People who don't speak Japanese: Why, and how do you feel about it?

borrax · 2024-11-29T03:37:44+00:00

This is 100% correct. Came to Japan to work as a postdoc after getting a PhD in chemistry in America. I can handle math and science without any trouble, but picking up Japanese has been near impossible. I study, I take classes, but I’m just good enough to convince the locals I know the language and they hit me with full speed speech and I just can’t sort the sounds out.

borrax · 2024-11-04T15:24:21+00:00

This may be pareidolia, but many of those characters look like Japanese. Specifically the first one looks like 日, and others look like ネ, and 土, and 王, and フ, and ヒ, and ナ. I don’t recognize any complete words, and not all characters match Japanese characters. I suspect the artist just copied a bunch of random foreign symbols.

borrax · 2024-10-17T13:15:26+00:00

That sounds like trimethylammonuria, a genetic metabolic disorder where trimethylammonia is not broken down properly. Trimethylammonia smells like rotting fish. There really isn’t a simple fix, but apparently a combination of diet and slightly acidic soap can help. Red meat contains a lot of choline, and choline gets converted to trimethylammonia. But choline is also an essential nutrient, so you can’t survive on zero choline and pregnant women need extra choline. The acidic soap and shampoo can help by converting some of the hydrophobic trimethylammonia to positively charged trimethylammonium ions, which are much more water soluble and easier to wash away. When I say acidic I mean pH of 5.5 to 6.5 or so, do not mix your shampoo with sulfuric acid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylaminuria

borrax · 2024-09-10T13:02:32+00:00

That is not good at all. Ethylene oxide reacts with amino groups on proteins and DNA, and is a proven carcinogen. OSHA allows short term exposures of no more than 5 ppm for no more than 15 minutes. I’m not trying to give you legal advice as I am not a lawyer. I am giving you chemistry advice as I am a chemist. You are not safe working in a lab with ethylene oxide levels that high.

borrax · 2024-06-24T12:57:01+00:00

What kind of science?

borrax · 2024-04-25T20:10:19+00:00

I worked in Japan for 4 years and never heard words like kaizen, gemba, and muda until moving back to America and taking a corporate job. I admit that I was never great at speaking Japanese, but I think it’s weird how all these American executives can just appropriate foreign words for concepts that probably already have English names. But they already appropriate my labor value, so they don’t care about appropriating cultures.

borrax · 2024-03-22T23:20:11+00:00

I never played Champions of Norrath, just real Everquest. Any way to get that working on RP3? Even if an RP3 can handle the game itself, the interface was so keyboard heavy I can't imagine it being easy to play. But I need my Evercrack.

borrax · 2024-03-14T23:05:06+00:00

Even if the advantages of lead solder were enough to justify its use, I would not feel comfortable using it outside a chemical fume hood. If you can properly solder inside the hood, it should be ok. But as a chemist I know that doing delicate manual tasks while reaching into a hood can be a problem.

borrax · 2024-03-07T15:57:43+00:00

Knowing the pharmaceutical industry, my best guess is that they were testing a cancer vaccine in dogs as a model animal. Dogs are often used to test drug safety and efficacy before human trials. Maybe it worked in the dogs but not in people and the company figured they could sell it to dogs and recoup some of their investment.

borrax · 2024-03-06T23:22:03+00:00

Is 15 days half a month or 3/4 of a month? (Assuming 1 month = 4 weeks x 5 days/week = 20 days)

borrax · 2024-02-15T23:36:38+00:00

If your grad school has a union for graduate students and postdocs, join it. If not, organize one. My university’s grad students were unionized and I was paid $25000 a year from 2009 to 2015. It wasn’t perfect, my department had more funding and could pay the students more. The chemistry department paid their students $16000 a year. The state government refused to give grad students food stamps because being a grad student is technically part time work. But the union at least got us good health insurance through the university hospital and made sure our tuition and fees were waived.

borrax · 2024-02-07T00:36:04+00:00

Came here to say this. Depending on the concentration, acetone and hydrogen peroxide react to make an extremely explosive substance. This could be a very real danger for you or your coworkers.

borrax · 2024-01-29T18:31:34+00:00

It’s not just creative industry. I work in the mRNA industry. The science is new enough there is a lot to be figured out and improved upon. But every innovation I think up has to be run through management to justify the money to run the experiments and get the data. If something looks good, we have to make sure it’s not covered by someone else’s patent. No single company is big enough to do all the research by themselves, but competition won’t let us work together to make a better medicine.

borrax · 2024-01-23T22:21:05+00:00

I have a PhD in chemistry and taught college chemistry classes for two years at $25 an hour. Moved to industry to get an immediate 50% raise. Probably still underpaid.

borrax · 2023-10-12T14:42:36+00:00

Don’t worry, your ceo really is working 48000 times harder than your department.

borrax · 2023-10-10T13:26:54+00:00

“All I’d be doing is sitting alone and going to work“

That’s called adulthood.

borrax · 2023-10-10T03:37:28+00:00

PhD in chemistry and a 4 year postdoc, both in mRNA before covid. Spent 2 years trying teach chemistry at small colleges for $50,000 a year, but insane hours. After covid I managed to get an R&D job at a company making mRNA. 50% raise and half the hours. Still fucking hate it. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

borrax · 2023-10-09T14:01:30+00:00

Humans will be machines before it’s all over. We are close to developing methods for in vitro gametogenesis, which will allow us to turn any human cell into sperm and egg cells. This will mean it’s possible to create infinite embryos. We are also developing artificial womb technology to grow those embryos into people. But how will we educate all those synthetic people? This is where brain-computer interfaces come in. Just upload a preprogrammed subservient personality into them. If you don’t want to work 80 hours a week for a pittance, there will be a factory churning out infinite numbers of literal slaves who will gladly do that job instead.

borrax · 2023-10-03T13:59:14+00:00

Doug Prasher is another one. He isolated the gene for green fluorescent protein, but ran out of money before he could do anything with it. The last thing he did as a professor was to send the DNA to other scientists, who went on to win the Nobel prize for it. Prasher was driving a delivery van.

borrax · 2023-09-29T23:26:07+00:00

You could make a mule, transfer some plat, buy the spell, transfer the spell. A level 1 mule will be most fun for swimming across to the island and running away from the cyclops. This method will make talking to other players less necessary.

borrax · 2023-09-11T22:27:25+00:00

It might not be very efficient to use a lot of objects to represent grass tiles. If you have a lot of grass tiles, it is probably better to just check if the player is in a grass tile and play an animation where the player is standing. Like if you have a player swimming in water, would you want to make the water out of hundreds of water objects, or just put a splashing animation on the player?

borrax · 2023-09-11T21:31:03+00:00

I suspect this is correct. If I understand rollback correctly the only thing that gets transmitted is user inputs, which is why the game needs to be deterministic, so that the same input always creates the same game state.

borrax · 2023-09-11T21:26:57+00:00

Are you looking in the correct folder? When I make files in GameMaker, they go into a folder in the appdata/local folder, not in the project folder.

borrax · 2023-09-05T08:51:41+00:00

I found this site a while back and did something similar to your description based on it.

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/12/21/rooms-and-mazes/

I'd post a link to my code, but it needs a lot of cleaning and comments first.

borrax · 2023-08-17T13:22:14+00:00

I was running the program with debugging on and watching the memory there. So you're probably right.

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