DrAnthony

DrAnthony , 4 months ago

So Thunderbird is super dead this time huh?

DrAnthony , 7 months ago

I’d love to see the health outcomes of this sort of approach in general. One thing that has always irked me though is that we don’t directly test for cholesterol, we test for the expression of cholesterol carrier protein, and as far I know, don’t distinguish Apo versus Holo. Just presuming that expression scales linearly with cholesterol levels with no deviations for genetics (among other factors) just feels like an enormous leap of faith.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

You can bank on energy consumption rising year over year for the next lifetime or so. We have completely run out of low hanging fruit in terms of cutting back like moving from incandescent to LED lighting, installing heat pumps to replace resistive heaters…ect. Solar, wind and other green sources ARE very much the future (assuming we want to have a future at all), but their variable output doesn’t mesh super well with how electrical grids are handled today. Batteries and other storage options are no where near ready and may never be for grid scale. This is where nuclear shines, that steady trickle over many, many decades as a bridge to a future with a redesigned distribution network and other technologies we can’t even conceive of yet. The thing is it’s a long term play, there’s a massive upfront cost and the people involved the project today may not even be alive or seeking any sort of political office in 20 years when it’s completely validated. Even if these plants can’t get online fast enough to meet the peak demands in the near-term, there’s nothing stopping them from scaling out solar and/or wind farms to pick up the slack.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

I guess I could have stated the form of energy I was talking about a little more clearly. That’s actually mostly in agreement to what I was referring to though, as we move from fossil fuel powered transport to EVs, we’ll see that demand shift and drive electrical consumption up dramatically (even if the total joules of energy required decreases from a physics perspective). Yes, internal combustion is inherently very, very inefficient but it just takes HEAPS of energy to move 3,000+ pounds (1,350+ kg) of anything and all of that will be coming from the mains rather than an oil rig. That’s why we (not just Sweden, all of us humans) need to increase our electrical generation capacity and modernize our distribution networks.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

This reeks so badly of desperation that I don’t even feel comfortable saying that they are grasping for straws because that might imply there’s anything within reach. Capable militaries tend to follow the whole “speak softly and carry a big stick” principle and leave the saber rattling for the also-rans. They are just simply FAR more interested in propaganda than any sort of actual invasion.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

I’m not saying Lemmy/Kbin are perfect but fragmentation is a red herring. Reddit has a HUGE degree of fragmentation, look at how many news subs there are or wrestling versus squaredcircle ect. It’s not really an issue either, take the wildly different approaches Games takes to Gaming; each community serves a related, but unique purpose.

The true battle here is userbase and thankfully those numbers are climbing at a sustainable rate. If we ever get into the hundreds of millions of users it won’t matter how many cooking subs there are, there would be enough unique and viable ones that everyone would have just the one they were looking for.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

I think it’s fair to say that basic science in general is underfunded and adding to that academic overhead is absurd.

That said, it’s useful to clarify some definitions in there. Basic science is anything but basic, it’s “pure research”, or projects that aim to better understand some principle and/or phenomenon (a relevant example would be the mechanisms behind superconductors).

That and the academic overhead I’m referencing is the cut that a university takes of grant awards. Most of the departments I’ve been around take 50% of the grant award, so if you need $100,000 to complete a project, you have to ask for 200 grand (or more if you want to be paid the whole year rather than just 9 months). Now a lot of this is driven by an outrageous number of administrators with insulting salaries for what they provide (does the vice president of insert some nebulous term here really provide 300 grand worth of contributions to a university, especially so when they set the salary of teaching faculty down around 40~50K and expect applicants with PhDs and years of experience).

So what ends up happening is that researchers tag buzzwords and trendy bells and whistles onto research projects that really don’t need them just to have a single digit percent chance at getting the finding to make them happen. Oh and if they don’t beat the odds, they are shown the door in 5 years. Academia really needs a shakeup.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

I can directly verify this based on my career. I’m not really trying to dox myself, but at a large state university in Ohio (not OSU) PhD candidates in chemistry were paid 22k a year for their teaching positions. I was offered the academic lab manager position (I held the interim title a few times while finishing my PhD) which is a PhD wanted, masters minimum position at 29k. Nontenured teaching faculty started in the high 30s to mid 40s depending on experience. Fresh tenure track hires came in at 60k with little wiggle room. Because these are state schools, all of these salaries are released to the public. Pick a university and find a prof or admin you’d like to know about and plug them in here. www.buckeyeinstitute.org/data/higher_ed_salary

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

Oh it worked out fine for me in the end, I’m making 6 figures for a government agency. It’s the adjuncts that got screwed the worst, they had no promise of consistent work and landed I think 3 grand per class per semester with no benefits.

DrAnthony , 11 months ago

I absolutely adore how Hades is balanced across an impossibly broad skill range. With some practice, even more casual players can eek out a win and then you have these absolute top 0.0000001% players that can chase challenges like this. Very few titles have achieved anything remotely close. Kudos to the player here raising the bar and let’s see if anyone can string two of these back to back.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

I was mostly saying back to back in jest and was more referencing the next “impossible achievement”. Who knows, maybe some new exploit will be uncovered that broadens the viable builds for this particular one.

DrAnthony , 11 months ago

It’s awesome to see these projects are still alive and kicking but they feel like a relic of a past era nowadays. Much like how stock ROMs on Android have improved to the point that rooting isn’t really beneficial in most cases anymore, the stock firmware on the majority of routers is perfectly serviceable. I’m sure there are still some corner cases where they are as transformative as ever though.

DrAnthony , 11 months ago

Maybe I should revise my statement to “consumer routers an informed user would consider buying”.

DrAnthony , 10 months ago

A big issue is that we’re still quite limited when it comes to analytical methods for quantifying and classifying microplastics. I’ve seen a method from ASTM from like 2020 referenced once or twice, but the most telling one is that EPA doesn’t have one for drinking water yet. I know PFAS for example seems like a recent hot topic, but Method 537 dates back to to 2009 and UCMR3 (even if Method 533 is much more recent). Until we get a consensus on what exactly microplastic is and isn’t and a consistent way to put a number on it, we’re not really generating high quality data.

DrAnthony , 11 months ago

That’s an absolutely wild finding. I’m sure this loops back around to the (impossibly huge) impact of the gut microbiome.

DrAnthony , 11 months ago

I’m just thankful that Firefox still exists. I switched over back in 2003 and got hooked on Thunderbird as well.

DrAnthony , 11 months ago

Well that and we’ve (as in the scientific community) been beating the drum of beta amyloid for decades with little evidence to support causation rather than correlation. In fact, there’s stronger data supporting monomers or short chains as the toxic element and that they just get big and crash out later after the damage was done.