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Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

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Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#231

Post by dragonwriter »

otherme123 wrote: post #224
ellis-bell wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice Calc is free and doesn't corrupt data. It also has full support of UTF8

In the case menctioned in the article, LibreOffice is on par with Excel. Don't believe it? Open up LibreOffice, type "MAR-1" or "SEP-2" in any cell, and look how easy is your data corrupted. I have meet some other glitches: identifiers in the form of "1E123" get turned into scientific numbers. The column was something like "1A123", "1B123", etc. Those things are sneaky: you can have thousands of rows, and Excel/LO do…

> This shit could be avoided if they had a "scientific mode" to not be smart with your data, and be the default mode for any file in CSV/TSV mode.

There's a whole lot of business use of CSV/TSV with Excel that benefits from the existing defaults. Heck, I've seen federal government websites distributing code lists that are actually in CSV format with .XLS extensions and that are expected to use the default “smart” conversion.

Even if Excel should arguably have had different defaults, the impact on other uses of changing it now would be enormous.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#232

Post by behringer »

goatlover wrote: post #215
gameswithgo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn’t the saying, 80% of everything is garbage?

Yeah, but one would hope that science has a higher standard. 80% garbage results in science sounds catastrophic to our understanding of the world, and in particular when it comes to making policies based on that science.

You do realize we've been at this for a few thousand years, right? Catastrophic is putting it mildly.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#233

Post by adamsea »

goatlover wrote: post #215
gameswithgo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn’t the saying, 80% of everything is garbage?

Yeah, but one would hope that science has a higher standard. 80% garbage results in science sounds catastrophic to our understanding of the world, and in particular when it comes to making policies based on that science.

There's the saying "science advances one funeral at at time."

'‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ This principle was famously laid out by German theoretical physicist Max Planck in 1950 and it turns out that he was right, according to a new study.'

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/science-really-does-adva...

Also the story of Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered that if doctors washed their hands it reduced deaths during childbirth - but for a variety of reasons his findings were resisted.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/3756639... https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/3756639...

Point being, as awesome as science is, it's still a human enterprise, and humans are still, well, human.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#234

Post by jpindar »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #95

Reading this just makes me incredibly sad. This feels so dumb and backwards... Why do people even still use excell at all?

Because their manager wants the data in Excel, because their managers used Excel, because THEIR managers used Excel.

It's managers all the way down.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#235

Post by jpindar »

arethuza wrote: post #207
jpindar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, but with part numbers in electronics manufacturing. Excel also removes leading zeros from package names such as 0402.

That also applies to phone numbers :-(

And zip codes.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#236

Post by ivalm »

ellis-bell wrote: post #174
ethanbond wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also... Excel is great. What exactly is "ahead" of Excel? People on here really underestimate how great of a product Excel is because of its cultural affiliations.

LibreOffice Calc is free and doesn't corrupt data. It also has full support of UTF8

LibreOffice also explodes (or at least did a few years ago) if you try to open a few hundred mb csv file. Definitely can’t do fast filtering on columns in large files.

Should those things be done in sql? Yes... could this data be sent as SQLite files? Yes... were they endemically sent as csv and nothing could change this? Yes...

Excel is by far the best of “spreadsheet” apps I’ve seen at munging through multi-hundred-mb csv files.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#237

Post by EsotericAlgo »

jordigh wrote: post #228
fock wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in computational materials science (where ML brings funding) and a funny paper of this kind is here: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11... - they are literally trying out 100000s of possible combinations by brute force, to build a "physical model". Then they go on conferences and brag about it, because they have to (otr they know it's bs). Datasets are soso (you can have a look at QM9…

> (otr they know it's bs). Well, that's a new acronym for me. I wonder where it came from. Apparently it's "on the real". Sounds like AAVE?

I thought it was off the record like the old Pidgin plugin or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#238

Post by ortusdux »

jordigh wrote: post #228
fock wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in computational materials science (where ML brings funding) and a funny paper of this kind is here: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11... - they are literally trying out 100000s of possible combinations by brute force, to build a "physical model". Then they go on conferences and brag about it, because they have to (otr they know it's bs). Datasets are soso (you can have a look at QM9…

> (otr they know it's bs). Well, that's a new acronym for me. I wonder where it came from. Apparently it's "on the real". Sounds like AAVE?

typo for 'or'?

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#239

Post by magicalhippo »

ellis-bell wrote: post #174
ethanbond wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also... Excel is great. What exactly is "ahead" of Excel? People on here really underestimate how great of a product Excel is because of its cultural affiliations.

LibreOffice Calc is free and doesn't corrupt data. It also has full support of UTF8

It also doesn't use the decimal separator I have specified in my user profile, so it doesn't handle me pasting data from another application...

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#240

Post by throwawaylabor »

jordigh wrote: post #7

To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?" The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally ag…

The hyperbole here is amazing. You're saying that a 40 year old computer program that runs exclusively on windows is as un-changable as a _law of nature_.

The english comparison made in a peer comment is more apt, but wow.

The tech industry is so self-centered we think that Scientists should change their fields because of our bugs.

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