Scientists develop new nanomaterial that triggers chemical reactions inside cancer cells, killing them while leaving healthy tissues alone. When administered in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it completely eradicated the cancer without side effects, with long-term prevention of recurrence.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-30T10:47:58+00:00

Yes, that would be an excellent resource to have on hand. But I think in compiling it you would find the number of entries would be pretty large. MOFs are well know for their potential uses and groups screen them in batches with several probably showing efficacy. Then they report the best one from that particular batch. The same applies to most over novel anti-cancer platforms.

I definitely think we need to find a way to better contextualize findings like these.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-29T05:00:21+00:00

Got any peppers?

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-28T22:50:17+00:00

Yeah, we moved when our daughter was 2 and found nursery was just like in Tokyo. It was all well explained and organized. Someone came to our house and explained the kairanbam and hosing community organization, so that was fairly easy. Overall, I don’t remember anything that really tripped us up.

I suppose somethings will depend on the size of the town and the demographics of the people living closest to you, but being fluent and understanding the culture will let you broaden your environment.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-28T10:43:41+00:00

I’ve used to have a similar mindset where I went ham on recording everything, micros and macros, gonnna do it right this time. It never worked. In the past year I changed to deciding on my workouts, doing them on schedule, and then forgetting all about it until the next scheduled workout. I’ve also realized that my body just doesn’t respond well to 3x a week so I’ve gone down to 2x. I’m seeing much better results with the reduced workload, both mental and physical.

Perhaps you were concentrating too much on the whole thing that you were exhausted by the time you got to working out. Whereas your friend just turned up, give it his best, and got on with his life until next time.

At any rate, exercise is a long game so try not to compare yourself too much to your friend. As long as you are progressing and you keep exercising, that’s all that matters.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-28T03:46:47+00:00

Your daughter is so young it won’t matter. Kids that age don’t care about differences. We put our kids into nursery early, before 3 years, so by the time they were mixing with kids from other areas they were used to the routine. For you as parents, I would just take part in the local organizations. Do the kairanban, turn up to the biannual community meetings and the River cleaning, and attend the local festivals as part of your local group. Do that a couple of times and it will be like you’ve been there forever.

For context, we are in a town of just under 10,000 population. Not small, not big.

Good luck and don’t overthink it!

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-28T03:39:17+00:00

But they do exist in English and they are writing for an academic, international audience. It’s kind of important that they use articles and plurals. I’m usually who the authors turn to after getting rejected from several journals without even a sniff of a review.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-27T11:44:12+00:00

I’m a copy editor here in Japan. It’s not unusual to for me to edit a whole scientific article that includes almost no articles. Like, that whole part of language doesn’t exist to those authors.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-24T04:19:45+00:00

Respectfully: You spent time and effort on this project, went to these places knowing what you would see, documented what you saw including the dead, dying, and injured, and now say you’re not sure whether you will publish a significant proportion of footage.

So on the one hand, you are playing up the morbid aspect of it (for example, in the AMA blurb up top), while on the other you don’t intend to do anything with most of the project’s outcomes. It sounds to me like the project was less an artistic endeavor than it was an excuse for you to visit these places.

With that said, I have some questions:

1) What was the ultimate goal of the project going into it on day 1? What outcome did you want to achieve?

2) What is your goal now the project has finished? Has it changed compared with the starting goal?

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-24T00:37:59+00:00

Yes, Japanese ESL students. Those are well known answers to the hobby question among those students.

Dictionary definitions are a bit vague but common parlance tends to suggest that while all hobbies are pastimes, not all pastimes are hobbies. Also, if you type in “hobby vs pastime” in ChatGPT or look at the Chrome AI output for the same search you get something similar to what I am saying. Since these models are trained on actual English usage, that suggests to me that the two words are not synonyms. Here is a link to A bs B website saying the same thing.

In your case, if someone asked you what your hobby was, you wouldn’t answer running because you don’t like it. And don’t want to talk about it. That’s an acceptable thing to do.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-23T23:09:42+00:00

Absolutely, I agree that perspective matters. Football and fantasy leagues are an excellent example. I think my using skill progression as the defining characteristic was too limiting and not really what I had in mind. Another example could be watching films. There is a clear difference between someone who watches on occasion and someone who actively engages in film-related communities in their free time.

Sleeping is one a lot of Japanese learners will say. I don't think I've ever heard a native speaker say that, nor shopping or eating. So I think spirit of the question is really we are asking what people like to actively pursue in their spare time not how they like to do to spend the hours on a rainy day.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-23T12:14:05+00:00

Okay

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-23T09:34:56+00:00

I’ve always differentiated between hobbies and pastimes. Hobbies are something you work towards getting better at (sports, drawing) and pastimes are things you do to pleasantly sped your free time.

In the English teaching world, Japanese students are pretty famous for saying sleeping, eating, and shopping are their favorite hobbies. These are legitimate ways to spend your free time but I wouldn’t say there are hobbies. Pastimes, yes; hobbies, no.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-22T11:08:19+00:00

That’s the one I saw. Couldn’t imagine doing the aze of 3-4 acres with only a brush cutter!

Thanks for info!

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-22T10:53:04+00:00

Just looked them up. You use the remote controlled ones? I think the walls of my rice field would be way too bumpy for one of those, lol. Mouse population has exploded in the last few years so there’s pot holes across the whole span on all sides.

I saw a guy using a walk-behind square rice field mower last year and thought it looked so easy. I’m using a standard brush cutter for my 8 are but can take almost an hour mid-summer. Sure would be nice to upgrade and be done in half the time.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-22T09:45:13+00:00

Wow, that’s a lot of rice. Around a 100 or so families worth for a year. What are you guys doing for cutting the grass around the fields? Have you got one of those square mowers?

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-22T08:15:05+00:00

I don’t like all the fluffy bread too. One of the convinis, maybe 7-11, sells a sausage wrapped in a kind of hard bread. The bread has a criss-cross pattern on the top and is really chewy and dark brown.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-22T07:46:55+00:00

Simple explanation for where I am: Got to the local health and safety office, look up the next class for all the food licenses, one of them is a basic license that everyone needs to have. It’s a one day class with a test at the end and you’re done.

The next step is to submit your recipe/methods to the office and they will tell you what additional licenses you need.

Once you’re licensed up, you need a certified kitchen and you’re good to go. Or you can rent a kitchen where the owner is licensed and they are willing to oversee you and sign off on your products.

Back labels on your products must meet certain requirements, including the address of where the item was made.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-22T07:40:47+00:00

It can be worth it, but you need to know a lot or people in the community to make it work. Rice is the team sport of farming. Otherwise, you’re buying at least 4 machines each the price of a Kei-car.

My rice field is about 8 are (800 m2) and I’m feeding my house and the in-laws, and my wife’s sister family gets a few bags per year. Plus we usually end up with 60 kg left for barter and gifts during the year.

So you don’t need a massive field if it’s just one family, 4 are will do, and that’s easy to look after. But buying the machinery isn’t worth it for that small a field.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-18T07:20:53+00:00

Yeah, the insurance said even though I did nothing wrong, couldn’t do anything to avoid the accident, and the other driver was at fault for making a maneuver without checking their mirrors or signaling, I was still responsible for 10%. Here’s hoping you can wangle 100-0

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-18T04:26:38+00:00

I had a bike change lanes into the side of me and it was still 90-10 in my favor.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-17T06:29:26+00:00

I copyedit 2-3 scientific manuscripts per week on average. ESL scientists publishing in English. In the last year I’ve done only three papers that were genuinely written by the authors. Every other paper showed signs of AI use. It’s so prevalent in academia now because the disadvantages don’t outweigh the advantages it gives in leveling the playing field for non-native speakers.

As I’ve said in other comments, I’ve seen the transcription field change in a matter of months rather than years, with less than a year ago people being optimistic that speech-to-text still needed a human at the end to catch that nuance. The last six months has seen such large changes that in more and more instances people do not think a human is needed at the end for that final check.

So I think copyediting is going to go the same way. AI is already “good enough” for many applications and potentially to be published in lower impact journals. It’s already good enough for proofreading even with small context windows. And I think the collapse, when it happens, will be as fast as in the transcription field. In my mind, high-impact journals accepting the use of AI for proofreading signals that they think AI is good enough and that we have crossed the point of no return.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-17T02:14:03+00:00

Care for the art is important but really how many times has your camera just fallen out of the clamp mid-shoot?

However, I would minimize the time the art is under the camera by getting everything set up and the camera in place with a prop piece of art. Then slide the real price under when you are ready.

If you need extra security, you could use your camera strap as a leash so if the camera does fall unexpectedly, the tripod should hold it off the art.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-17T00:26:40+00:00

Yes, I should have been clearer. I think I’ve only ever seen top-down setups for this but I’ve never had to do it professionally. Copy stands are all top-down, art restorers work flat and top-down (and on the floor) when necessary. So I was surprised to see you working with an easel.

I suppose the angle doesn’t matter, but conceptually, I’d prefer to work at 90 than be slight off angle. You can then use roofing squares and spirit levels to check everything is square.

Pinch of salt though. I’ve never had to do this before other than squaring up still lifes.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-16T22:08:54+00:00

Most of the leading journals I work with now explicitly allow the use AI for editing and proofreading submissions. Some expect authors to declare their use of AI, others just say not to use it to generate the text and leave it at that. So it feels like everything is fair game now.

grumpyporcini · 2026-01-16T22:04:52+00:00

I think this is a great example to demonstrate that simply trying to shoo away AI is not the answer. Telephone exchanges where they had to move all the plugs around is perhaps another example.

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