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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#241

Post by LockAndLol »

This virology course (1) made me start taking courses on Khan academy to understand cells (I don't) and DNA. There really are few occasions in life that remind me of my years as a child giddy to understand how things work and I'm glad I found that virology course. This blog post strikes a cord with me.

My anguish for the worldwide state of education is abysmal. School and university are necessary, but the goal isn't to make us curious and wonder about things or excited to learn. The education system packages us up for work and is heavily focused on knowledge, not understanding. If you fail school, or uni - or look like you failed - people think you're dumb and unintelligent.

You can be lucky sometimes and get a teacher who's actually passionate about their subject AND is able to teach. Most teachers and professors I had were just I'm the system and mentally done. I can't blame most of them. The salary is often miserable, the curriculum bad, the books boring, administration annoying and the parents... good grief. Of course some really shouldn't have become teachers or let near kids, but that's the minority.

Anyway, I'm really glad the pandemic happened. Studying biology and physics at home has been rewarding and highly interesting. If only school and uni were/had been the same...

(1): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNldpyRUBBEz...

Re: I should have loved biology

#242

Post by infinite8s »

dekhn wrote: post #234
nynx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AFM isn't really used in biology.

But it is used a lot in biophysics!

Re: I should have loved biology

#243

Post by Attained »

john_minsk wrote: post #184
jeromenerf wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love biology yet I could not have described more opposite interests. I have zero interests in producing gmo in my kitchen, but I am definitely hooked on plants interaction and selection in open fields. Biology is pretty broad a field. Science of the living.

Not to start a holy war, but what is the difference at the end of the day? Isn't one just faster?

GMOs are the somewhat intentional introduction of genes from another organism while breeding approaches often involve radiation to expedite random mutations which may have less obvious changes that are not safe.

Re: I should have loved biology

#244

Post by Bjartr »

rimliu wrote: post #158
etripe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I think that comment just reflects the current thinking that you can have something without putting any effort.

I think this comment reflects the current thinking that the amount of effort is intrinsically tied to attained value.

Re: I should have loved biology

#245

Post by infinite8s »

kls wrote: post #182
MauranKilom wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not the same education system, but there are many things I no longer do explicitly that are nevertheless important for understanding the concept. Off the top of my head, for just mathematics: - Long division - Calculate limits - Curve sketching These aren't things I do by hand any more. But if I hadn't learned how to do them, I wouldn't be able to apply them to more advanced problems. From my extremely limit…

I would say the times tables is a good example, once you know the mechanics of multiplying 2 numbers you don't need to redundantly memorize the exact values of tables of numbers. The mechanics and how to solve for it are the important pieces to learn. Further I think it actually does more harm as it hinders the child's ability to look at numbers as placeholders and variables when they get into higher level maths. Spe…

You don't need to memorize the times tables once you understand multiplication, but having fluency in being able to do that makes subsequent mathematics much easier (for example, I'm not sure how you could learn algebra without having a fluent ability to do arithmetic).

Re: I should have loved biology

#246

Post by Attained »

animal_spirits wrote: post #231
nkrisc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One occurs naturally and thus happens all around us without human interaction. So there's value in understanding how things work without any input from humans. One is more like studying a natural process while the other is the mechanics of that process.

Yes exactly. The fruit might be the same at the end of the day; red, round, juicy. But there is more that goes into growing fruit than just reaping the end product. There is fertilizers which run off into lakes [1], pesticides and herbicides that get into the soil increasingly making soil less fertile [2], market cornering tactics like seed patenting [3]. I think it is more important to study how to make nature do th…

Look up mutagenic breeding, the idea breeders are taking a more natural approach is nuts.

I do agree we should invest more heavily in tech like bug resistance to reduce necessary pesticides.

Re: I should have loved biology

#247

Post by infinite8s »

tejtm wrote: post #95
mannykannot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts. They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance. It is the natural gift of being able to identify the key features of the forest despite the preponderance of obfuscating trunks and branches. It is the gift of seeing some sort of order behind ci…

my observations which I think broadly agrees. -Math/CS: inherently better at abstracting & are "proof" centric. -Life Sciences: inherently better at observing then reasoning and are "argument" centric. Coming from the CS side this is not a marriage made in heaven as opinions don't matter by design.

Schrödinger published a very interesting treatise (What is Life - http://www.whatislife.ie/downloads/What-is-Life.pdf) which inspired a generation of physicists to study biology. Biology is still mostly at the early observational phase (similar to physics in the early Renaissance period), although slowly more systems-level approaches are being applied to be able to model biology with the same types of tools (namely mathematics) that have been so successful in physics.

Re: I should have loved biology

#249

Post by koeng »

hnmm23 wrote: post #105
koeng wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is awesome that you're getting started in this community! Here are just a few very biased recommendations of interesting folks for your podcast: There are a bunch of different cliches (community bio vs biohacking vs citizen bio vs grinders vs transhumanists are all VERY different), but I'd recommend checking out a few of the conferences. iGEM is going on right now which is super cool, and BioHTP and Biosummit are…

if i want to learn more bio not bc i want to hack or edit genes or whatever but because of reasons such as: understanding autoimmune diseases, the treatments for them, relationship to other issues, medication and their mechanism of actions, and just a whole host of other stuff basically i want to learn how to help people i know who suffer from multiple autoimmune diseases and the mental health/daily life and fertilit…

That's unfortunately much more into the medical field, so I'm not really sure where to start. I only really work with single celled organisms.

Re: I should have loved biology

#250

Post by Balgair »

billfruit wrote: post #240
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…

Any books you would recommend for someone coming from CS background to get a jump start on this topic.

The article has a lot of really good introductory texts in it.
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