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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#141

Post by bergstromm466 »

nynx wrote: post #87
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #41

After 15 years in tech and a life-changing psychedelic trip, I decided to self-learn genetic engineering and share it with the world[1][2] while I look for a meaningful biotech venture to found. What you can do today from your kitchen or home lab is remarkable. For instance, I taught myself PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and recently published my first genetic sequence at GenBank from fungi that I cultured, extracte…

This is a really inspiring comment. I'm an engineering student who's kind of mentally stuck between the worlds of computing and bio. I want to do research in biotech, but I'm having trouble finding the will to do it for some reason. In a different vein, I've recently started designing a really cheap atomic force microscope, which I plan to open-source, so I think that may be a valuable addition to the bio and nanotec…

> I've recently started designing a really cheap atomic force microscope, which I plan to open-source, so I think that may be a valuable addition to the bio and nanotech diy community.

I hope you do

Re: I should have loved biology

#142

Post by madrox »

Of course Feynman had something to say about this:

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

I knew this intuitively at a very young age, which made me a poor public school student. Unfortunately, there are some subjects that are easy to learn on your own, and some that are only easy with a good teacher. Biology is one of the latter. However, that may be different these days.

Re: I should have loved biology

#143

Post by firstplacelast »

acomjean wrote: post #57
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #17

Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.

bioinformatics (mixing computation and biology) is a profession that is well paid. I'm have a comp-sci background and I work with computers in academia. The pay may not be as high as straight engineering but is good enough to cause some grumblings.

No, it does not. It pays better than a lot of scientists in the wet lab, however.

I have to do contract work as a data engineer (which pays about 60% more hourly than my bioinfo job) so I can live a decent life.

Biotech pays people like dumb-fuck children when you account for the amount of education required. Damn, it is interesting, though, which is what keeps me here.

End goal is to have my own company in biotech, which is why I contract to build up a nest egg for eventual entrepreneurial pursuits.

Many people with PhD’s in computational bio/bioinformatics in HCOL areas are bringing in <130k/year. It’s really bad.

Re: I should have loved biology

#144

Post by jiggunjer »

hnmm23 wrote: post #117
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to scholar.google.com, search "autoimmune disease treatment", filter by last five years, use sci-hub to read the paper. Repeat until you learn enough to find your next step forward.

i mean i want to learn about everything before that too, like history, links, diagnoses - to be sure, as well as testing/tracking metrics and the likes, also reading is the easy part, but what about understanding? when im running into medical terms/and other things im not familiar with or equipped to understand, where do you go? bc i find myself ending down different rabbit holes and my productivty diminishes and my…

Add the word "review" to your search queries. Often, single author articles just review history and current state of the art.

Re: I should have loved biology

#145

Post by locallost »

He's right, but it's also hard. He wants to be amazed, but being amazed also depends on your interest and level of knowledge at the time. And also the approach and skill of the teacher. In my age I've learned that I'm a pretty bad teacher, and I can tell most people are really bad at it also. Even if you're a good teacher, in a class of 20, your approach will not be optimal for all: some will not understand, for some it will be too easy and boring, and for some it will be just right.

His complaint about calculating the surface of a triangle is fair, but actually I do remember that in 5th/6th grade we had to derive things like the height of an even sided triangle give the length of the side, and subsequently the surface. But the Pythagorean theorem was kind of just given. Is there a way to provide a proof that children will understand and thus understand better in general? I think that's really non trivial (and I hope people are working on it).

Re: I should have loved biology

#146

Post by saiya-jin »

tofurocks wrote: post #126
ericmcer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to quantify how strong based purely on dose size, but yeah 7g is double what I would consider a strong dose. I did that amount once in high school and I didn’t touch them again for several years haha.

People have wildly different reactions, some of my friends can take 14g+ and be fine, others are barely able to talk after 2g. Plus potency varies wildly between crops and strains.

Also, there are different types of shrooms, saw at least 7 types last in Amsterdam, potency varied significantly. Also, how empty your stomach is makes world of difference. Also, method of consumption - dried vs fresh, raw/cooked, or like me mixing it with raw lemon juice (makes trip shorter but way more intense - 3g trips were full beyond reality with good setting).

Plus individual variation in digestion/enzymes/receptors/god knows what else is most probably also important.

Re: I should have loved biology

#147

Post by TeMPOraL »

redvenom wrote: post #47
m463 wrote: post #2

I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…

I'll tell you something about memorizing phyla, orders, families, genera, and species. If you've never had exposure to any of that, it might seem arbitrary. But now, go out in the woods and try and identify species you see. You can start with birds and mammals because they are the easiest. As you begin to do so, you can keep a record of them in a spreadsheet or notebook. Look up their biological classifications. All…

Which is why I suspect the obsession of education around the world with biological classification dates to the period where most people lived in the country, not in urban spaces. Us city kids, we didn't get to spend so much time in the woods, to see so many different kinds of plants and animals - and the ones we did, we've already known by their laymen names.

Tangential: it would be helpful if schools explained to kids that all classifications are arbitrary, in biology and otherwise. Their value is in being useful, not correct to some magic metadata tags attached to things.

In context of school biology, I wish we spent more time approaching the classification like: "See that thing in the picture? We classify it as X, because it has $property; subtype Y, because it has $different-property; ... subtype ABC, because initially biologists thought this is different from BCD; now we know it isn't, but the classification remains for now". It would all feel much less boring this way.

Re: I should have loved biology

#148

Post by etripe »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #98

This isn't just biology, it's school . The only time you're taught processes and methods, it's when they're busywork, and you're wasting a year memorising how to do something nobody does any more because we have computers and calculators. What you're being taught is to squash your individuality, demand and follow orders, and to seek your worth only in the approval of your betters. But most of all, you're being kept o…

You made me exhale in amusement at this comment, because it is true to a degree.

Do you think most people don't actually mind this kind of education? I'm asking because I'm baffled this is the way education seems to work in most places and has done for ages . I also assume that something would eventually change if enough people disagreed.

Or might it be because that is still how we think about the employer-employee relationship and the latter's duties - follow orders and ignore your individuality?

Re: I should have loved biology

#149

Post by heisenzombie »

nynx wrote: post #87
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #41

After 15 years in tech and a life-changing psychedelic trip, I decided to self-learn genetic engineering and share it with the world[1][2] while I look for a meaningful biotech venture to found. What you can do today from your kitchen or home lab is remarkable. For instance, I taught myself PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and recently published my first genetic sequence at GenBank from fungi that I cultured, extracte…

This is a really inspiring comment. I'm an engineering student who's kind of mentally stuck between the worlds of computing and bio. I want to do research in biotech, but I'm having trouble finding the will to do it for some reason. In a different vein, I've recently started designing a really cheap atomic force microscope, which I plan to open-source, so I think that may be a valuable addition to the bio and nanotec…

Planning on using off-the-shelf probes in your AFM? How cheap can you get those nowadays? I remember being worried about crashing them too often with our modest lab budget.

Re: I should have loved biology

#150

Post by rjsw »

kernoble wrote: post #24
m463 wrote: post #2

I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…

I excelled at AP biology, but college biology was a total drag. Honestly, it's just the teachers, my high school teachers taught with passion in college it was a chore for my professors. At least software has more jobs and better pay, even if it's less fundamentally interesting.

All my high school biology teachers were good. As you point out, there are not as many other good jobs for biology graduates as there are for CS ones.
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