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I should have loved biology

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Re: I should have loved biology

#171

Post by sritchie »

Koshkin wrote: post #154
Infinitesimus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... it'll be fun if you start from what happens when the enter key is pressed- the mechanics and electronics involved in submitting that URL (and some chemistry and physics behind what your eyes see on the screen), the physical transmission of the signal from your computer to through the interwebs and some error correction protocols to ensure your signals are still useful. Maybe toss a line or two in about the comple…

> it'll be fun Not during an interview, though. The interviewer would see it as trolling (at best), and you would fail the interview. And for a good reason! Because as an engineer (and an intelligent person in general) you must be able to separate what is essential from the non-essential for the subject in question. For instance, the physics or the physiology of the process of pushing a key on a keyboard is probably…

That’s the joke!

Re: I should have loved biology

#172

Post by jcims »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #96
bognition wrote: post #8

There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner. In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stori…

I had a similar revelation for structural biology, applying the physics I learned for bridges and buildings to microscopic proteins. They are structurally like a cathedral built by a blind and deranged architect. The fact that mechanically bend, pivot, and move like a complex machine at a micro scale to do real work is the most sci-fi thing I can conceive of. Think of a even a simple walking protein like Kinesin [1].…

I was about two sentences into the parent comment when these videos came to mind. If I had seen just about anything done by Drew Berry when I was in middle school I probably would be in a completely different career:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Drew+Berry+anim...

Re: I should have loved biology

#173

Post by Fomite »

As a biology major who became an epidemiologist, I felt the same way about math - it turns out I'm decent at it, and use it literally every day of my career, but it took halfway through college to have someone approach math in a way that made sense, rather than "for its own sake".

Re: I should have loved biology

#174

Post by kenjackson »

imaltont wrote: post #99
bognition wrote: post #8

There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner. In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes. It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stori…

I feel the same way about just math in general, and all the sciences that derive a lot of their knowledge and systems from it. You start learning math as just high level/abstracted away things where you just have to memorize that this thing does that and in this case do this instead, especially derivation I remember they showed us the formula with dy/dx, but they never showed us any proofs of why or how that lead to…

I agree in spirit. I’d love to see a curriculum that somehow teaches kids to “discover” counting, addition, the utility of notation, squares, cubes, up through square roots, complex numbers, derivatives, etc…. But I feel like it would be tough to create.

Re: I should have loved biology

#175

Post by steakknife »

Verath wrote: post #15

During the first part of the pandemic I watched the lectures for the Introductory Biology course [1] from MIT OpenCourseWare. I cannot recommend those highly enough! Almost every lecture brought up and highlighted something really cool and fascinating. Like how RNA sequencing over the last couple of years has gone from expensive to almost free, and what its uses are. Or time-lapse of bacteria adapting to antibiotics.…

Anything with Dr. Eric Lander from MIT (e.g. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...). Hands down the best lecturer I've ever encountered.

Re: I should have loved biology

#176

Post by COGlory »

mncharity wrote: post #161
ip26 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through biochem, but didn’t fully understand just how gigantic & complicated proteins are until I started learning about computational protein folding. There’s several levels of abstraction just between rna/ribosomes and functional proteins… that’s one of the most shocking complexities to me, most pieces of life are rather elegant when you come to understand them but it’s hard to imagine how complex proteins e…

> I went through biochem, but didn’t fully understand just how gigantic & complicated proteins are until I started learning about computational protein folding. Some years back, there seemed an opportunity to create an educational web interactive, a full-scale 3D folding sim, with hands-on direct manipulation, by aiming for plausible -not-correct folding. The simulation literature having built up lots of shortcuts fo…

This sounds like FoldIt?

Re: I should have loved biology

#177

Post by philsnow »

Koshkin wrote: post #154
Infinitesimus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... it'll be fun if you start from what happens when the enter key is pressed- the mechanics and electronics involved in submitting that URL (and some chemistry and physics behind what your eyes see on the screen), the physical transmission of the signal from your computer to through the interwebs and some error correction protocols to ensure your signals are still useful. Maybe toss a line or two in about the comple…

> it'll be fun Not during an interview, though. The interviewer would see it as trolling (at best), and you would fail the interview. And for a good reason! Because as an engineer (and an intelligent person in general) you must be able to separate what is essential from the non-essential for the subject in question. For instance, the physics or the physiology of the process of pushing a key on a keyboard is probably…

This answer reminds me of the blog post of the guy asked to implement a linked list iirc during an interview, and he does it all in Haskell's type system.

https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

Oh it was N queens, but the line I remembered was "Summon a linked list from the void."

Re: I should have loved biology

#178

Post by intrasight »

I dropped out of tech after a couple years to go study neuroscience. Even though I returned to software, I do not regret for a second that I went to study something so broad and deep and mysterious. I know that huge areas of neuroscience will remain opaque to science for decades to come. I am blessed to have had a few years contact with that complexity and mystery. If anyone reading this, at any age, wants to take biology for a spin, by all means do so. You only live once.

Re: I should have loved biology

#180

Post by technological »

intrasight wrote: post #178

I dropped out of tech after a couple years to go study neuroscience. Even though I returned to software, I do not regret for a second that I went to study something so broad and deep and mysterious. I know that huge areas of neuroscience will remain opaque to science for decades to come. I am blessed to have had a few years contact with that complexity and mystery. If anyone reading this, at any age, wants to take bi…

Do you suggest any starting material or steps on how to get started
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