. So I would not count on this even in a country with traditionally strong
621.
by ImaCake 6y ago
I have recently transitioned from wet lab biology to knowledge work. Something I brought with me through the transition was the keeping of dated physical notes with a digital todo list (also with dates). I find being able to scribble the ph
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by ImaCake 6y ago
Why not use markdown instead instead of .txt? All good editors (including vim etc) have great support for markdown and you get plenty of great simple features without much crap getting in the way.
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by ImaCake 6y ago
Yep, the usual coding tools aren't ideal for bioinformatics. We have our own set of tools that work well with the various "standard" formats for sequence data.
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by ImaCake 6y ago
A given combination of 7 bases has a probability of occurring of 1/16,384. Since the COVID genome is about 22k bases long I guess you have pretty good chance of it appearing in there somewhere. This assumes uniformity, which of course
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by ImaCake 6y ago
I imagine we have tools in that direction, but nothing complete. Unlike math and computers, biological systems don’t really go from a uniform set of simple rules to emergent complexity - there is a whole lot of sideways complexity thrown in
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by ImaCake 6y ago
Things are getting better, but it still so so bad. The funny thing about that Nature article is that I recently had to parse a html table from a recent Nature article. Thankgod pd.read_html did a decent job and I then only needed another ho
627.
by ImaCake 6y ago
Frankly, this looks like the playbook of sociopaths. I would use this book to figure out what bad actors would use to manipulate me. If you want a book that teaches you how to get what you want while also not being a shit person I would rec
628.
by ImaCake 6y ago
This maybe just an observation that life isn't fair. Some jobs both pay more, are more enjoyable, and look better on your resume. Some people are attractive and successful. It is definitely worth keeping this in mind when considering y
629.
by ImaCake 6y ago
The biographies of "successfull" people are full of failure already. Stefan Zweig committed suicide out of despair in 1942. Stalin, undeniably successfull, was a depressive paranoid maniac. Blaise Pascal renounced math and lived i
630.
by ImaCake 6y ago
No, Australia. But there are a fair few developed, isolated countries with little to no COVID.

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