A cranky biologist who means well. My hobbies include long walks off short piers and anything science related.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Cloning, once you have done it once, is a dead simple process, relatively. Figuring it out the first time was hard, but since Dolly (the first cloned sheep, born at University of Idaho) there have been high levels of publication on sheep cloning specifically.

    Anymore, anyone who can parse reasonably complex instructions and has access to the kind of facilities any large animal vet might have could do this. It takes more money than I personally command but an even slightly well off person could afford it.






  • I meditate as part of a dedicated yoga practice. When I am doing a group practice, i arrive early and perform a physical warm up and then spend ten minutes in a seated meditation before the class begins. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my workout to get my mind firmly rooted in the immediate experience.


  • “Building on this literature, I propose a definition of shitposting that embodies four distinct elements: a reliance on absurdity or “meaninglessness,” the critique or disruption of online discourses, the employment of an “internet ugly” aesthetic, and the use of meta-languaging”

    Good lord, it took them forever to spit out a coherent definition!

    Does this paper itself represent a form of academic shitposting? I mean, the subject is sound but the convoluted and discursive presentation is maddening.

    But, yes, shitposting is worthy of significant further study and all grant applications in that area should be automatically approved.


  • Back when Perl was the language of choice for bioinformatics, I found a huge performance boost pre-processing large (~1Tb) text files using built in unix tools like sed and awk with regex. So while it might take me a full hour to peck out the correct incantation, the task would then run in an hour, compared to four hours or more for the same task using Perl.

    So many pipes…