Excellent content, thanks for sharing. I enjoy tormenting my friend with a constant drip feed of nerdy jokes, so I’m always looking for more to add to my supply (lest they learn that I do not actually have an infinite supply of them)

I do enjoy being part of a nice, orderly queue. Makes me feel like I have some purpose in life. I can just slip partway into derealization as I submit my will to the queue.

I didn’t notice it as a thing that we did until I went travelling in Europe and frequently found myself ambiently stressed due to the lack of queue in a situation that would benefit from one. Sometimes if enough British people congealed together in one place by coincidence, we might find ourselves forming a neat little queue.

There’s so much that makes me ashamed to be British, but this is silly and fun; I like it.

Indeed, that is the healthier way to go about things.

Personally, I struggle with that kind of compartmentalisation, but I would probably be healthier if I could do that. I have never lasted long when doing work that I’m not passionate about, and when I am passionate about work, it’s hard to not bring it home (even if that’s just working on stuff adjacent to the task).

I know a lot of people who work in academia, and it’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing to see how people’s research interests end up bleeding into basically all elements of their regular life. I think some people are just wired that way. I wish that they had the freedom to engage in that in a more healthy way, free from the additional bullshit that Capitalism heaps onto them, making the dynamic so toxic.

However, given that we do live under such oppressive economic conditions, “work to live, not live to work” is an essential mantra to aspire towards, especially the people who put their whole heart into their work. It’s not ideal, but it is necessary to learn if we want to survive without burning out.

The thing that made it click for me is to realise that particles and waves don’t really exist — they’re just terms we use to try to understand the world. When we see weird quantum shit happening, it’s not actually weird in and of itself, we’re just finding that our reductionist (but often useful) models are breaking down and we can’t straightforwardly say “that’s a particle” or “that’s a wave”.

I think of it as analogous to statistical averages. If I have a group of 100 people for whom I know the average height (and other summary statistics). Thinking of them in terms of the group is like treating them as a wave. They don’t have a precisely defined position (because they’re a diffuse blob of people), and although I know their average height, it’s clouded by uncertainty. When we do statistics on a group of people, it’s almost as if the individuals cease to exist. If all you have are the summary statistics from the group, you can’t know the heights of any individuals within the crowd.

I can “zoom in” and pluck a person from the crowd and measure their height, then that’s sort of like wave function collapse. Now I can precisely define the position of this person, because they’re just one person — if someone says “which person are you talking about?”, I can point to them and say “this one here”. However, I don’t know anything about their surrounding context — whether they’re taller or shorter than average. They’re basically a particle.

The key to this is how “zooming in” on an individual person gives us a fundamentally different perspective to the zoomed out view of the crowd.

I don’t use Arch, but I am eternally grateful for their excellent documentation.

I am also grateful to you for your comment, because this is a good idea

Having a development folder is such a good idea that I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. Thanks for the idea.

I learned about it last week; it’s delightful. A close friend is half Czech, so I often end up sharing with her cool stuff I learn about Czechia, and this was one of them.

Something that’s been cool about this is that before I knew of her Czech heritage, I knew very little about Czechia. I’ve realised that whenever I stumbled across cool facts about the place or people, my brain didn’t have anything concrete to attach it to, so it’d just end up in a nebulous blob of Eastern European-ness, and would more readily be forgotten. A lot of what I’ve learned over the last year or so has mostly been because if I stumble across something cool, like this dam, then my brain now goes “ooh, this is cool, I should tell my friend about this”. She acts like a sort of semantic anchor in my mind, and that’s really cool

Something I find cool about this book is that it’s so well known that people who haven’t even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how “enshittification” caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they’d been experiencing.

It’s a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they’d had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they’d struggled to find anything that wasn’t soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.

They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say “all of this is basically just saying you don’t care what job you have, as long as it’s a non-bullshit job”. They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes

In terms of who manufactures chips for RAM, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron have a combined market share of 94%. I don’t know how big of a slice of the pie that Micron is, but it seems we’re down to two (and those two are also investing in AI — for as long as people are buying, anyway)

Stuff like this is pretty context dependent, and vibes based. Did it feel like this happened because people recognised that you belonged to a marginalised group, and were earnestly making an attempt to subvert systemic oppression you may face as a researcher by raising you up? Or did it feel like you were being instrumentalised, boiled down to a 2D representation of who you are in order to further the aims of that conference and/or research group?

Ignorance isn’t bliss when you’re living in an objectively crazy world. At that point, you either internalise all the craziness and believe it’s in your head, or you look up and recognise that it’s the world that’s nuts. I’d prefer not to live in such a world, but given that I do, I might as well not be in denial about it.

Isn’t there only like, 2 other manufacturers of RAM?

I feel like I just got goatsed by Saturn

I was going to comment this, so I’m glad to see that you beat me to it. Benzene is so cool.

Meme: Virgin cyclohexane in chair conformation vs. Chad benzene, a planar ring

Symbols are powerful things. I’m not an American, but something that surprised me with Mangione was how people on the left and the right seemed to support him. It was a rare case of example of political unity amongst regular people.

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

This particular dog is fortunate enough to have shoes

Absolutely they do

I would imagine that there isn’t anything hazardous to that degree. I studied biochemistry, and I can think of a lot of different research areas that would include minimally hazardous materials (e.g. phosphate buffer)

Cats are theoretically capable of this, but the problem is that they’re much harder to train than dogs are.

There seems to be at least one case of it though