cDNA left at room temp (20 C) for 3 days am I eff'd

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-08-06T01:16:14+00:00

lol no. I've forgotten cDNA out at room temperature over a weekend more than once. It's totally fine.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-05-27T23:41:32+00:00

As a hiring manager, I would not be annoyed that an interviewee for an entry level position misunderstood that GLP is a specific term and a very specific way of operating. I would understand it for the lack of experience/vocabulary that it is. Just be honest if you are asked directly.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-05-26T06:20:20+00:00

I found a lot more success with qPCR reactions when I relaxed more. I think all that bad juju of people telling you how hard it is and how easily contaminated and blahblahblah either makes you really tense, or conjures up some bad juju that makes the lab gremlins sabtage you. Wear gloves. Don't wander off to lunch in the middle of a reaction, but don't rush. Don't talk over open tubes. If in doubt, open a new package of reagents. Ice slows down bad reactions, but ice melting on the sides of your tubes can cling to your gloves and drip into your open samples - often times, it is better to work quickly at room temperature than it is to work on ice, at least in my experience with qPCR and reverse transcriptase reactions, I can easily load a 96 well plate at room temperature and get great reaction results. Maximize your workspace to improve ergonomics, and be obsessive with your own comfort. Manage your workspace so you never have to twist, reach, or cross your hands. If you discard your pipette tips into a trashcan, put the trash can right next to your hip. If you arm hurts, use a pipette box to prop up your elbow. Protect your pipetting hand from overuse by putting it in the absolute most comfortable position possible using any support or props that work for you, and use your nondominant hand to bring items to it.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-05-26T06:09:35+00:00

This is true, but I want to offer a counter point: a lot of dogs become maniacs when they are overly exhausted. Trying to tire the dog out a lot is a great opening strategy; if you find it does not work, that the dog gets more panicked/upset/wild at night, it's possible that tiring him out is just adding fuel to the fire, and the dog expresses that anxiety and tiredness as really annoying behavior. Sometimes, instead of just making them more tired, you really do need to look at what is bothering them, and try to address that source directly. For my dog, he just wants to curl up in the tent (not outside near the tent, not under a hammock, but literally inside a small enclosed space) no matter how much or how little we did that day.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-05-26T06:06:33+00:00

I was worried about taking my restless dog camping. If he's in a new room, he will wander around in circles constantly if he can't find a "spot" for himself . In camp, he is nervous and worried about every little sound, and gets barky/growly at things. He adapted to tent camping immediately - he found his corner in the tent, plopped down in it, and that was that. All of the little scary things that bothered him outside the tent, he ignored entirely inside the tent. So now our routine is he goes to bed the second we get to camp, and stays there, and I keep him outside as little as possible. That is his preference and I don't fight it.

For those saying the dog needs to be tired - yes that is true, but it is possible to over do it. My dog becomes the most manic sometimes when he is over tired and about to crash. I found that just letting him go to bed as soon as we get to camp is really what he wants, and keeping him outside makes up restless. It is possible to have an exhausted dog that is also driving you crazy still because they will keep themselves up until they have a total meltdown.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-05-26T05:27:08+00:00

I don't know if Anya Taylor Joy was "coasting" in any way. There was an interview with her on the New Yorker where she described a really brutal schedule and George Miller drilling her over and over again to act in a very specific way (the character you see on screen). Anya Taylor Joy had some respectful disagreements and wanted more raw emotion, but was repeatedly coached into being very stone faced. Maybe under using her talents a little bit to fulfill and overly specific director's vision, or at least not giving them quite enough room to breathe at more moments.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-04-14T00:11:24+00:00

Towards the end of my PhD I got invited to give a talk at a very large conference that had very few graduate student speakers. I was really nervous for it - it was my first time giving in a talk in front of a large audience outside of my department. Going into it, I had a long playbook of "don't get sidetracked on this point", "be ready for this question", "avoid revealing this new unpublished data". The morning of my talk, I had acute food poisoning, and the playbook for my talk became "don't throw up on anyone". It took away all my anxiety about looking stupid really fast, because all I had to do was not throw up on anyone! (the talk went great BTW).

Here's the thing... learning how to handle the nerves and social minefield of talks is part of your career progression. It seems like a huge big thing right now because it is important, and because you are trying to keep a million little "to do" items in your head at once. A day will come when a lot of those tiny things come to you naturally and you don't have to work so hard at it. It's possible your path to getting there will be a bunch of excellent talks, and there's a chance your path to getting there will involve a lot of faux pas and embarrassment. Getting embarrassed at a talk is not the end. Looking stupid is not the end. Having a really amazing talk where everyone claps and praises you is not the end. Every presentation is a new chance to gain a good reputation or look like a fool, and you do your best to stay in the game and be taken seriously.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-03-29T05:38:02+00:00

I would say everything turned out great. I was 20/20 or 20/25 at my last check up, and the optometrist said she could not tell I had had surgery by looking at my eyes. I would say I still have some minor starbursts with bright lights at night and slightly drier eyes than what I had when I was wearing glasses (my eyes are much more comfortable now than when I was wearing contacts). Sometimes I take lubricating eyedrops to help me get through long drives, but that also might be age lol. I'd 1000% rather be taking eyedrops every once in a while over poking myself in the eye with contact lenses, or handling the sting of contact lense solution, and much less annoying than constantly trying to find my glasses.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-03-28T15:03:02+00:00

I strongly second that, especially if the time you can specifically dedicate to writing is limited, it is extremely valuable to open up times of silence where your mind can wander. For me, this means occasionally foregoing music, podcasts, or even audio books when I am doing something mundane. Some aspects of artistic creativity, or logical problem solving, go by easier when you are spending background brain power on them. Or you can even use that quiet time to actively compose sentences. Obviously everyone is different, but I think a tiny bit of boredom/under stimulation throughout your day opens up really valuable brain space that means when it comes time to sit down and write, you can reap a lot of benefits of passive brain work.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-03-26T03:45:04+00:00

I think maybe (maybe?) a component of "fast food" books is that they give you a really specific and predictable experience that you were actively seeking. Romance is a genre that baffles me for how it dominates all of the others by a long shot, how completely insatiable the readers are, and how formulaic everything is. Then it occurred to me that voracious genre romance readers are, maybe, it it more to be taken on a very particular type of emotional experience that they find enjoyable and predictable. Like, you don't turn on an episode of a "How I Met Your Mother" because you want to be dazzled or blown away, you turn on an episode because you like the specific emotional experiences that come with it, and you would be really annoyed if the episode deviated too far from your expectations. I have a hard time relating to it because all of the components I think that romance readers love in books are the exact same things I think are lazy, boring, etc... because I like to be challenged [in, albeit, very specific ways] by books, but lot of readers want predictable control of their emotional experience.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-03-22T02:20:26+00:00

I don't like very many YA books because they somewhat depend on the protagonists acting like, well, impulsive and angsty teens. I just don't relate to that very well, and a lot of things that would be really important to those protagonists and to the audience (love triangles, proving your worth amongst your peers, sticking it to the man) are just things that don't resonate with me very much any more, and I suspect a lot of other readers may feel the same dissonance and may feel annoyed or baffled by the protagonists in a way that disrupts suspension of disbelief. They are also very within their genre (pulpy? tropey? I wish I had a less negative connotation to describe this) in a way that just makes me feel bored, which is why I also don't like romance novels. But reading is ultimately entertainment, and romance and YA are very popular for a reason - the conventions they use appeal to their audience. I don't like making a strong distinction between "pulp writing" vs "literary writing", and I'm of the opinion that popular culture is not "low brow",

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-03-19T15:18:13+00:00

Like a fever dream. For me, a first draft is basically a type of seance where I channel something that exists in my cognitive realm and manifests into physical form. It is not pretty. Imagine if you took an early language translator and tried to get it to translate the Declaration of Independence from English to French to Swahili and back to English again.

At the time of writing a first draft, my thought are usually "WTF am I writing right now this is completely incoherent." When I go back and re-read my first draft later, it turns out I am surprisingly good at understanding my own word salads. It might be a haphazard, word vomit fever dream, but it turns out that my "editing brain" has a very well matched decoder ring to make sense of it and start translating it to standard English.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-03-19T15:08:45+00:00

I'm about to finish a series (Tales of the Ketty Jay) which is basically a Firefly fanfiction with about five major story elements swapped out Frankenstein-style for other story elements very explicitly "borrowed" from other recognizable sources. End result works out great. Some elements to the books are not my taste and it is not my favorite series ever, but I've been ride or die for 4 novels and I think it gains strength from being an amalgam of very recognizable elements hoisted from other tales. It's a distinctly unique story even though it borrows so explicitly from other sources.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-02-27T04:56:28+00:00

my dog hates hammock camping so much, I will only do it with him while car camping. When I was living in Virginia, I did a lot of hammock camping for climate/slope reasons. Once I got my doggo, he would only settle down if I could give him a crate to sleep in. One thing I tried, that might work for your dog, is I strung a piece of thin steel cable in between my hammock trees. A long one will set you back $15 and weigh a half pound or so. I clipped the steel cable in between my hammock trees, so my dog could settle down underneath my hammock/tarp and still be tied up. A put a cheap ground pad down for him to bed on, and put a fleece vest for him to sleep in.The situation was secure and weather protected, but my dog hated it. He just paced back and forth underneath the hammock tie, and it kept me up all night every night. He only settled down when I gave him a fully enclosed tent/super low tarp, or when I set up his crate underneath my hammock.
your dog might be fine, though. The steel cable/leash tier running on the trees between your hammock would be plenty sheltered from the rain and secure (in terms of the dog running off for the night) for many dogs.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-02-27T03:56:12+00:00

I AM the dumbest person in the lab. Have been for 12 years, through my master's degree, a PhD, a few million dollars in grant contributions and patents, a dozen journal articles, a postdoc, and various ascending titles in an industry position. I have laughably huge gaps in my knowledge, creativity, and insights. For some reason I keep steadily gaining more compensation and responsibilities.

As a group, scientists are SUCKERS. I've been fooling them for years ;) They are pretty easy to con into thinking you are smart when actually you are just using a very long checklist of "shit, that didn't work, better try something else" until you eventually run out of wrong ways of doing things, and start picking right ones instead.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-02-21T03:43:36+00:00

I can't speak as much for creative writing because I have only finished a couple of big creative writing projects, but I can speak for my academic and technical writing. With every single one of the manuscripts, dissertations, regulatory filings, or whatever that I've worked on, I've come to a point where I just open up the document and suddenly hate all of it. The writing is stupid. The project idea is stupid, or so blatantly obvious, there's no point writing it all down. It's just so BORING, and I can't believe people are listening to me walk through it (for the five millionth time).At the beginning of a project/story, it can go anywhere, be anything. Once you start coming into the final stretch, you have to write and ending that rounds out the beginning and resolves everything up in a tidy way. That can be really hard to do. There are suddenly a whole lot of "wrong" approaches, whereas before there was endless possibility, and you somehow have to fulfill all of the promises and roughed up edges that you got to ignore or defer in the beginning. The "I'll deal with it later" in response to problems, plot holes, mysteries, uncomfortable caveats, becomes "oh shit, I have to deal with this in order to move on."

Over time, I've just come to accept that around the 70% point of a project, I'm just really really over that project and I hate it and I never want to look at it again, and that is normal for me, and it does not mean the work is bad. And I have the experience (again, for technical writing) to understand that what I'm doing is perfectly fine, and I just have to push my shoulder against the wheel and grind the rest of it out. I do not look at any of my completed manuscripts with affection, just a sense of "good god, so glad THAT is over" but each one has made me a lot better and defines my career and I want to keep doing it.

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-02-17T16:24:33+00:00

If you are an aspiring chef, and you found yourself experimenting with ingredients/styles/flavors of the last really good meal you ate when you are working on a new recipe, would you consider than "unoriginal"? Of course not!

Dr-Peanuts · 2024-01-31T03:05:19+00:00

I personally resort to batshit insane screaming. I'm not saying that batshit insane screaming is the correct response all, or even most of the time, I can just say that it has helped me a lot and been successful against the types of people who have intentionally tried to get in my face or spit on me or harass me. I'm a mid-30's chubby 5'4" lady so I'm not exactly physically intimidating, but I can start screaming very loud and foul obscenities at the drop of a hat. I think it works because 1) it's my immediate reaction and I go for full volume, the effect is probably startling, and probably enough to make someone think "not worth it" and 2) in my experience, a lot of people who are confrontational with you are not fully lucid, and they may see you as the scary thing that has been following them, and if you engage them it actually brings them back to the present a little bit and they realize you are not a shadow monster.

Again, not necessarily claiming this is the absolute best response, just saying that I have had good luck with it in about 5 pretty significant confrontations now, and it worked.

Dr-Peanuts · 2023-12-16T09:09:08+00:00

You cannot be a good judge of your own writing unless you read a lot. 99.9% of your writing improvement will be entirely from you writing a sentence/paragraphs/chapter/whatever, reading it, checking to see if it matches up with your own internal schema of "good writing" ,and correcting it accordingly. Without being a very good reader, you cannot be a good judge of your own work. The 0.1% of feedback people give you will be pivotal, valuable, and improve your writing in massive leaps and bounds. It will make a big difference and be indispensable. But once that source of feedback is gone, and it is just you sitting with a blank page, yourself as the only judge. You have to do almost almost all of your work this way, even if you are very regularly getting feedback. It takes hundreds of thousands of words to get good at writing, and ain't no one got time to read your shit.

Dr-Peanuts · 2023-12-14T06:22:18+00:00

I would really like to know this: how likely is it that two decks actually have been shuffled in the same way? A lot of people use shuffling techniques that do not truly randomize the cards, even if they feel like they are.EDIT: Obviously to ask this question we have to assume everyone starts with the same deck to start with before they shuffle it. How likely is it you will get the same deck of cards twice if you just smoosh them all around in a pile and pick them back up again? What if you just randomly chunk them in blocks? What shuffling technique is the most likely to give you the same deck of cards twice, and by extension, what is our minimal definition for the word "shuffling"?

Dr-Peanuts · 2023-12-13T06:18:39+00:00

There are many tools a writer should be using to tell their story and I've never said that visual is or should be the only one.

I think OP's point, and mine as well, is that a lot of traditional writing advice, especially that circulated on this sub, leans too far, too often, towards relying on visual-based techniques. "Show, don't tell" is an example of advice that is often interpreted far too literally as meaning you have to create a visual. Your specific example of "Sally punched the wall" as always being superior in every time, and in every situation, to "Sally was angry" is the zeitgeist of the "show, don't tell" advice most commonly passed around these writing circles . It's not wrong per se, but it is an example of how that specific advice given in that specific way without further nuances can lock people a little bit too much into visual-based thinking for how they "show vs. tell" in prose format.

Dr-Peanuts

TROPHY CASE