I have very, very strong opinions about the the US national anthem (the Star Spangled Banner). It’s too long, too boring, the words are weird because it was a poem first. As a kid, I had a hard time remembering the lyrics to the song (to put it in perspective, I had no problem remembering the Canadian national anthem after couple listens of the version that was on the South Park Movie OST). Furthermore, the US national anthem is written by a pro-slavery dick head. Lastly, 99% of people do not have the vocal range to hit the highest notes.

You know what is a great, catchy song, that anyone can sing? Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land. I am half willing to drop the lines critical of the US government, if it means that it would be chosen as the national anthem. (Edit: grammar)

Yeah, I wanted to go and learn more shit, didn’t matter what (and my parents didn’t care either), I just wanted to learn more. Eventually landed on biology and got a BS. I still wanted to learn more so I got a PhD in biology. I’m a postdoc now and still learning and discovering cool things.

Relative to my qualification i’m paid like shit and nothing about my position is permanent, so it’s stressful. I love my job though, and don’t regret my path through higher ed…except maybe that I’d like to have learned skills to be able to fix my own car.

Yeah, preprints are becoming more common in bio too.

Not always—it depends on the publisher for sure, and possibly the field (e.g., physics, chemistry).

In biology, you have several models for peer review. Completely blind reviews where both reviewers and authors are anonymized. You also have semi blind models where the reviewers know the identities of the authors, but the authors don’t know reviewers’ identities. You also have open reviews where everyone knows one another’s identities.

In completely blind and semi-blind models, you occasionally have reviewers that reveal their identity.

I’ve got the ai search bullshit turned off for my Google searches.

I occasionally use chatgpt to write awk scripts for me for work because I find awk difficult. The one liners it spits out are wrong 7/10 times, but it puts me in the right direction, so it’s not completely useless. Now that I type this out, I wonder if it’s hindering my awk-learning…

It is pretty good at annotating code that already works, which is pretty convenient.

I didn’t have the tape, but instead had the plastic rings that had a tiny bit of powder in it. I wonder if they had similar smells.

Arborescence is one of my favorite examples of convergent evolution .

You forgot the part where you step on the rake in different ways to see which one whacks you in the face the fastest.

It depends on how much you like QTE gameplay and turn based JRPGs. If neither appeals to you, then the refund was a great idea. If one or the other appeals to you, then I think it’s worth sitting through because both gameplay mechanics are executed well enough and the narrative is good. If both appeal to you then you’ve missed out in getting a refund.

I really enjoyed this game. The gameplay is intuitive, but challenging; the narrative is engaging; the soundtrack is incredible.

Instructions not clear. All I got was goatse and a stinky after taste.

2/10

Japanese and Mexican for the sake of the question. It’s what I grew up eating, and I hate the idea of being without my familiar comfort foods.

Truthfully though, I love eating too much to limit myself regionally or to just two countries. There’s so much I haven’t tried.

“fetid” is great descriptor. It to me feels more visceral than “rancid”.

I think I disagree with “grape” being the worst though. Artificial grape flavor is the most honest one, be it medicine or soda. It’s the distant cousin that shows up to the wedding or funeral in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip flops; it’s the octagenerian emeritus faculty member that shows up to seminar and sits in the front row and sleeps through the presentation; it’s the Kazaa (or Morpheus or Limewire) file labeled “Blink182.mp3.exe”—you look at it and you know exactly what you’re gonna get.

The anatomical answer is sagitally down the midline.

I felt that in the bone. Postdoc life is one foot getting ready to move and the other foot dreading every decision that led to the thought “A PhD is a good idea”

It was a good idea, but holy shit is it all sorts of miserable.

I CHOOSE YOU, BALLSACK FR- I mean, turtle frog! https://share.google/2q4ew0HzbeLWAjPfm

Do lizard-people have hemipenes and cloacas?

Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.

Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.

In other groups it’s not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.

Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.

Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.

Eukaryotic sex determination isn’t a binary and it isn’t even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It’s a grab-bag of whatever doesn’t perma-fuck your genome.

Source: me, I’m a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.

Somewhat related—oldies stations are like this, except with “new” songs entering the rotation periodically. Of course, when the end of the year rolls around they play the “Top 100 songs of the year” which are essentially the same set of songs in a haphazard order.

I didn’t mind it so much because it was much better than listening to the low hum of showcase coolers of a mom-and-pop grocery store. However, it was pretty jarring when I heard them play a song I distinctly remember hearing on the radio as a kid riding in the back of the van getting dropped off for 1st grade (or some such young age)

Maybe it’s haunted by a drunk cow?

Yeah, it’s generally between Science and Nature in terms of greatest publication prestige. Most scientists work their butts off to get their works published in either of those, only to get their work desk-rejected and ultimately published in “less prestigious”, field-specific journals.

That’s not to say the Science and Nature are the end all be all of scientific journals; there are many journals specific to each field that is also prestigious.