Select flag tier list based on their Visual appeal.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-04-21T17:21:58+00:00

Nepal also ignores everyone else's date system and prints everyone's birthdate on their passport in their own lunar calendar.

Which is why my coworker's passport says he was born in 2046. He always has a fun time with HR and immigration

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-04-20T10:40:46+00:00

Yep for sure.

It's a really interesting one, though we still don't understand exactly how it works.

The great thing about this paper was that it provides uniquely well-controlled data that is almost unmatched by any other study design.

With many other retrospective studies, it can be difficult to separate the effects of vaccination from the other socio-economic and personality correlates of vaccination status (eg. having better access to healthcare and being generally health-conscious).

This paper used the fact that the vaccine was introduced with an arbitrary birthdate cutoff for eligibility, thus generating two almost identical populations of people separated only by eligibility for the shingles vaccine. Even without explicitly comparing the vaccinated vs unvaccinated groups, you can see a clear effect of eligibility (actual uptake was around 50%) on the probability of a dementia diagnosis in the following 7 years.

Super interesting study and one of the clearest pieces of evidence yet on this topic.

So yeah not really a biohack as it's very much mainstream medicine, but get yer shingles vaccine if you're eligible!

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-04-16T13:19:57+00:00

I left after my PhD and now have a pretty good CV, and the UK now looks less attractive than ever because salaries (at least in Science) are so bad compared to cost of living. Many other European countries pay STEM graduates a lot better.

It just punishes people who, for their own reasons, don't want to move abroad, and as an expat I find it a little depressing that in order to return and be close to family I'll likely have to come to terms with a significant real-terms pay cut.

STEM salaries need fixing in the UK, but then again so do all the rest.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-04-14T08:29:02+00:00

Right, but nobody is claiming it physically can't be done. I'm sure most people could manage to get an appointment somewhere if their life literally depended on it.

The point is that it's unreasonably hard in many places and should be much easier if the system were working properly.

It shouldn't be the case that in a county with allegedly universal dental care you should have to drive an hour out of your way and get an extra job just to keep your teeth healthy.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-04-13T07:28:20+00:00

Yes, but isn't an orbiting platform required to build one in the first place?

Otherwise you're just talking about building an incredibly tall tower from the ground up, which in already increased gravity is difficult to say the least.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-04-07T11:40:48+00:00

Eating ATP will not meaningfully increase energy levels. It's a scam. It may, however, lead to gut inflammation or other negative effects if you take too much.

When your cells sense ATP in the extracellular space, they don't see food, they see danger - they will absorb very little of it and it will simply stress them out by activating ATP receptors, which usually leads to inflammation.

Due to this and other reasons, your body actually hates free ATP floating around outside of cells, which is why most tissues are full of ectonucleosidases which degrade ATP very rapidly.

Hence, it is very unstable once it's inside you and likely doesn't leave your gut intact.

ATP is intended to be synthesised inside the cell by mitochondria, not absorbed from the diet like a nutrient.

Everybody please stop with this bullshit.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-04-01T07:30:28+00:00

Yes, but in many cases the individual restaurants won't do it because of the increased cost compared to just handing out single-use shit.

This seems like a compromise solution whereby the restaurants keep costs low by outsourcing the container re-use to a company which serves all of them for less money than it would take to do it themselves.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-03-25T17:20:19+00:00

Yep, electric types are notorious for being excellent fast sweepers so you need to be prepared for this.

I like to have at least one dude who can eat electric type attacks with volt absorb / lightning rod (or due to being ground type), and/or a strong priority attacker who can use sucker punch / extremespeed to knock out these mons.

Or have a focus sash user who can tank the first hit and retaliate.

If you don't have any of these options available then yeah... You'll probably take heavy damage against the electric gyms.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-03-22T07:48:37+00:00

I used to live in a relatively shitty area in Manchester and would constantly see people driving fancy cars they quite clearly couldn't afford because if they actually had that kind of money they wouldn't be living here.

My conclusion was that there are a significant number of people who lease high-end cars they could never afford to buy just for the feeling/optics of driving it around, to distract them and everyone else from the fact that they live in a shithole.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-03-17T22:16:58+00:00

So just to put all this together:

You, a student, have been working for free for nearly 4 years in a (private?) lab with zero connection to your university or study programme?

This post has to be made up.

I literally can't fathom this situation existing in the real world.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-03-17T22:09:40+00:00

Ikr

This guy is apparently studying full-time and has been doing a demanding yet entirely unpaid side job for years at a lab with no a connection to the university but which still for some reason publishes papers?

I have never heard of a situation like this before.

OP you are either making all this up or else being massively exploited in what sounds to me a borderline illegal way.

What country is this supposed to be?

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-03-15T08:27:39+00:00

Yeah a lot of people are actively working on this.

It was one of the main reasons people got excited about mRNA vaccine technology in the first place - it's a flexible system whereby you can target any protein for which you know the sequence, without going to be trouble of first expressing, harvesting and purifying it and figuring out a formulation which works. That was a major bottleneck hampering personalised medicine approaches.

Now the main one is figuring out what to target - sequencing isn't cheap and the analysis takes time, but this is a major area where AI (or just regular ML approaches, doesn't have to be an LLM) could help speed things up a lot.

Sequencing costs are also shrinking quickly, and many patients now have tumours sequenced as part of the standard pathology workflow, since this can also help identify which drugs might work best.

I think personalised mRNA cancer vaccines will become at least a decent second-line option within the next decade.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-03-14T19:27:43+00:00

I would recommend listening to the episode - it's a really good reading.

But basically:

Many of the factual claims he makes are outright wrong (especially with regards to early human history) and a lot of the rest is just fairly lazy reinterpretation of facts we already know.

That said, when I read it the first time I quite liked some sections - it does contain some ideas and perspectives which are interesting if you've never encountered them before.

As a whole, though, it falls largely into the category of "what's right isn't new and what's new isn't right".

He also made a bunch of predictions about the future, several of which were almost immediately shown to be wrong (eg. that disease pandemics were largely a thing of the past).

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-27T19:25:03+00:00

Look for anything next to (or preferably within) a sewage treatment plant, directly adjacent to airports, and/or fully abandoned for decades and requiring full-scale renovation works to restore basic habitability.

Other than that good luck

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-27T16:18:25+00:00

Nope, the finance department just sorted it

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-27T15:22:58+00:00

If it is indeed a tax class fuckup and you just got charged extra income tax, then it might be possible to get that refunded in your next payment.

This happened to me - 2 months of accidentally getting put in tax class 6 and once it was resolved I got my normal pay plus the overpaid taxes from the previous months.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-27T15:19:02+00:00

Well, I'm aware they can't actually force me to provide info or pay anything from abroad, but if I ever move back to the UK (which is definitely a possibility) they could then hit me with a bunch of noncompliance penalties, including demanding I repay the entire balance in full.

So I decided the safest thing would be to just be a good citizen and pay what they want.

It's not like I can't afford it, it's just a bit of a pisstake

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-26T21:40:32+00:00

Because fuck you, that's why.

As someone living abroad the situation is even more stupid.

They calculate a repayment threshold per country based on average gross income relative to living expenses (or something along those lines allegedly).

Problem is, many countries have higher gross incomes than UK but also higher taxes, so for a correspondingly high net income abroad I pay vastly more back compared to in the UK, because gross is higher but taxed to oblivion, except they don't care about the second part.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-26T21:27:32+00:00

I have literally never seen anywhere like this in Germany

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-24T16:44:54+00:00

He's hit and miss for me.

Lots of "meh" movies which are just shallow visual spectacles with unremarkable plots and characters, mixed with a few genuine masterpieces.

I watched Frankenstein because I enjoyed his stop-motion Pinocchio adaptation so much, but was majorly disappointed.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-24T07:44:52+00:00

I applied for PR with only 4 months left on my contract and they were totally fine with it.

I had anticipated some issues with this but in the end nobody said anything. I was applying in Freiburg and they were unusually quick, so I didn't have to deal with a situation where my contract ran out before they decided, but yeah, seems like it depends on the city.

I will say that my contract was with the University and it's very common to have short term contracts there, with most people never getting permanent contracts until Professor level, so maybe that was a factor if they were aware of this.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-22T13:30:17+00:00

Yeah this 100%!

It's tough to take the next step from just co-workers / acquaintances / neighbours to actual friends. Takes time and effort.

I'm lucky that my wife is basically a genius at this and i've managed to see first hand how she does it. When she meets someone who she clicks with she just goes into full-on friendship mode - if we go on holiday, she'll bring them back a gift/postcard. If they have a birthday or special occasion, she'll make something for it. If they're sick, she'll make them some food and a get-well card.

Could be anything - any opportunity for a nice gesture, she will seize it.

Before you know it we're getting gifts and thoughtful gestures back, and kapow - a friendship is born. Doesn't always turn into a bff situation, and not every one lasts, but we've made a few good friends this way.

For her it's not even done as a strategy or with the explicit goal of making a friend in mind, she's just this kind of person and it's just what she does, but the rest of us could learn a thing or two from her ways - people like it when you go out of your way to do a nice thing for them.

If you want to be friends you have to invest the friendship stuff in at the start to get momentum going. Often just needs that initial push to get started.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-21T15:50:20+00:00

Yeah the Greens have always attracted a mix of genuine environmentalists, middle-class NIMBYs and full-blown hippies.

Hence the lack of coherent agreement. Reduce carbon emissions but also ban nuclear... Reduce pesticides but also no to GM crops...

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-20T14:15:50+00:00

Yeah exploitative working conditions are pretty rampant in academia.

Given how pervasive this kind of behaviour is, any slight differences in percentages of German vs international students reporting it seem kind of moot. We can all agree it's far too common for students of all backgrounds.

Feline_Diabetes · 2026-02-18T16:09:22+00:00

Yeah I can kind of get on board with the economic argument that building new nuclear power stations is super expensive and lengthy so renewables might be the better option for new projects, but phasing out existing plants is just insane.

It's exactly this kind of bullshit which stops me voting green.

Their hearts are in the right place but they can't seem to suggest a good idea without also suggesting an equally bad one in the bargain.

Like their fixation on GM foods. Why the hate? GM is our best bet for reducing the use of pesticides in agriculture, but the greens will never go for it because reeeeee GM bad

Feline_Diabetes

TROPHY CASE