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A thread split is a great idea. Maybe call the new thread "The Lowest Common Denominator Goes To Space".

Although, what do I know, I'm just the asshole over here who clearly doesn't value our species, because all I'm doing to save it is devoting my life and career to biomedicine in an effort to figure out how to solve some of our self-created problems so we can keep going for long enough to not fucking accidentally murder ourselves off.

Currently, however, our planet is overrun by self-obsessed colonialists, and that mentality really isn't ready for interplanetary communication IMO.

I'll be over here in the corner, quietly valuing our species.

Semi-nihilistic whinging aside, am I the only one who gets tired of the whole trope of "humans are the real monsters" thing in sci-fi? Like, I get that were shitty, but it seems premature to assume we're the shittiest thing to come out of the universe.  I mean we evolved this way, why wouldn't we assume some other species would evolve  down a similar path due to similar evolutionary pressures and be just as rapey and murdery and dicks as we are? Hell, what if we're not even that bad, all things considered? Who's to say the Orks from Warhammer 40 aren't on the other side of the Galaxy, being more war-like than could possibly be, on our worst day?

Odds seem pretty high that the universe is full of assholes pretty much just like us. However, we aren't done evolving because evolution is an ongoing process, and presumably there are also people out there of various species who have evolved through the kinds of pressures that come from being a very successful species, such as the population and conflict crunch we have managed to put ourselves into, and come out better for it in the end, as I hope that we will also.

My company has essentially exactly the oppposite policy.  You can see how this works out with regards to my co-worker.

My co-worker has done insane amounts of overtime.  In April, she took maybe 3 days off in total.  She's done 24 hour shifts, 12 nights of shifts without a break.  All voluntarily, but she's done a lot for the company.  Last year, she was practically running the building throughout the summer, on her own.

In return, she asked for two things.  1, to move on site, as the option is available to nightworkers.  2, she went for a job opening which would see her promoted to senior (my staff level).

She was told "hahaha, no.  Maybe next year" and she was passed over for the senior position by someone who is an old friend of the head of department.  So you know what she does now?  Exactly what is required by her job, and nothing more.  She has, like me, learned that there is no benefit to sticking your neck out for this company.  The overtime pay isn't even really that great, and accounting often mess it up, requiring more work to resolve it.  In return, you're taken for granted.  She's not motivated to try any harder than she needs to here any more, and if she needs money she'd rather pick up part-time work elsewhere than cover shifts here.

This sounds like a person who should be getting paid a lot more money somewhere else.

For that matter, so do you.

We could build an enormous colony ship, say it's meant to colonize Mars and turn it into a Libertarian wonderland where no one has to vaccinate anything, the government only exists to make sure everyone is a good Christian, and cucks won't be allowed.

And then we could fly that ship into the sun.

Perfect solution 10/10: wins  for actually doing something practical and feasible that demonstrates valuing our species.

['Chinese'!]

People! Must I be really be the one to remind you that we're dealing with Chinese fortune cookies here?!

The operative word being 'Chinese'!

Now then, who is the most famous writer in Chinese literature?

Lu Xun.

this is why i'm sincerely hoping we colonize a planet in my lifetime. It's the only semi-possible escape i can see from this madness.

I would happily nuke this planet or worse to prevent human beings from colonizing space with rape, murder, and anti-vaxx-type bullshit.

If I were an intelligent, space faring culture, I would throw an isolation grid over this planet faster than any dude could ever put on a condom.

The only solace I find in this world, philosophically, is that we've used up too many resources to let the madness OUT.

Yeah, thankfully I think we missed our shot, as a species, by insisting on using up all our energy resources to make and transport disposable consumer goods.

this is why i'm sincerely hoping we colonize a planet in my lifetime. It's the only semi-possible escape i can see from this madness.

If we can't get our shit together here, we won't be able to get our shit together anywhere else, either. I'm not sure what that would accomplish besides fucking up more planets (which aren't really even ours to fuck up in the first place).

I shadowed an MD today! It was super super super fun, like basically being a doctor is the customer service end of science. So fascinating, and so many different things going on! Doctoring might be the perfect profession for people who have ADHD but also really like science. And yesterday I actually got my advisor into the lab to show her the issues with the tissue I was supposed to be using for validation, and when I walked her through the process and showed her the tissue she agreed with me, which is GREAT because now I can put my time and energy into something that will actually move the project forward.

Good times, good times.

Someone unfriended me on FB because I told him his method of evaluating a fucking card in Magic was wrong.

That's just sad. Not for you, for him.

The thing that's driving me crazy is that she's an excellent teacher, as well as a very very intelligent researcher with a proven track record. I think she just really can't or doesn't want to put in the time to train her graduate students. She has an R1 grant FFS, she has to step up. I don't think she even read my email explaining the problem.

Gonna Mark All As Read.

My facebook feed today: but whatabout AMURRICA?!?

I'm talking about the UK, so I don't really give a shit about America.  Sorry.

That's a great time to use the "For my next trick, I will turn this conversation into a conversation about ME!" meme.

[The reason she has a problem with bad data is because her approach to training is to throw a project at a student and tell them to figure it out, just as she is doing with me right now.]

So I kinda feel like my advisor is off the deep end.

She wants preliminary results for a project she's been sitting on for three years but we just started this Fall. She wants these results in a month. She wants me to figure out from scratch with no guidance how to use imaging software no one else in the lab knows how to use, that was designed for immunofluorescence, to quantify IHC-DAB. She gave me about four days to figure this out, and to perform a validation experiment using tissue from a previous grad student who is gone. Going through that student's data, I already can see and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the previous data, which has been accepted for publication, is bad. At least the cell counts for the supraoptic nucleus are bad. I don't have time to deal with this and it's also not my problem, but I have a feeling it is about to become my problem on top of having three weeks to process and assay 124 brains.

The reason she has a problem with bad data is because her approach to training is to throw a project at a student and tell them to figure it out, just as she is doing with me right now. If she had taken 20 minutes to train the last student, they would have known that they were counting cells in a region caudal to the supraoptic nucleus, and this data would not be bad. I can correctly quantify staining in these tissues, but I can't use these tissues to validate my method because the existing data is bad... this is a waste of my time. And everyone else's time.

I always wonder if people do that because they think the student will understand the material better through "independent discovery," or if they get some sick satisfaction from the thought of someone else not being able to do stuff that they themselves know how to do (Or maybe don't know how to do, for that matter). Based on the fact that she's been sitting on the project 3 years, I'm going to assume the latter.

The great thing here is that she has no idea how to use this software. She's never tried. She can't even critique my progress because, as became clear to me when she asked me if I was taking pictures of every tissue section, she has zero idea how to use it. You have to take pictures of all the tissue to be analyzed, that's how the software works. I suspect she has used this approach with other students in the past, and that's exactly why the data I'm trying to use as validation for my method is bad; she herself didn't know how to do what she asked the grad student to do, so she couldn't check the data to make sure it was collected correctly.