You ever have one of those weeks where you're just like: yeah. there might be a right-wing conspiracy?

I don't think Infinite Jest is itself depressing, but you'll want to avoid some of the books that came after. After reading Oblivion I didn't feel surprised that he killed himself.

From the wiki:

In general, Marshall Boswell claimed that this was Wallace's "bleakest" work of fiction. In Oblivion, he "uncharacteristically" provides "no way out" of solipsism and loneliness. Boswell further suggested that the collection "repeatedly undermines many of the techniques for alleviation" from loneliness, like communicating through language, that Wallace presented in Infinite Jest. "Oblivion," he writes, "remains unique in Wallace's oeuvre in its unrelenting pessimism."[26]

Fuck if even Brooks is seeing the light, maybe there is hope?

Chances are I'll still be in town doing the same old thing next April too. Keep us posted!

Implemented an algorithm from a paper, got invited out to drinks tonight by the author. Makes this a real pubski, rather than a labski, day for me!

Also, met with my adviser to discuss human patient data, kept calling our samples "animals". Old habits die hard?

Do they freeze alright? Their parent cells are so finicky that somehow I doubt mine would be happy with a drop of DMSO in solution.

And making microglia:

I made an embryoid body!

~2 months until I have the final cell type I'm looking at.

A month and a half of treating, sorting, maintaining, and cleaning my cells every day to finally get the CRISPR knockouts I'd been working towards:

Now to do this 6 more times.

One of the genes I'd been trying to knock out was in a tricky region to sequence. I asked my adviser if I should spend a month debugging the PCR (after a post-doc had tried and failed for a month), just show the protein had disappeared by an antibody assay, or sequence the whole genome and look at that one gene afterwards.

They said sequence the whole genome.

The golden days we live in. Time to start making designer babies.

Nom nom nom

I'm getting chunks of human brain today!

Thu / Sun both work for me, keep us posted

I'll be around, I'm down for a pubski in meatspace.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/17/bannons-time-is-up/

Daily caller, but it's Stone who's... a sight to behold:

Not understanding that “personnel is policy”, Bannon refused to fight for any of his allies or those who helped get Trump elected. It’s as if Steve felt the grubby business of patronage was below him.

Bannon delivered the Trump State Department into the hands of the Globalists.

Bannon failed to push the President to use his most potent rhetorical and political weapon-Term Limits -in his current fight with the Congress. ... which sent the clear signal to Republicans in Congress that you can thwart the President and there are no consequences.

Tough talking Anthony Scaramucci, whom I like and whom I think was treated rather shabbily, was, as I said, a political suicide bomber. He took out two RINOS: Preibus and Spicer

Thoughts:

- It's pretty annoying to see the guy described as having a PhD in systems biology from Harvard. Word from a friend is he dropped out after 2 years. And even if he had the degree, it doesn't really doesn't make him any more an authority on psychology or gender dynamics than the layman. Especially when half his links are blog posts.

- The guy's an idiot if he expected to keep his job after calling his female colleagues more neurotic and less stress tolerant. Especially coming from a biology background where environment is just as stressful but the gender ratio tips the other way.

- Saying "I'm just commenting on general trends, don't take it personally" doesn't make what comes after any less offensive or wrong. The same goes for "PC culture isn't going to like this but..."

- The arguments from inherent genetic differences tend to always ignore the social differences, past and present, that favor one group over another. Most positive initiatives (select training and outreach to women, under-represented minorites) are evolutions on previous affirmative action policies as a way of addressing the whole "it's not fair to those of us in the present who aren't responsible for the actions of others in the past" argument.

- It's hard to read this:

I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.

And not think that this guy doesn't play well with others.

"Nucleofector – Amaxa" and "Human Stem Cell Nucleofector Kit 1 – Lonza", I may need to play around with it though, as the protocol appears to have not worked very well (it was ~6M across 4 cuvettes, which may not be the optimal cell:cuvette ratio?...)

Wasn't this what Russians ridiculed Obama for as ineffective when he did it to them?