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I should have loved biology too

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Re: I should have loved biology too

#201

Post by cainxinth »

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…

> 13 year old kids don't care about the history of computers

Speaking for myself, and I’m sure many others on hn, I was very interested in the history of computers at 13!

Re: I should have loved biology too

#202

Post by owenversteeg »

I love "In textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment."

I think that is precisely what made my biology classes so good; the astonishment. Properly blowing students' minds week after week is a real skill. People are capable of incredible things, the motivation is the hard part. Each "wow" is a great motivator for you to learn more.

Re: I should have loved biology too

#203

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

skrebbel wrote: post #165

This resonates with me. I live in the Netherlands and back when I was a teenager, the English language started to become trendy so high schools began programmes where certain subjects were taught in English. I enrolled in one of these, generally liked it, but it made me hate biology. Thing is, in my native Dutch, most things from nature have normal, natural sounding names. Words like "scheenbeen" (shin bone), "longon…

Hrm. It's (or was?) almost the same in Germany. I recognize Schienenbein, Lungenentzündung, Butterblume instantly. But, hear me out ...

Regardless of that english stuff, which we didn't have as you described it,

with the exception of maybe some private schools, or model-projects in some states,

in higher levels of education, class 11(sometimes 8) to 13, 'gymnasiale Oberstufe', leading to 'Abitur' and 'Hochschulzugangsberechtigung',

meaning qualified to go to University.

You learned that stuff in Greek, Latin(Biology/Medicine/Mathematics), sometimes Arabic(for Astronomy), but tought in german.

English as a subject in school was just for learnig general english.

Looking up 'dorsal', 'sagittal', 'ventral', and so on it seems similar in the Netherlands, at least according to https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomische_vaktermen_van_posi... compared with https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomische_Lage-_und_Richtung...

Re: I should have loved biology too

#204

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

cherrybajan wrote: post #167
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…

As a non native speaker, given the prevalence of spelling "segway" in corporate, this is how I thought the word was spelled, until now that is!

Hrm. I haven't even heard that so far, maybe because I rarely did meetings.

Looking it up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segue they even warn about that!

Re: I should have loved biology too

#205

Post by westurner »

Fomite wrote: post #145
westurner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do bioinformatics? Bioinformatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics Health informatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_informatics

I'm a computational epidemiologist.

If so, then what are the A and B terms in an (A/B) expression like 10,000 cases out of 100,000 unit sales?

Numerator, denominator?

Does any country's FDA AERS collect unit sales data?

Re: I should have loved biology too

#206

Post by westurner »

westurner wrote: post #70
westurner wrote: post #7

Genetic algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm : > Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems via biologically inspired operators such as selection, crossover, and mutation. AP®/College Biology: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology

AP®/College Biology > Unit 6: Gene Expression and Regulation > Lesson 6: Mutations: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/gene-expressi... AP®/College Biology > Unit 7: Natural selection: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/natural-selec... Rosalind.info has free CS algorithms applied bioinformatics exercises in Python; in a tree or a list; including genetic combinatorics. https://rosalind.info/pr…

> and then XAI

And then tests for convergence given different metaparameters and resource costs.

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