The one in the Aomi region near the Tokyo Teleport Station? I knew virtually nothing about gundam, but I had a conference in Tokyo in ... 2018? ... that involved walking past that statue regularly between the conference site and my hotel.
Evolutionary biologist, teaching-track professor (knowledge transmitter), board game and cat enthusiast, budding archer, teller of Dad jokes, believer that sarcasm doesn't have to be mean. Also a "damn greenblooded hobgoblin". I read a lot. š³ļøāšš§« šØ
4,417 followers 609 following 24,966 posts
view profile on Bluesky
The one in the Aomi region near the Tokyo Teleport Station? I knew virtually nothing about gundam, but I had a conference in Tokyo in ... 2018? ... that involved walking past that statue regularly between the conference site and my hotel.
I use different colors of sharpie as labels in ways to distinguish across either replicate blocks or steps in a procedure. etc. It's not any special talent, it's just being methodical and engineering my workspace to provide internal checks.
For example, I use pipette tips in a specific order, which lets me line up which one I should be on at any given step. When I process a tray of flasks, I take the old flasks out in a specific order, and I put the used ones back into a new tray at a 180 degree spin from the first.
I've had multiple profs describe me as having good hands in the lab. As best as I can tell, this mostly means that I pay attention to what I'm doing, so all the steps, and work out a system whereby if I do something wrong I notice in time to correct it.
I'm a Millennial, but apparently too old for their data. But perhaps you are not?
Tangent: What is the best way to tell a chemist from a plumber? Ask them to pronounce "unionized"
Tangent: What is the best way to tell a chemist from a plumber? Ask them to pronounce "unionized"
or "You had 4 pairs of birds do / not do a joint task 50 times, you measured the frequency they did the thing, but you counted your replication level as 50 when it's actually 4".
These weren't cases of arguing whether one should run a Bayesian vs frequentist test. They were things like "You have run 87 statistical tests with no correction for multiple comparisons and your most significant uncorrected p value is 0.04"
I've seen a number of papers rejected over a single thing. But that single thing is mostly along the lines of "You have done your statistics completely wrong," and are cases where I am fairly confident I was assigned to review the paper because the editor knew I would raise stats objections.
I've accepted that there's a royal Cait Sidhe nearby, and mine have access to the Shadow Roads.
My org at work is hiring for an #HPC Architect role to help design and build next-generation GPU clusters! Our team is remote-friendly, with in-office options, and our current team spans all US and most EU time zones. Iām one of the hiring managers, and happy to answer questions by email or DM!
Can I ask why not Whitmer?
Nope. I actively dislike chocolate.
Cherries are the best but also they are the worst.
The remaining cherries will either be eaten as is, or possibly made into some sort of biryani-adjacent dish. (If I just ate as many cherries as I wanted to, I'd make myself sick, so there are *reasons* to try to do other things with them. Also, I needed to do something with some milk)
In today's uncontrolled experiments in not letting stuff go to waste: ~ 2 pounds of cherries pitted and stuck in the food dehydrator ~ 1 pound of cherries and 4 cups of milk blended with some coconut pudding mix, cooked, and set to chill
Well, the generational change doesn't involve them changing their minds. It involves few people signing onto that garbage fire once Trump's gone, and the old guard eventually dying out.
Yeah, I don't really expect to be an outlier on most things on this site. Especially given most of the people I interact with regularly.
I think tying its box office success to how much more they'll do beyond the initial number was a very savvy move. I mean, we all know there's a lot of film account chicanery, but this is probably going to move some people to see it who otherwise wouldn't.
My own sense of what's normal in child development is skewed by my own history. I learned to read at 2. Only one other kid in my 1st grade class could already read when the school year began. I was doing multiplication and division before 1st grade. š¤·āāļø
It's weird to me for that meme to even talk about a 4 year old being homeschooled, tbh.
J Jonah Jameson. Who would likely blame Spider-man.
But our choices could -- and still can -- mitigate those harms. The US doesn't *have* to spend more on its military than the next 10 largest spending countries combined. We don't *need* to tie health care to paid work of 37+ hours per week. These are choices, and we can change them.
There are some bad things which just are. Even if humans hadn't been messing with the global environment, disasters like hurricanes and wildfires and all the rest would still happen. People would contract illnesses, and sometimes treatments wouldn't work. Our choices can't undo all of those.
It might seem counterintuitive, but I think it takes a certain amount of optimism to even think things could be better. To challenge the fatalism that the way things are is inevitable.
The difference between what you end up with, and what you expected to have? That's in many senses where grief comes from. To risk being trite: Few 70 year olds are grieving the death of their grandparents, even if those grandparents were wonderful and beloved.
Social progress has come in spurts, and while movement has happened on a lot of fronts, it's often far short of what proponents either expected or hoped for.
But our advances have not been even. The huge increase in productivity hasn't resulted in people working fewer hours and having more leisure time. Wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of the few, and a larger share of people are finding everything more precarious than before.
Crime rates are far lower than they were. Though there's still work to be done, society is more accepting of a range of lives than it used to be. We've actually fixed some environmental problems, like acid rain. There is a lot that's been good.
Nostalgia's an easy trap for many to fall into, but things are so much better now in so many ways than they were even 40 years ago, let alone 400 years ago. A lot of formerly death-sentence diseases are now managed chronic conditions. The percentage of people in extreme poverty is way down.
I am, at times, vocal in my frustration with the way things are. But the thing to keep in mind is that this is due in large part due to the gulf between the way things are, and the way things could be if we collectively made different choices.
I had fully expected we'd need to wait for generational change to make real progress on gay rights, but that happened fast enough that it's clear some people actually changed their minds. Now I worry we're going to need to wait for generational change to get rid of the current Trump cult.
P(birb)>0.98
Yeah. Bake-eh-light.
In my defense, "colonel" is pronounced very weirdly given its spelling.
I recently saw someone non-ironically refer to sourdough as "woke". I think it might be time to just walk into the sea.
Do I have any art moots who table at cons in the US and would be willing to break down the process for me? I'd like to start at one or two small ones next year but it's really intimidating.
The Ranch shall flow like water.
In fact, they are not. They're further down the aisle. While there are some olives present, they are a smaller fraction of the goods than a number of items not indicated.
Nice thing about grocery stores: Large signs about what aisles contain. Problem with grocery stores: Those same signs being inaccurate.
I know this is a real thing, and yet I watched enough Simpsons as a kid to keep trying to turn this into cromulent.
I do think the math serves a purpose. If someoneās struggling to pay their own bills, it wouldnāt be weird for them to resent paying several thousand dollars so that parents who could afford it didnāt have to pay for their own kids meals, for example. Doing the math communicates the actual scale.
Anyway, hereās a cat Iām looking after this weekend while his humans are away.
Do we gay dudes get a higher multiplier than the straights? What about librarians? They should also get more cats, right?
(Yes, I realize the numbers arenāt exact. Could be more students would get the school-served meals if they were free. I am fine with that. Weāre still talking fairly modest costs when spread across everyone.)
In fairness, he had the kid on the young side. His other kids were all born in the 2020s. Like, I overlapped with him at USC -- he graduated 2 years after me -- and among my classmates who have children, those kids are mostly in the 4-to-13 age range.
I feel like I need some sort of Buzzfeed-style quiz to determine where my personal level of eccentricity falls in faculty space.
The weight seems less the issue than simply finding a carrier big enough for the two.
Good reason to consider sisters over brothers. Mine get along well enough that itās only the physical space thatās an issue, but adult females are smaller than adult males by a good bit, on average.
My bigger concern about grocery prices is ICE. The US produces a tremendous amount of its own food, but mostly on the backs of immigrant labor.
does anyone I know have recommendations for English language frequency dictionaries and grammar books for Italian and Croatian? I want to try and pick up some basics in the year and a half between now and my next cruise!
I am sorry you were cursed by the gods.
I really hope that some of the people opposed to it are just bad at math and think it would personally cost them thousands per year.
N.B.: This math is elementary. Literally; it's simple division. The kind of stuff that got taught to me in public schools. Probably would have been harder to learn that if I wasn't being fed.
To a certain extent, I want the people who think that to be required to actually say it, so that they can be appropriately ridiculed and/or shunned.
I ran the numbers. Looks like just making it free, if charged as a flat fee instead of a percentage on every US taxpayer, would cost each of those taxpayers ~$35.44 per year. Even if there was no cost savings for not tracking eligibility. For every kid to get free lunch every day of school.
That assumes that we don't also have some savings from not having to spend money figuring out eligibility, who's paid up, etc. If you don't think paying an extra $35 a year so that every kid had lunch every day of school would be worth it, I suspect we have deeply incompatible values.
So the cost of making them free would be that $5.6 billion - whatever is spent on compliance and reporting and tracking debts and whatnot. Let's pretend that's 0. There were ~0.158 billion individual tax returns filed that year. So if everyone paid the same flat fee? ~$35.44 / person for a year.
I want to expand on this a bit. This is an opinion piece, so obviously has an agenda, but it's also got numbers to back it up. In 2019, school lunches in total cost ~$21 billion, of which $5.6 billion were paid by the kids / their families. jacobin.com/2023/03/univ...
I don't (and stats say almost certainly won't) have kids, and I just cannot fathom people being opposed to universal free school lunch. Even if it raised my taxes -- which I'm not even sure it would given the lack of spending on admin -- it would be a minuscule cost for an obvious gain.
I miss the days when the CDC and the FDA were just quietly operating in the background and there was little reason for the average person to even think about them.
Surprise twist: the prof who went overboard was actually just attempting to escape the boat party.
I'm still wearing a mask when indoors with more than 10 or so people, so clearly I'm not moving in step with most these days.
Has Ursula called a warrenmind into existence?
How is this a surprise to literally anyone? Have you ever used an automated phone tree instead of actually speaking to a customer service rep? The rate of those systems even *routing you to the right person* is abysmal, let alone trying to take any additional actions based on your input.
In which case, I would argue it's part of the etc. of debating the level below antibiotics.
Could there be hand wringing?
Important, yes. To the same degree as sanitation and vaccination? I very much say no.
I think people have missed that things like āEveryone has the right to their opinionā and āagree to disagreeā are fundamentally about *opinions*. Examples where they apply: Food Music Best tax rate Examples where they donāt: Vaccines save lives Trans people exist Humans are warming the planet
Lower down than that, we can start talking insulin, vitamins, painkillers, surgery, chemotherapy, antidepressants, birth control, transfusions based on blood type, etc. But the number of people who are alive today who would not be if not for vaccines, sanitation, and antibiotics is staggering.
Honestly, the only thing even in the same league as vaccines is sanitation. Antibiotics are the next level down.
Indeed. There is *such* a difference between the "I have a hunting rifle for deer/duck season" people and the "I need more for my Collection" people. Unsurprisingly, I am actually friends with some of the former. Not so much the latter.
When our lab had a postdoc working with something photosynthetic, it was momentous. We had lots of little flasks and/or tubes of something bright green that it actually made sense to sometimes look at in Scientist Pose (to see if it was clumping and anything was settling out).
That might be related to our entire timeline being completely bonkers.
I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)
Does what it says on the tin.
š¶Does whatever a hyphen canš¶
This paper seems to suggest people either smoke, snort, or inject it. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7921717/
So, I'm relentless square, but: I didn't think you swallowed cocaine? Seems like a weird thing to even have in pill format.
Yeah, no. One, itās really not, and two, my job is teaching them biology.
These LLMs aren't always wrong. But they do not make it all clear to a novice what is solid and what is made up. I can't stress this enough: in large part because they categorically cannot think. They themselves don't know.
For what it's worth: As I was walking around the room during part 3, I heard multiple students in different parts of the room saying things to the effect of "I hate AI". My main goal here is just to get them to treat its output skeptically. I suspect I won't need too many examples to get there.
This week I did the first of several planned exercises of the format: 1. Have students complete a task (part of their normal in class activities) 2. Show them what Chat-GPT produced ~last week 3. Have students write out what Chat-GPT got wrong.
Most semesters we'd have a handful or two show up, and then realize that actual fencing was very little like The Princess Bride. Most stopped coming when they came to that realization, but a few would stick with it.
Said former coach won an Emmy (in a rather technical category), and yet is markedly less well known than another Hollywood person with the same name as him (who also won an Emmy, but for a show many more people know about).
My brother apparently also tried out fencing at UofR (he was an undergrad there 1998-2002), which I find somewhat remarkable as he was, undoubtedly, the single clumsiest person I have ever met. My undergrad team was virtually all STEM folks except for a couple of theater people.
A striking number of people from this administration seem to have ideas that I associate with undergrads who have no concept of how people actually act but are nonetheless convinced of their own brilliance.
There is.
Michigan folk: CVS has the new Covid vaccination available.
Oh, yeah. One year in undergrad, I lived across the alley from a violin major. There were a good 3 hours of violin practice every single day. Whoever it was was far better than the person drunkenly failing to teach themself the guitar at 2am.
(I am aware that my life sounds fictional at times)
At the time I was on the team, he was a PhD student in anthropology, studying the portrayal of scientists in fictional media.
So in a sentence that is actually true but sounds ridiculously made up: Most of my insider Hollywood knowledge consists of things I have learned from my college fencing coach, who is a director of science content at Inquisitive.
As a palate cleanser, I offer you this much better video showing multiple people using a keyboard at once. www.youtube.com/watch?v=n543...
I just love it when men say ... passport.
Sneakers. They mostly used social stuff to get around passwords.
I think Swordfish was the most ridiculous hacking movie I ever saw. They all sound like they've never even seen a computer. Though I did get @mgreenephd.bsky.social to burst into laughter when I turned to her at one point and said "This movie has been brought to you by the hormone testosterone"
