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I should have loved biology too

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Re: I should have loved biology too

#111

Post by gh0stcat »

girvo wrote: post #110
nightpool wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Unless you're riding a motorized vehicle, the word is segue, not Segway)

This is very much a tangent, but I think it's nearly certain that "segway" will end up overtaking "segue" as the predominant spelling for the word that is defined as: "to make a transition without interruption from one activity, topic, scene, or part to another" The "mistake" happens so often, partially because "segway" is a much more straightforward spelling if one has only heard the word said aloud, that I think it…

This is an absurd take. We should not bend language around ignorance. There is a beauty to effort. Please take a second to explore this for yourself.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#112

Post by gh0stcat »

intrasight wrote: post #5

My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously ri…

I would love to do this, I just cannot afford it as others have already stated. It's depressing to feel like I spend so much of my life at my day job and yet require it to afford the tiny portion I get left. I wish things were different.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#113

Post by diatone »

ricardo81 wrote: post #96
lotsofpulp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that, but I wanted to elucidate since many people think Myers Briggs is based on data and is not a fiction.

So is it a coincidence that a majority of programmers tend to fall into the INTJ bracket?

The criticisms shared by GP are that MBTI is unscientific; ie: unclear or hard to disprove.

There’s a funny irony that you’re using a rhetorical device, as opposed to a rigorous scientific methodology, to try and navigate that criticism.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#114

Post by abletonlive »

gh0stcat wrote: post #111
girvo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very much a tangent, but I think it's nearly certain that "segway" will end up overtaking "segue" as the predominant spelling for the word that is defined as: "to make a transition without interruption from one activity, topic, scene, or part to another" The "mistake" happens so often, partially because "segway" is a much more straightforward spelling if one has only heard the word said aloud, that I think it…

This is an absurd take. We should not bend language around ignorance. There is a beauty to effort. Please take a second to explore this for yourself.

Actually it's not an absurd take at all. The absurd take is that we "should not bend language around ignorance."

That's precisely how language changes over time. Language is not a strict set of rules. It's based on understanding and consensus, so sometimes things that are "wrong" do end up being accepted.

I suggest this as a great introduction into what languages are and how they evolve over time https://www.amazon.com/Language-Families-of-World-audiobook/...

Re: I should have loved biology too

#115

Post by dpc050505 »

TinyRick wrote: post #32
intrasight wrote: post #5

My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously ri…

I would love to do something like this but simply cannot afford it. I think it is good advice but going back to school for a degree one does not plan on utilizing is not as feasible today as it was in the 80's, largely due to the sizeable increase in tuition without reciprocal increases in wages.

My current tuition is under 500 CAD per class. The opportunity cost of not working full time is the real bulk of the cost of studying in places that have a functional government.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#116

Post by sitkack »

gh0stcat wrote: post #112
intrasight wrote: post #5

My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously ri…

I would love to do this, I just cannot afford it as others have already stated. It's depressing to feel like I spend so much of my life at my day job and yet require it to afford the tiny portion I get left. I wish things were different.

Jobs are a prison, if we had a slice of those efficiency gains, you would have ample time for all the things.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#117

Post by sitkack »

biomcgary wrote: post #85
TinyRick wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to do something like this but simply cannot afford it. I think it is good advice but going back to school for a degree one does not plan on utilizing is not as feasible today as it was in the 80's, largely due to the sizeable increase in tuition without reciprocal increases in wages.

I was paid to get a PhD in Biology, albeit just enough to live on. Most people in PhD programs are, either through being a TA (teacher's assistant) or RA (research assistant). The real financial cost is the opportunity cost of 5-6 years of your life. Whether or not broad support for training scientists holds up during and after the current administration remains to be seen.

Please, the cost isn’t your life, that is life and it is great.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#118

Post by BeFlatXIII »

ern wrote: post #106
kleiba wrote: post #2

A while ago, I taught CS for a year in a local high school. I can very much relate to the notion of "astonishing facts were presented without astonishment": as a teacher, you don't have the freedom to teach whatever you want (of course), but you're very tightly bound to a curriculum that's developed by the state government. And for CS, this curriculum was so uninteresting and uninspiring (what a surprise: 13 year old…

I can really relate to your experience, even though mine was from a parent's perspective rather than as a teacher. I found a similar thing when tutoring one of my children in trigonometry. The way the material was being presented in school didn't click with him, but astonishingly, despite having studied it decades ago both at school and university, explaining it to him, it finally made sense to me . The unit circle d…

> I also think this is where things like intergenerational math phobia come from: (elementary) teachers who don't grasp core concepts, are scared off, and can't help their own students, creating an ongoing cycle.

I hope you appreciate my addition of the other common path of math phobia.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#119

Post by ethan_smith »

mleroy wrote: post #61

I can really relate to this — in school, biology felt like dry memorization. It never clicked with me, and I wrote it off for years. If I could recommend one subtopic of biology to math and physic people, it would definitely be mycology ! It's like real-life Pokémon GO and field mycology has a "collect 'em all" vibe. You get out into nature, identify and catalog fungi — it scratches the same itch as exploring an open…

Mycology is also becoming a computational frontier - projects like FungiNet use graph networks to map symbiotic relationships, and citizen science platforms generate massive datasets perfect for ML applications beyond just classification. The unsolved phylogenetic relationships and complex biochemical pathways of fungi represent some of the most interesting computational problems in modern biology.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#120

Post by mncharity »

keithwhor wrote: post #69
intrasight wrote: post #5

My fork in the road with hard tech hard science versus biology was in high school. It seemed that students that wanted to become doctors took AP biology and students that wanted to be engineers took physics and chemistry. I had wanted to be an engineer since I was 12 years old so I felt the decision was already made. But all studying neural networks in college in the 80s I realized that there was this tremendously ri…

I've been programming since I was eight, but truly fell in love with biology in 12th grade chemistry: the first introduction to organic chemistry and biochemistry. It was the first time I truly started grokking the application of systems-level thinking to the biological world; how do trees "know" to turn red in the autumn? How do fetuses assemble themselves from two cells? I decided to purse a double major in biochem…

Has anyone seen content that used this multiscale networking and population dynamics as an instructional approach?

For small example, there was a Princeton(?) coffee-table book which used "everyday" examples to illustrate cell/embryonic organizational techniques - like birds equally spacing themselves along a wire. Or compartmentalization, as a cross-cutting theme from molecules to ecosystems.

I've an odd hobby interest in exploring what science education content might look like, if incentives were vastly different, and massive collaborative domain expertise was allocated to crafting insightful powerful rough-quantitative richly-interwoven tapestry.

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