great_tankard's comments

>We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those.

Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.

Very cool. Are you a dancer yourself?

"YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE: I have now joined the club everyone assumed I was already a member of."

This is not an original observation, but it took me too long to realize so I think it bears repeating: your personal website is also the one place where you have control over how much to write, how it looks to the reader and how long it stays up. Even though I'm a proponent of strict moderation on social media, it's ultimately a bad thing to hand over that kind of agency to the platforms.

You might want to look into why "journalism is dying" and whether Google (and Facebook) had anything to do with it.

About time. Any organization or person actively posting on that platform is just lending it undue credibility.

I must have missed this drama. Who was offended by it? When was Gary "cancelled?"

This is an awesome writeup that really helped me understand what's going on under the hood. I didn't know, for example, that for the limited number of PTMs AF3 can handle it has to treat every single atom, including those of the main and side chain, as an individual token (presumably because PTMs are very underrepresented in the PDB?)

Thank you for translating the paper into something this structural biologist can grasp.

It's true that Science is very invested in this bad (for everyone else) publishing model, and I suppose if somehow, by omission, they managed to convince the population that open access is inherently scammy, that's all the more convenient for them. I wouldn't necessarily group Derek in with that, though, and he's not wrong about this.

This topic has broken the brains of so many otherwise reasonable people. Is a lab leak possible? Of course it is. But the purported evidence for it is so weak, repeated by the same cranks who seem to have made up their minds.

Also, it's not like the authors of the Nature Medicine paper thought one thing and wrote another. Read their correspondences! Their thoughts evolved over time. It's almost as if that's how science is supposed to work.

From the original paper:

"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to disprove the other theories of its origin described here."

And

"More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."

I don't see the issue here.

Agreed on all counts, though it's important to note that this protein has bacterial homologs that almost definitely have the same function (5'-3' RNA ligase activity).

>Ridiculous not in a political sense (I have no strong feelings one way or another about the economic fates of career writers) but in the sense of being incoherent.

It is not incoherent if you believe art to be an expression of the human condition. You still need humans in the writer's room to know what they want the audience to get out of a show. That is not something that ChatGPT can understand.

Also, maybe people should have some feelings "about the economic fates of career writers." Who are we even building this hyper-efficient economy for?

Make sense. Plastics are notorious for absorbing in the UV range- for most useful spectroscopy experiments below ~400 nm we have to go straight to quartz cuvettes.

You're right! I didn't like what she had to say because the thing she said was transphobic.

The "trans issue" itself is not a weird topic. But there are certain ideas that seem to have taken hold ("the MASSIVE risk of fentanyl candy", "the HUGE threat of trans women using the bathroom", etc) that are objectively weird and, in the grand scheme of things, non-issues. For a regular person off the street, I might ascribe having an idea like that to ignorance. For people like Rowling, Adichie, etc I can only attribute it to bad intentions.

Yes, you've gotten exactly to the heart of what I was trying to say. Of course there are people who get unfairly maligned for saying the "wrong" thing (or when the things they say have been taken out of context).

But people pushing back on what someone says is a normal, healthy part of discourse and it absolutely should scale with the power and influence of the person voicing that opinion (Kanye is the perfect example).

I don't typically question a person's motivation for asking questions! But the "great trans bathroom debate" has blown up far out of proportion, and its such a weird topic to wade into unprompted, that I have a hard time ascribing anything but bad intentions to anyone who does.

People have weird opinions all the time. I'm sure I have many myself. The difference is that she's an influential author with a wide reach who can reasonably be expected to think just a little more before she voices an opinion on something that affects a marginalized community.

Ok I guess I have to spell this out explicitly: the self-censorship thing obviously applies doubly to the trolls and doxxers and "virtual vigilantes." Nobody deserves that kind of treatment.

Yes. I've often wondered about how previous generations got certain things so wrong, but this is the first time I've been fully aware of a revolution taking place right under my nose and I feel mostly powerless to do anything about it.

Even if mining all of the lithium and copper weren't such a disastrously extractive and exploitative process, big personal steel boxes would still be an awful mode of transportation for most people. Our insistence on building infrastructure such that cars are the only truly viable method of getting around diminishes my enthusiasm about what is otherwise amazing technological progress.

Lol

The only reasonable thing you said was that people generally aren't acutely aware of their energy usage. That has more to do with our society's attitude towards how we build things and how we get around than anything else. To condemn people to have to devote all their waking hours to monitoring their meters is an absurd solution to that problem.

Lack of regulation and poor politics have killed people, once again. Griddy was a stupid solution to the wrong problem.