fastaguy88

6 ms·

31.
by fastaguy88 1y ago
Not a lawyer, but there are a lot of crimes that are not felonies. Speeding 10 mph above the limit in a 65 mph zone - not a felony. Reading hacker news for an hour during work time and not being paid $800/hr - not a felony. Calling in
32.
by fastaguy88 2y ago
Let's see: C elegans -- the worm no computer scientist can crack S. cerevisiae -- the yeast no computer scientist can crack E. coli -- the bacterium no computer scientist can crack HIV -- the virus no c
33.
by fastaguy88 2y ago
If you read the Final Scientific Integrity Policy, included towards the bottom is the statement: "and under “Protecting Scientific Processes,” a statement noting that early termination of extramural awards is prohibited except under ce
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Your concept of designed is very different from mine. The iPad is capable of providing a shell interface, but it is clearly not designed to. It is designed to provide a secure media consumption experience. There is nothing arbitrary (from
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
I am very puzzled. Apple has locked you in a cage because you bought an iPad to replace a MacBook? What is the cage, and why weren’t you the jailer?
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
I think it is worth pointing out that Bell Labs was an Engineering research lab. Scientists there created new disciplines, but in the service of relatively well defined engineering goals. Contrast this with the NIH, where the science also h
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
> Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our > collective knowledge together with its students. > That’s it. Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
It might be insane, if you believe that "staff" are all doing administrative duties. But, as was pointed out, "staff" are often anyone who is not a tenure track faculty. So librarians, research technicians, environment
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
I’m thinking you never took a logic class. Is there only one reason why teachers quit the profession? Do problems in one location mean there aren’t other problems elsewhere? I suspect not, which is why your comment makes no sense.
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Non-scientists get excited and engaged by participating inthe scientific process. Including undergraduates on a paper annotating Drosophila genes is head and shoulders more exciting than rediscovering some genetic principal published 70 yea
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
It is hard for me to understand how proposing some minor outreach goal (that would consume <5% of the budget) politicizes the science. Perhaps the outreach was politicized, but outreach is not science.
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
>IRBs are only REALLY required when you are intervening in patient care or pose some theoretical risk to a human. Theoretical risk is a very broad category. IRB approval is required to download de-identified human genome sequences, in p
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Early studies (1970's and earlier) used the antigen (hapten) di-nitro-phenol (DNP) to explore antibody diversity (how many different antibodies might be raised against a simple small molecule). DNP is very simple (non-chiral) structur
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
The claim that mirror molecules would not be subject to immune surveillance makes no sense to me. The immune system is happy to react to non-biological molecules. It reacts to shapes, not chirality. It is a separate question whether the
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
A meta comment: This paper gives an example of a "teaser abstract". It says what was done, but does not say anything about the actual results. This style is relatively common, but I find it very annoying. There was certainly e
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
I'm sorry, but I could not get beyond the first sentence in the abstract: "Living cells are extremely well-organized autonomous systems, consisting of discrete interacting components." Living cells (and most other biological
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
The idea that biologists have difficulty with abstractions probably reflects the “solidity” of modern molecular biology. Biologists were doing genetics, working out the rules of heredity, mapping genes onto chromosomes, understanding meioti
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
I am a bit more comfortable saying "Biological systems also have 'solutions' that emerged through evolution." That is certainly true. But unlike designers, evolution is perfectly happy to re-invent the wheel (even if it
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
I am always puzzled when biologists make analogies between living systems (or sub-systems) and human-designed devices (even complex devices). Human designed devices have an essential property that biological systems do not -- they were des
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
One of the major breakthroughs in Bioinformatics was the recognition that local similarity scores (which can be thought of as runs of positive sequence similarity) are extreme-value distributed.[0] The logic of that discovery uses almost e
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Just a minor correction. Most of the proteins encoded by the human genome are NOT enzymes. Only about 17% of the ~20,000 human proteins have known enzyme activities. Many proteins (probably the majority of protein mass in the cell) are s
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
If we are not doing Intel/ARM architectures, a lot can be said for learning PDP11 assembly. Among other things, is maps very cleanly into concepts central to higher level programming languages, like indirection.
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
One strategy for better pictures is not to worry so much about what the camera points at (or where the focus should be in the frame); instead focus on the edges of the picture. By shifting your focus from the "focus" to everythin
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Absolutely. But DMD has a spectrum of severities, and it seems possible that for some patients, producing some normal transcript would make a real difference, so that until more people are treated, we cannot know when more normal transcript
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
The tricky business is defining effectiveness (and the target population). This drug was not effective at the specified clinical end-point for one set of patients. But it did show promise for other end-points (production of a normal dystro
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Clearly written by someone who has never submitted an academic paper for publication. Latex (despite its many issues) does sevealthings well: (1) bibliographic references in many formats (2) internal references to figures and tables (3) fig
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Under-funded defined benefit pensions may be a Ponzi scheme. But properly funded (X% of salary per month, calculated to cover future costs) defined benefit pensions are significantly cheaper for a given level of benefits, because they only
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Curious -- how do we get information about the thickness/shape of the galactic plane from observations within the plane?
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
ROI of whose investment?? The parents? The federal loan forgiveness program that puts social workers in poor neighborhoods? In general, the student is not providing most of the investment, and the investors (parents, government) are proba
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by fastaguy88 2y ago
Pretty much every faculty member at any university has chosen quality of life over getting rich. Most of them did not inherit or start out rich.

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