Alright ya nerds for the final chapter in my job transfer adventure: I have accepted the new position! Talking with the person who will be my boss I am going to have a higher level of responsibility than most. I'll essentially be the point person for outbreak things. All facilities, all types of disease. She has watched the work I've been doing with the facilities so far this pandemic and has been pleased and needs an outbreak person. That's pretty much exactly what I want to do so I took the leap and took the mid-pandemic job change. No reason to close that door without trying it.
Tin-Can was approved for iOS! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tin-can/id1435356247 I will make a post about it as soon as Android is updated. Think Twitter, but without the internet.
Thanks for getting the UF Boardgame Club an interview with Vincent Baker, esteemed designer of the hit indie RPG Apocalypse World among others :) (link again, in case the embed isnt working twitter.com/UfDice/status/1172716210770915328?s=20)
So like ten years ago a dude wandered into a subreddit I'd literally set up to prove how easy it was to set up subreddits. Needed help with his speech for clemency. I put like 45 minutes into it 'cuz I word good. He was looking at like a 10-year bid because minimum sentencing and had a 5-year-old kid he didn't wanna grow up without a dad. He liked what I wrote. Asked a while later if there could be someone to relay art out to the world while he was serving his sentence. In for a penny in for a pound so like a chump I volunteered. Long story short he was a spectacular case study for overriding mandatory minimums so he did 18 months. I posted his art. A troll army loosely associated with violentacrez thought it would be hilarious to get him investigated for molesting his son. Reddit refused to do anything, said they had to violate the terms of service if I wanted anything to happen so I spent a year and a half getting them to violate the terms of service. Trolling the trolls, as it were. Got my wife doxed, got daily death threats, got violentacrez to dedicate himself to ruining my life which in turn got him doxed to Adrien Chen which landed his ass on Anderson Cooper, launched the ridiculous mess of /r/creepshots and led to the ridiculous and scummy battle for the heart of Reddit that ended... I mean, butterfly effect. The guy who founded /r/thedonald was a guy I curb-stomped into triple digit negative karma for lashing out at me for insulting Clarence Thomas but by then I was a fading memory. Dude made good. Radically improved his art. Landed a job at Reddit - think he's their oldest employee now. Got full custody of his son. 50k instagram followers, reality TV, entrepreneurialism, all that good shit. We still talk. Not nearly enough. Friend of his, whose name I've heard for ten years but never met, vanished into Zion a couple weeks back. He refused to face facts. Was one of many who kept up the pressure well past the point of reasonability. Poor dumb SAR out in Utah spent a week looking for a desiccated corpse because a small number of vocal friends did everything they could to turn this into a story. They found her yesterday. Alive. Pay it forward. People helped you. You help people. The more people you help, the more help there is. "Look for the helpers." I got a deeply insincere apology out of Alexis Ohanian for the shit I got dragged through because they're too sociopathic to do the right thing but today I don't care anymore. I'm not out beating the brush in bumscratch UT but I know that every choice we make has consequences.
I was completely shocked by this story. I was in Utah when the story first ran about her being found, but there were ZERO details. I don't know how well you know Zion, but it ain't that big compared to how many people visit. And according to that article, "authorities found Courtier "in a thickly vegetated area along the Virgin River." That's like... the main corridor of traffic. It's not even a mile across that canyon. It makes more sense now that I know she bonked her head pretty hard and was more or less just laying there disoriented. I was having a hard time imagining someone getting lost in the main section of Zion. Regardless, I'm super stoked she made it out alive.They found her yesterday. Alive.
Made my first stamp that's not carved out of a potato! Thanks _refugee_ for the inspiration :) There's been some really good and significant progress in our plastic recycling non-profit. Enjoying doing tests, coordinating and onboarding new volunteers. Finally getting a little back into the marketing groove, now that my presidential duties on the board have settled down a little. Soft-launched the Patreon on the mailing list, will start posting on regular socials shortly and getting into the website re-design. The distancing rules are making things a little hard, but we've been finding solutions and things are definitely moving along. It's just too bad there is not real money in the project, at least in the short term. I'm definitely putting 30h/week into it, if not more and seeing progress has really motivated me lately. I'm really loving my life balance right now, where I'm leading a meaningful project, learning a lot and collaborating with people (which is new for me, i've aways been a solo-project kind of person). I have time for personal hobbies, seeing family, reading lots, cooking good things and keeping the house organized, having really good times with friends, spending time outside... Twice in the past 10 days I went to sleep with this overwhelming feeling of being loved and well surrounded - like this weird warmness in my chest on a regular day when i think back on some talks or moments with my buddies. I really really don't want to get a dumb job to take away my time. Shoutout to the Canadian government for paying my bills, but i'm a little worried this will end soon. Got a call from the Quebec revenue agency about some weird filling details in 2018. I always had a feeling my accountant did not understand a lot of what I do, and now I'm worries she mis-filled some of my income. I'm poor - so it's not like they can claim I owe them money but that's stupid and stressful shit I didn't want to deal with right now. Definitely going to get a new accountant, because I have a feeling the Federal governement will fine-comb the fillings of all of us fuckers that got free money come tax season.
Had an interesting situation come up the other day. Some of you who have been on the site a while might know that I'm in the medicine buzz, as in creating new medicines. One of the things I do on the side for extra cash is to help some Wall Street types decide if they should put money into developing some molecule that a company is looking to develop (if I have a superpower, it's smelling bullshit). Another thing I'm known for in some circles is being very cynical about science. I think the "reproducibility crisis" isn't due to a bunch of complicated factors, but to the simple factor that people publish bullshit way more often than not. I think most of the bullshit is biased data moreso than fraudulent data (soft vs hard corruption, say). But yesterday, as I was reviewing a diligence package on a company I found a figure that looked familiar to me, but not entirely. So I cross reffed the recent papers from the scientist whose lab the work came from, and there it was: the figure in the paper had actual manipulated data... Not something like the results of one molecular test that an underling could have messed up, but a complete misrepresentation of the work that was done. Needless to say I called my people and said, this guy's a liar and don't ever talk to him again. But there's a bigger issue here, too, which is that the knowledge I have could ruin this guy's career (he's a decently well known guy in the field, though not like a really famous scientist). But if NIH knew what I know he would be black listed from getting a grant for a long time, maybe forever. I'm bound by an NDA not to blab, and I won't, because my career matters more to me than the satisfaction I'd get out of blasting this dude. But man, it's gonna weigh on me for a while. Science can't proceed by fraud. And yet there's so much suspected fraud in the field, so you want to help when you can. But I'm powerless here. Really interesting situation for me (but probably nobody else!).
I've been involved in science for many years, and while I've suspected fraud a lot of times, this is the first time I've ever actually discovered hard proof with my own two eyes. So it's basically new territory to me. The hard thing here is that the false data are in the public domain, whereas the complete data I only saw as part of a confidential diligence package, which means there isn't much I can do. Were I in a safer position, I might have more to think about.
That is an interesting situation. I believe I am responsible for a 'corrigendum' to this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31542391 Figure 5 looked suspect. I haven't looked into the corrigendum enough to decide if I buy it.
This was that crazy photonegative figure you mentioned in chat! The correction shows one figure depicting intensity change rather than before-and-after values. The figure now seems to match the change in before and after values. Using the raw change percent (not log₂) the pattern mostly matches, though I can't distinguish between a 400% increase and a 141% increase in the new Figure 5.In the article, we showed data after transforming the Day 0 and Day 14 values within subjects as %. Based on the advice of colleagues and readers, we show data and statistics without that transformation and show the raw data in the following Figures and Appendix. We present analyses of these data conducted and/or reviewed by professional statisticians (see acknowledgements).
Just saw this post. Does this guy work for a university / research institution? If so, there would have to be whistle-blower channels where you can flag this anonymously. It might take some endeavour, but I'm with you that research integrity needs to be held close to sacrosanct.
Public university. Lots of NIH money. I think I can describe in better detail what happened without crossing a line. Basically the guy published the results of an experiment (a drug trial of an animal model of a disease), which he reported to be a several day experiment, and was described as such in the methods. When I got access to the full data, the experiment was actually a several week experiment. The "statistically significant" effect he observed was an obvious random occurrence, as there was no indication that there were any between group differences at any other time point. So what happened, obviously, is that they just decided to publish the experiment as if it were always supposed to end at the time point that he published it to be. That might seem not so bad to people outside the field, but in the business that is considered straight up lying, no wiggle room, no grey area--just plain lying. When you do drug trials you have to always describe what you are going to measure before the experiment takes place. The reason for that is that you can calculate, based on some assumptions about the data, what the a priori odds of a "significant" finding are. The trouble with not doing that is that you can measure a whole bunch of stuff and then look for things that appear different between groups, which there are bound to be if you do enough measurements. Then you can calculate what the a priori odds would have been had you not run the trial, and say, "Great! There's only a 1% chance of making this finding by chance, so it must be true." But it isn't. It's like throwing 5 heads in a row and then convincing yourself that the coin is loaded, because there's only a 3% chance of that happening, so it meets the p value requirement. But there's a 3% chance of any given series of 5 coin flips, and one of them has to happen. It's offensive to me that the dude is out there getting grant money based on this horseshit. But the grant game is fucked anyway, so whatever. What's really annoying to me is that he's out there raising drug money for this. Like you want to waste millions of dollars and thousands of hours of time just to boost your ego a little? It doesn't make any sense to me. What kind of an ego gets off on an obvious lie? Where is the accomplishment to be proud of? I guess the real problem is with science. The incentives are set up to make people lie, so I suppose we're all irresistible to that force at some point. Edit: I should point out that I emailed the potential financier about this, which he just straight up forwarded to the scientist in question while doing nothing except redacting my name and editing out the part where I called it "fraud." So if this were to come up from his research office, it would be very obvious where it came from.
Since you know exactly where the error/lie is in the data, you can whisper to someone else, "gee, isn't that table on page 9 odd? That third number in the second column seems off to me. Someone should mention that..." A wink would probably be a nice closer. Then someone in the field can call out the fraud, and it's not YOU.
Hey y'all. Been a while, huh? Thx to izzy417 for the reminder that it's Wednesday :) So what's been up with me? Jesus, what a question. Isolation? lol. In the early days of the pandemic, I spent a shitton of time with my best friend in the dorms here, and now we still hang out almost every day, although it's become less and less. I have new roommates, which is cool. Both of them are future music teachers so we hang out and talk/play music all the time <3 University remains stressful, in that the semester still has not started and I'm getting very tired of having so little to do but I also have absolutely 0 interest in another online semester. The last one was v rough, I couldn't focus at all and ended up dropping quite a few classes. Which is extra fun because it means now I have to do even more this semester. But I'll survive, I guess. On the personal front, a few weeks ago I wrote some new "rules" for myself (under the heading DISCIPLINE) and hung them up next to my bed. With the exception of the week that I had a head cold, I've mostly managed to hold to them: - Wake up before 9 - Get out of bed before 9:30 - Exercise once a day, ideally in the morning - Limit myself to 1 coffee per day - Alcohol and other substances only on the weekend - Go to bed by midnight It helps me feel a lot better, I think. Of course I'm still stressed and anxious and the world is fucked, I'm often homesick or feel directionless or scared of the future, but having a bit of structure despite the circumstances feels good. I'm proud of myself and how healthy I've managed to stay. We'll make it through this, I think. I missed you all.
Not sure whether I shared this here or not. We used to have coffee provided free at work. Nothing fancy, just a bog standard drip feed, but I developed a habit. I noticed I was getting tense and irritable and common wisdom says caffeine can cause that. Still I never suffered from any other consequences from drinking coffee. As an experiment I quit coffee completely expecting headaches and other symptoms of caffeine withdrawal - which seem to be suspiciously similar to symptoms of too much caffeine. Somebody should look into that. I didn't have any reactions though, except for the mental cravings you can get from any habit, in my case whenever work was calm or quiet I'd go and fill up my cup. Several months go by. Out for dinner one evening, everyone was served a cup of coffee without ordering it and after the first sip, I had quite the emotional response. A warm, tingling sensation at the top of my scalp that spread like a wave down my body along with a deep feeling of bliss followed by goosebumps all over my arms. I was stunned. I realised how much I liked and missed coffee so I spent some time each week looking for recommendations or places with good reviews of the coffee. It became a beautiful, solitary ritual I looked forward to every week. I'd go wherever my research pointed me to and order an espresso along with some other coffee based drink - sometimes just a regular cup of black or cappuccino, sometimes whatever ridiculous speciality dessert in a cup of coffee they offered. I've never enjoyed coffee so much in my life. Once I'd removed the self imposed denial I began to love coffee. I've never had problems sleeping due to coffee in the past, but these days I can't seem to drift off if I drink any after about 3 in the afternoon. I'll have a cup in the morning and occasionally in the afternoon but I'm not snobby or obsessed with coffee. I did buy an aeropress and experiment with it but it's not suitable when anyone else wants a drink. The aeropress lets you easily adjust the most important parts (probably) of making coffee - the dose, the immersion and the time and the flavour is extracted under pressure which subjectively seems to be a great improvement. I've settled on the inverted method with some other adjustments I've read abuot and adopted. Seems I'm just into coffee rituals. <3. Limit myself to 1 coffee per day
I can't imagine how difficult it must be to be enrolled in university right now. All of the "extracurricular" aspects that are now cancelled were what got me through my time there. It sounds like you've got the right approach figured out to surviving this. Discipline and socializing are key.
Hi friends. Been a minute. Sorry this is so long. Cat Story Went to visit my parents 2 weekends ago, with my in-laws watching our cats. Our oldest (cat tax, he's on the left) developed some bad urethra/bladder/kidney issues from the stress of us leaving, although we have left many times before and it's never been a problem. Poor little guy went to the kitty hospital on a Sunday night and spent 4 days there before coming home. When he returned, he was still acting strangely. On Friday morning (my partner was at work), I called the vet... "So he keeps going between litter boxes but isn't successful in peeing, won't eat or drink, is lethargic, and extremely moody. We thought he was just uneasy about being back after so long away, but something definitely seems wrong. Oh, also, his ears are hot. I'm not sure if that's relevant." "Oh, his ears are hot? Do you have a thermometer?" Dr. L asked. "What, like a mouth thermometer?" "Yeah, something you wouldn't mind shoving up your cat's butt." As I dig through my partner's bedside table (sorry, love): "So...what's the average temperature inside a cat's butthole?" Dr. L: "Probably about 102.5 on the high end. If it's up over 103, he's definitely gonna need to come in, because it's an infection. I hope you have Vaseline." As I balance Rhett on my knee, the vet on speaker phone, a tub of lube next to me: "Uh...should I call you back?" "Yeah, you're gonna need two hands." So I hang up, tell my cat I love him, and do the deed. Once it's firmly in there (he's really not a fan), I push the button, but don't get a reading. I try again. Nothing. Yup, dead batteries. I pull it back out (he liked THAT even less), call the vet back and explain the situation, then call my partner and ask her to pick up a new thermometer on the way home. When the vet saw the cat, they determined that he still had a slight urethral blockage. To fix that, they "applied light pressure to the abdomen and were able to express the bladder, removing the blockage in the process," or, in layman's terms, "we squeezed the fuck out of kitty cat till his massive piss rocks cratered our floor and he saw God." All's well that ends well. He's recovered nicely, and work was very understanding about me missing large chunks of the day (just like the vets missed large chunks of kitty's urethral blockage ayyyyy). The first few days in hospital ran us just shy of 3k USD, which is far from ideal, but a small price to pay for an alive cat, and also we probably would have paid anything for treatment given how obsessed we are with him. When we brought him in the second time, they didn't charge us for anything except his new antibiotic, which was good of him. I love veterinarians so much. They're good people. General Life That has obviously been pretty all-absorbing. On other fronts, a moment of personal pride this past week (setting aside my reservations against evaluating your "worth" and the advantages I had to get here, namely living with in-laws and not paying rent for a full year) as I crossed from a negative to a positive net worth. I did work hard to get here with aggressively paying off debt and saving/investing, and despite $5,000 or so in unexpected expenses. My goal was to reach the black by the end of the year, so it was nice to be 2.5 months early. I have also decided to go to law school, so I'm studying for the LSAT, and we'll go from there. Again, I have personal reservations, but I'll get over them and/or figure them out. If anyone in the Northeast US would like to meet up to ski this winter, I would love company. I bought a pass before my cat couldn't piss. Discounted tickets are a possibility, and I would be able to borrow some of my in-laws gear if needed. I love teaching new people! Oh, and since I never post without tagging galen, I ended up in a game of TF2 yesterday with one of my favorite players, something he has also experienced.
I’m trying out a meal replacement so I can keep up my calorie intake while working, since I’ve been forgetting to eat while working and my partner says I get cranky (true). I feel like it actually makes me more hungry, but I just started. I’d really rather just have a meal, but don’t like working past my designated work hours. Anyone got tips on optimizing the whole meal replacement thing?
Depends on your goals. For me, I'm trying to keep my carb intake to below 20g/day. Which is REALLY hard. There is a meal replacement drink called Sated that is nutritionally balanced, as well as being extremely low carb. I find that eating something crunchy/salty along with it, will make me feel full and ... sated ... for many hours. So I'll have a piece of celery, or a "meat stick" (I get landjager from my butcher), or a carrot along with the drink. Also, drink the drink slowly over about 15-20 minutes. Take little sips. That works very well for me, to keep my calories down (CICO) and my carbs down (Keto).
Thanks for the link! It looks like an interesting alternative to the oat-based product I'm using right now. Any idea why the crunchy/salty side helps? I've definitely munched celery before to feel full. Your response also has me thinking I should be really intentional about taking my time with the drink, so I'll definitely give that a try too!
I think the crunchy/salty thing is just the animal brain. Things that go crunch tend to be more calorie-laden, so I expect the animal brain learned to associate crunch with "nutritional value". The nutrient-rich marrow is inside the bones, and leaves have little caloric benefit... so "crunchy = keeps me alive/makes me full". (Maybe. Not a biologist.) Americans are so programmed to eat fast... and that is not good. You can easily overeat if you just jam food into your pie hole. But if you take time with it, the body begins working on the first bites, and processing the food right away. Then you reach satiation earlier; aka, before you eat more than you need to. The biggest thing for me on Keto is that my portion size has dropped to hummingbird levels... and I'm a 230lb dude. But by eating slow, I take in far fewer calories, but don't feel hungry or cheated.
A quick healthy lunch could be pieces of fruit, some crackers with cheese or nut butter, and mixed nuts. Takes minutes to make and with no funky junk inside (unless you love velveeta). Pair it with slices of cured meat and you'll be full with basically no cooking.
I do love velveeta, but I'm trying to make sure I get all my vitamins and such. Sounds great, though I live in a tiny apartment with limited space, so my thought was that a meal replacement might hit the sweet spot of being not terrible for me and compact. Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into it further!
I've been using Huel for like 6 months now and I find that twice a day is my max for meal replacements before I start really wanting real food, but I imagine that's different for everyone. Sounds like your max might be 0 meal replacements :/ The one thing I can recommend if you're trying to balance real food and replacement is something like Huel Hot & Savoury, which is almost like a chili instead of just a smoothie. I find it's a pretty decent middle ground for "quick and nutritionally complete but still feels like real food". There are some days that I just have 3 smoothies and 1-2 bowls of Hot & Savoury.
I've actually been trying Huel out! To clarify, when I wrote, "makes me more hungry", that was a poor wording. I meant to say (as you also noted) that after Huel for 2 meals, I find that I am really looking forward to eating actual food (most likely) psychosomatically. In a weird twist of fate, my cousin sent me some hulled hemp seeds, which I've started added to Huel before blending together. This seems to work better! Maybe I'll give the hot and savory a try. Glad it's not just me who feels like eating real food after 2 meals of Huel!
I'm having a wonderful week off. Have an oversupply of paid leave that needs to be down to zero by Jan 1st, so I'm taking this week off, a long weekend early November and almost all of December. Most of my week so far has been spent reading, cooking, and getting to a bunch of things I had postponed until further notice. I had been cooking more the last few weeks, but this weekend I got Ottolenghi's Simple as an early birthday gift so I got a pack with a bunch of exotic ingredients, made an extra grocery trip to get a bunch of veggies and declared Ottolenghi Week in our household. I've always liked to put something great on the table, but until last year that'd mostly been a handful of self-made or altered recipes from random sources. This year and especially the last week we've expanded our spices cabinet almost twofold and I love exploring new tastes and techniques and learning how to use them properly. I started writing morning pages the other day. The only goal I have is to try and cathartically write how things are going and what's bothering me for five to ten minutes at the start of my day. I've been keeping a simple diary (did this, did that) for a year or two now but have never been very happy with it. This so far feels a nice addition to my morning routine. It helps me clarify and articulate my thoughts better. There is a markable difference between late-night tired worries and early morning, coffee/tea in hand worries, with the latter being much more important and worth thinking about. Since writing is a form of thinking for me I think this'll be a valuable new habit, not just in the short run. Yesterday I realized which kind of contemplative mood I'm in. I always get contemplative when I am away from work for a while. I use the mental space I gain to endlessly ponder over bigger questions in life, as that's the only way I know how to deal with them productively. But it's always coloured by what's top of mind, and this week it's the woes of people in their thirties and early forties. Kids, building a family, thinking about what you've built up and what you still want to build up, that kind of thing. Devoured a book that was basically a collection of reflections and stories of someone turning forty, and I bought the game Eliza which has overlaps. It doesn't help that my mom is asking me out of the blue if we have wedding plans yet. Basically I'm looking for experience about settling down, while also realizing that I don't want to be gently coerced into doing so. Thus the need to figure out what part of that is for me and what part isn't. Put differently, I desparately don't want to be that friend of mine half brainwashed into wanting a mortgage equal her net salary in an overheated market, or the other friend getting a divorce because it just didn't work out anymore.
I'd like to ask researchers a question, but figured it probably doesn't necessitate a separate post: to what extent it's acceptable to quote or discuss feedback from peer review with people who weren't involved with the paper? Answers I got from folks at the institute varied enough to make me want a larger sample. b_b, mk, am_Unition, Cumol, johan (and anyone else, just going from the top of my head). In other news, this week I tried exercising like I used to (minus running) for the first in almost a year, and it's pretty poor performance-wise, BUT: I stop because my muscles can't handle more, not because my heart is about to quit. Feels incredible.
So the fact of discussing peer review is not a problem. The reviews are confidential to protect you, not to protect them. The only issue I could see is if the information was confidential, so your collaborators wouldn't want you to discuss the findings and critiques until it's published. It's 100% up to your what you're comfortable sharing with others.
Having gone through peer review exactly once now, I'm puzzled as to why anyone would care if you'd share it? You don't know who wrote it, so you can't properly take their wishes into account. And if it's a small field and the reviewer does find out you've quoted whatever they said to someone else, they should stand behind their words because that's the purpose of a peer review.
Holy shit 2nd story decks are expensive! With the wildfires this year, the price of lumber has skyrocketed. So I figured the $8-10k I had budgeted for my deck replacement was going to exceed that by a bit... ... but not twenty thousands dollars more expensive!! So here's a thing I learned about building outdoor decks that are roughly 16x25, with stairs going down to the back yard.... they are over $30k. Doesn't matter what material you use - composite, hardwood, tile - it's still around $30k. And $15k of that is the fucking RAILING ALONE. My third estimate will happen this afternoon, by a pro deck-building company that has been in the biz for 30 years. I fully expect it to be up around $40k. So that leaves me with a question: The current deck is falling apart and is unsafe. I need to replace it. Do I go ahead and bite the bullet and do the whole big thing and have an epic deck? Or do I build it myself; a far-larger project than I've ever taken on before, and will still run about $10k? (While also making my tennis elbow/nerve problems in my right hand permanent and require major surgery on my gimpy left knee that I damaged playing rugby 20 years ago.) Bah humbug. And that burns the entire budget for the renovation of the entire downstairs... which desperately needs it. Home ownership, man.
Are you familiar with the concept of Everyday Resistance?
Oh, very cool! I was actually introduced to Vinthagen by another professor of mine, whose area is political violence and post-conflict transition. If you were into Vinthagen's work, I'd recommend that you check out the UMass Amherst Resistance Studies initiative (which he heads), as they're involved in a number of upcoming actions. It's been very interesting chatting with Vinthagen, particularly around protest as a primary form of resistance, as well as how he's seeing Everyday Resistance manifesting under a remote-work paradigm. I had to laugh as one person in a group my org facilitated the other day refuses to turn on their camera or microphone, which again, drove home the point that in the US, people are mostly casting protests from democratic/democratic-leaning groups as "resistance" while casting what republican/republican-leaning groups as decidedly "something else". I will check out Whispering Truth to Power, as one of my research interests is organizational silence, which I believe also manifests elsewhere as societal silence. Cheers!