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.


  • 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…




  • meyotch@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlEven paper glows
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    6 months ago

    Whew, thanks for not being a knee-jerk about my ‘mental prosthetic’! It takes real skill and understanding, I think, to even write the pseudocode or plain language description of a working script. After all, describing the problem and the outline of the solution is usually the hardest part. Pecking out the syntax takes the bulk of the time, but if you can avoid that step, what is lost? Very little in my experience.

    I’ve begun collecting an assortment of custom python and shell script utilities to accomplish routine or one-off tasks for which system utilities don’t exist. You bet you are still learning when doing it this way. After all, you have to understand the code well enough to tell if the output is what you need.


  • meyotch@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlEven paper glows
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    6 months ago

    I agree.

    Does it count if one uses an LLM to help compose the shell script? I mean, I can and have written gnarly scripts by hand but it can take half an hour to work out a single line sometimes for a simple task versus 10 minutes describing it in plain language.


  • These are all great suggestions and I concur. Education will be much more individualized. I prefer a competency (some folks here use ‘results based’ which is analogous, also sometimes called ‘strengths based’) focused education process.

    Also, education will no longer be seen as a thing separate from life/work. Education isn’t something you finish then go to work, it’s a thing you incorporate into your whole life. Solarpunk society values simplicity but solarpunk society is more complex and demands a bit more from people. The solarpunk dream is that these demands are balanced by a healthy reward of a functional supporting social system.