Viewing profile — throwawayarnty

Do people have to sign waivers so phone checkers aren’t liable if and when robbers come and take the whole basket of phones ?

Having lived in many European countries, Netherlands was by far the most openly racist of them all. Especially during coronavirus. Just browse a Facebook apartment rental group in …

As another anecdote. It is common for apartment ads in Netherlands to explicitly say “no foreigners!” in their ads. Which was a shock to me when first seeing them on Facebook by 18…

I found Wikipedia most inconsistent when dealing with academics. Whether living academics are included or not has no relationship with whether they are prominent or influential. Th…

My only objection is the food/fruit/vegetable argument. The best fruits and veggies come from gardens, most from Japan. Random fruits and veggies from the wild mostly taste overly …

I can’t feel sorry for people who take a line of credit and use it to put it in cryptocurrency. Maybe its schadenfreude, but I feel they all got what they deserved. Trying to make …

You’re right that France is also bad (also spain) but it’s better to sample around phd salaries in different countries. Roughly in euros per month: Netherlands: 3000 Sweden: 3000 S…

As a non Brit but had a permanent position in Oxbridge, my advice was to look beyond the UK. Even within Europe, there are many institutes that are strictly better than oxbridge. I…

PhD in the UK is a different level of poverty compared with PhDs in any other “Western” country. Can you imagine graduating at the top of your class and you living in London or nea…

The thing that is so foreign to me in the UK is their academic culture. There are people who literally think there are only two universities worth being at: Cambridge and Oxford. T…

Do everything yourself to show them how things should be done.

The desire to live in NYC is mostly for the hype and story you can tell yourself. The reality is that the daily commute, expenses, and crowds is worse than other places. Your daily…

Even if FSD doesn’t work out Andrej still has an impressive achievement for 5 years. I’m not sure if many people 5 years out of their PhD can say they did anything close to what An…

University rankings are mostly bunk because they weigh mostly on perception and lagging indicators. A university can deteriorate for decades while remaining high on ranking. The on…

The interesting thing is that knowing these facts has no correlation with whether you are a good biologist. Real biology involves designing clever wet lab experiments, analysing da…

Biology is particularly difficult to learn in school or from any book because one cannot “do” much biology on pen and paper. Math, physics, and certain parts of chemistry can actua…

I hear a lot how people find it difficult to slog through anna karenina because of its length and numerous characters. They cannot see how such a book could be one of the greatest …

Highly recommend the 2016 tv series of war and peace starting Paul Dano. Sometimes the movie can be better than the book, especially if the book is a dense classic.

Amazing how much China has changed over the past 60 years. From backwards and famined to a global super power.

Single cell sequencing technology is analogous to taking many radios, and listing all the parts the radios contains. Then clustering radios by similarity in their part abundances. …

When cooking zucchini it is worth chopping a slice in the middle and tasting it. If it’s bitter just throw it out. The worst is you cut 5 zucchini’s , and one bitter zucchini ruins…

How would this advice apply to people who have won Nobel prizes? These people worked on things that were scientifically unpopular and deemed unimportant (eg autophagy, GFP). What m…

What works for us when you’re in a city is to pick a restaurant you want to go to, then walk in the general direction there. Allow spontaneous detours in corners you find interesti…

I wonder how member of Congress justify that they need a special health care that is different from the public. It seems to make sense and align incentives to have members use the …