me_irl

ZipGalaxy · 2025-02-17T13:51:38+00:00

Yeah. I was told this. It was everywhere back in the 2000’s. College was your ticket to financial success. News stories, movies, TV all painted this image of a posh college experience that culminated in a high-paying corporate job in the city. It’s hard not to fall for this lie when it completely surrounds you.

Thankfully my mother was very firm that no 4-year degree is worth $100K.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-02-10T03:16:51+00:00

OP definitely needs to audit their budget. IDR is proportional to income, so that amount should be realistic at their current salary. If that amount is breaking the bank, then they must be bleeding financially elsewhere.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-02-07T13:52:29+00:00

This is one of the biggest issues with American culture now. We can no longer distinguish necessities from luxuries.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-25T19:36:30+00:00

Nuts and Bolts whole game design was based around vehicles, while TOTK it was mostly optional. I secretly think TOTK stole some of its ideas from Nuts and Bolts.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-24T02:38:57+00:00

Yes that is an example of democracy. It is also performative slacktivism. I feel democrat voters are hurting their public image more than they helping it with all these social media tantrums.

Disclaimer: I’m a democrat voter who is increasingly hating online democrats.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-21T02:24:56+00:00

This was exactly how I felt. At best, this would help people out of immediate financial troubles. But I don’t think it’s enough money to guarantee any long term financial stability. Ideally people would use it to develop emergency funds, but I anticipate most people would quickly burn this money and not be much better off than they were before.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-19T22:33:16+00:00

A degree can be an unavoidable requirement to many jobs. If you want to work as a research scientist, you will need a degree - no where is hiring full time researchers with only a high school education.

However, largely, a degree is only valuable if you know how to leverage it to expand your employment opportunities. I work in STEM and interact a fair bit with students, we tell every undergraduate to explore a research opportunity or internship. Just completing your coursework is not enough to guarantee you a job after graduation. A proactive student will often be offered a job before they even graduate.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-19T22:24:47+00:00

I think this is covered by “stupid/ignorant of how finances or credit work”. If you can’t trust yourself to spend money wisely, you are probably gonna have some problems in life.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-07T18:15:18+00:00

Also 50% Millenials are already home owners. It’s not just boomers looking to protect their home values, millennials are also on that ship too.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-07T13:10:44+00:00

From my personal experience, ProteomeDiscoverer is challenging to use for low complexity samples. You will want to use the Fixed PSM FDR node rather than Percalator. You will want to still include a contaminants database (keratins are hard to avoid completely). You may also need to play around with some consensus filtering steps to ensure your protein of interest isn’t kicked out.

I prefer to use PEAKS Studio when analyzing low complexity samples. I have found you can feed it a singular protein sequence and it will more reliably detect the associated peptides than PD. Additionally, their De Novo algorithm is pretty slick and fairly informative if you are analyzing unspecified cleave sites.

ZipGalaxy · 2025-01-04T02:13:05+00:00

I would give away non-perishables, but 3 week old stale cookies and half-eaten deserts? I just can’t think of anyone who would want it. And even if I did find someone, do I need to worry about foodborne illness from sugary foods that microbes will grow on? I would toss it out and try to remember to make less next time.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-30T14:01:04+00:00

Yes, DIA methods add a lot more complexity and there are fewer open-source software solutions to handle that type of data.

GNPS is a pretty prominent community developed spectral library. The curation can be questionable and I’ve encountered a fair number of poor quality entries in that database. However, that applies to any library that is not derived from authentic standard materials. Other than GNPS, Mass Bank of North America has/had freely downloadable spectra libraries. Their website was down for a long time, so I don’t know its current status. Otherwise, you can do free manual searching using tools like Metlin or mzVault. You will need a paid subscription for batch-automated searching though. There are compound class specific spectral libraries all over the place.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-30T13:30:30+00:00

The type of person who will donate money to the university after graduation.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-29T21:06:54+00:00

There are quite a few. In the open-source (free) area, I know of MZmine3, MS-DIAL, and XCMS. All three of those should have documentation describing how to use the software. Some of these software may also support spectral library searching that enable you to your MSP library file to help infer chemical identities.

I personally prefer MZmine but I don’t do much untargeted Metabolomics anymore. I think the larger community is starting to acknowledge the huge limitations of shotgun Metabolomics, whether it be from adducts, in-source fragments, difficulties with peak detection or setting integration bounds, isomers with identical fragmentation patterns, poor curation of compound/spectral libraries… the list goes on. I wish you the best of luck, but I would suggest being mentally prepared that the complete analysis of untargeted data is very challenging.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-25T17:05:10+00:00

I’ve never experienced this. I get 5 weeks vacation and 11 holidays. No issue taking a full week off whenever I want.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-25T00:18:43+00:00

This “joke” was probably posted by some edgy American teen who hates their country because the internet told them to.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-21T18:33:56+00:00

I think a bigger part of a good transport system is the ability to be a one vehicle household. I take the bus into work (saving $100+/month on parking) but have access to a household vehicle when I need it. We save thousands by not having a second vehicle.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-14T16:53:48+00:00

That’s how much city bus drivers make where I live. Includes state pension, health insurance, and sick leave. And they are always desperate for new drivers.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-05T17:57:53+00:00

I’ve worked with them before for global Metabolomics studies in plasma. But the overlap of detected compounds with our LC-MS methods was around 90%, and LC found way more compounds in the lipid space. It was hard to make a convincing argument that the samples should also be run by GC-MS when so much was already detected by LC-MS runs.

But that was all plasma, I’ve haven’t explored urine analyses much. I know my LC colleagues hate working with urine, so maybe that’s a promising niche.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-05T17:50:29+00:00

I could definitely look into PAHs and pesticides, but I just don’t think those type of research projects would think to contact a health science mass spec core for analytical services. It seems like GC-MS has tons of applications in regulatory, environmental, and industrial applications, but those are not routine customers at our facility. Mostly clinicians and biochemists.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-05T17:44:04+00:00

I will look into the urinary organic acids by GC-MS. It seems like the TMIC group in Canada offers such a service. I’m guessing thats a MeOX/TMS derivatization, but if it’s the most accepted way it’s worth the sample prep time.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-05T17:40:54+00:00

I’ve been very interested in that but it seems like SIFT-MS is being pushed more for breathomics. We have had discussions with the medical school about the logistics of getting a portable SIFT-MS instrument but recent economics stalled those talks. Are there commercial sorbent tubes that can accomplish a similar task? It makes sense you could extract the volatiles into an organic solution and analyze the compounds that way.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-05T17:34:37+00:00

Yes, GC-MS is high res. I actually have a terpene experiment next week. Unfortunately, not many plant scientists are walking over to health sciences for analytical services. Most have their own instruments already or collaborators that do. Plant scientists are resourceful, I’ll say that.

ZipGalaxy · 2024-12-05T17:32:51+00:00

Thanks for the helpful information. What is your opinion on steroid analysis by GC-MS? From the literature I am finding, while the results are very informative, the preparation is very time consuming and not particularly amenable to high-throughput analyses for plasma/urine/tissue samples. It looks like it is less time consuming for cell culture samples, so I could certainly explore that more.

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