What does OC mean in this context?

Speaking as someone who’s not American, I lost hope for her campaign when she made a show of getting endorsements from some pretty reprehensible Republicans (including but not limited to Dick Cheney).

I’m not sure how well this works for a bingo square, but something that I thought of was about how nigh every paywalled article has an archive link either in the post body itself, or in the comments.

I find it heartwarming that such considerate behaviour seems to be the norm here. It inspires me to be one of those helpful people adding an unpaywalled link in the comments in the rare case of finding an interesting post where that hasn’t been done yet. It makes me feel like I’m part of a community.

Hallo, Queen (yes, I mean you)

My brain is now imagining a world where a woman is so intrigued by her vampy saviour of the night that she ends up going out late at night and feigns vulnerability to draw the attraction of another predatory man, who ends up being the prey for the actual predator — the vampire lady.

They fall in love and repeat this schtick as a regular hunting strategy. This way, there’s less chance of women walking home being freaked out, and both women in the hunter team feel empowered by their bizarre date nights.

No, I get it. Humans are capable of such destruction on unimaginable scales, just by living our lives. Governments and corporations are such huge structures of diffuse accountability that often, we are unaware of the extent of the harms done by humanity. This video feels like an act of resistance to that. A whole team of divers take the time and resources (air) to help this little octopus that was a victim of human existence. It doesn’t erase the harm done by humans, and it would devalue the act if we pretended that it would be possible to balance the scales in this way.

It’s a powerful gesture precisely because it’s so insignificant. There are many humans who are also being harmed by the ruthless machinery of human society, and taking the time to be present and compassionate something that can be hard. Watching the video made me feel more human, because it highlights that I don’t think that humans are inherently the problem. Some humans are assholes, sure, but most of the problems are because we’ve made a lot of dispassionate systems that are far bigger than we are. I often think that it’d be easier to fight these things if we could make space for our humanity.

D&D is like sex, in the sense that “no D&D is better than bad D&D”

I find that the people who play in groups like this are people who haven’t been able to find a better group, but haven’t realised how antagonistic groups kill the joy of the game

I used to do this, because it didn’t seem to cause any issues — until it did, and I lost a lot of data.

For a while, I was subscribed as a patron to Elisabeth Bik’s Patroeon. She’s a microbiologist turned “Science Integrity Specialist” which means she investigates and exposes scientific fraud. Despite doing work that’s essential to science, she has struggled to get funding because there’s a weird stigma around what she does; It’s not uncommon to hear scientists speak of people like her negatively, because they perceive anti-fraud work as being harmful to public trust in science (which is obviously absurd, because surely recognising that auditing the integrity of research is necessary for building and maintaining trust in science).

Anyway, I mention this because it’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve directly experienced in recent years. A lot of scientists and other academics I know are struggling financially, even though they’re better funded than she is, so I can imagine that it’s even worse for her. How fucked up is it for scientific researchers to have to rely on patrons like me (especially when people like me are also struggling with rising living costs).

I started keeping an informal “changelog” for my PC, because I was burnt out on reinstalling my OS every few months. I can be a bit patchy at actually updating it, but when I do, it’s so refreshing to ask “why the hell did I install $software ?” and then to check my logs and find that I installed it while trying to solve $problem, but that it didn’t work and I ended up solving the problem a different way, but forgot to remove $software. It’s so nice to not be scared of breaking stuff when I’ve forgotten why I did things a certain way.

Stuff like this is why I love xkcd. I feel this in my soul

It does mean something to them, but not in a way that will stop you from getting laid off; what it means is that after laying you off, they’ll quickly come to regret it and scramble to try to fill the knowledge gap they now have. I know a few people who were called up by the company basically begging them to help. A couple of people I know were able to leverage this to get a short term position contracting (at exorbitantly higher rates than their salary way), and a few others instead just cackled in schadenfreude.

It’s just covers different topics; it’s titled “Cell and molecular processes”. I don’t find it as fun as a topic, and it’s also far less comprehensive than the metabolic pathways one (possibly because cell biology is more complex and thus it’s much harder to capture all that we know at a given time)

I fucking love the Krebs cycle. It’s so cool. Something I love is that on the big Roche Biochemical Pathways poster, if you zoom out, you can see the Kreb’s cycle in the centre. It’s so cool at how it is so central to cell metabolism. It’s obviously key in carbohydrate metabolism, but it also acts as the entry point for the metabolites formed from the breakdown of amino acids and fatty acids.

Here’s a zoomed out view (low res, you can’t zoom in):

The interactive website is down at the moment, but a high res image can be found here

I was talking about this recently with someone (read: ranting as they nodded sympathetically) and I finished up by saying “what’s the point of ‘smart’ tech if the humans who use it are steadily disempowered and ultimately, made less smart?”

I’ve recently been dabbling in HomeAssistant and learning how to set things up properly feels like it’s been making me more smart.

I have a random question, if you would indulge my curiosity: why do you use ‘þ’ in place of ‘th’? It’s rare that I see people using thorn in a modern context, and I was wondering why you would go to the effort?

(þis question brought to you by me reflecting on your use of þorn, and specifically how my initial instinctual response was to be irked because it makes þings harder to read (as someone who isn’t used to seeing ‘þ’). However, I quickly realised þat being challenged in þis way is one of þe þings I value about conversations on þis platform, and I decided þat being curious would be much more fun and interesting than being needlessly irritable (as it appears some oþers opt to be, given how I sometimes see unobjectionable comments of yours gaþer inexplicable downvotes. I have written þis postscriptum using “þ” because I þought it would be an amusing way to demonstrate þe good-faiþedness of my question, as I’m sure you get asked þis a lot))

I liked the 20-200 also.

I really enjoyed it. I haven’t used a pipette in a few years because most of my focus is more computery nowadays, but I really miss the zen of pipetting. My arms did ache after a long day in the lab, but I sort of liked that. I think it stems from a deeply silly part of me that enjoyed how sciencey I felt when using a pipette.

It helped that when I first started my undergrad studies, I seemed to be much better at it than many of my peers — a boon which was compounded by being good at being systematic in a manner that caused me to make fewer mistakes and thus finish labs sooner, despite taking longer to get started doing the actual wet lab work.

I especially liked the practicals where we used a spectrophotometer to measure the initial rate of an enzyme catalysed reaction. Pre cutting out squares of parafilm for mixing the cuvette, organising my workspace so everything was in arm’s reach and unlikely to be knocked over during the rush stage, the stressful tension of carefully adding reaction reagents (sans enzyme) to the cuvettes, ensuring I wouldn’t get them mixed up — it felt like gearing up for a difficult boss fight in a video game. All culminating in a frantic flurry to perform efficiently once I set the reaction going and had to start taking measurements. If a protocol required us to take another spectrophotometric measurement of each cuvette 2 minutes after the initial one, I could just do it one at a time, and twiddle my thumbs waiting. That would be far too simple however, and I relished the challenge of taking the initial readings of another few cuvettes in that time, until I would have liked 4 or 5 going at once. If I misjudged my abilities, I’d end up not taking the second reading of the first cuvette in time and I’d likely need to prepare a replacement sample for the one I’d botched up. It was the kind of low stakes, high intensity pressure that I live for.

Even before I stopped doing wet labs, I never did as much fun pipetting as I did during undergrad labs (which makes sense, given that they’re drilling you with the skills), but I always look back fondly on those labs.

Except when I got one of the shit pipettes. They did the job, but they were not nice to use and it’d be enough to make me grumpy for the whole day.

Our entire existence is a temporary rebellion against entropy. In light of that, hubris seems inevitable. I reckon a little bit of it is useful for us

That’s incredible, thank you for sharing