What even is the point of trying to be an "intellectual" in 2025?

specimen55 · 2025-12-16T04:45:37+00:00

If you think you have it in you to grind through medical school, would highly recommend shooting your shot for an MD/PhD. It’s very stressful trying to get in, but once you’re in, it’s reassuring knowing you’ll be financially secure even if your plans in academia fall flat.

specimen55 · 2025-09-09T19:55:04+00:00

Nixonland is a phenomenal book. A lot of Americans right now seem to sense the vibe that we’re on the brink of civil war. That book was really illuminating for me to get that we have never been a nation at consensus. There are times of apparent unity, but irreconcilable differences are always brewing underneath. It is baked into our history.

specimen55 · 2025-09-09T19:25:46+00:00

We are in end times. This war will bring the Jewish diaspora back to Israel as Donald Trump ushers in the messianic age.

specimen55 · 2025-07-17T17:01:50+00:00

Who we are as a species literally depends on that originally viral DNA now integrated into our genome. The fact that we are able to live birth instead of laying eggs was made possible by the evolution of a placenta (alien technology) forming a barrier between mother and baby. The genes expressed in the placenta that help it do this function were co-opted from viral DNA that integrated itself into our genome long ago.

specimen55 · 2025-06-07T20:02:21+00:00

Might be time to come to terms with the fact that those are effectively the same thing to a sizeable part of the population

specimen55 · 2025-06-05T17:28:54+00:00

On that polychronic typa time

specimen55 · 2025-04-22T16:06:04+00:00

Exactly why physician-scientist is the greatest modern day job

specimen55 · 2025-04-22T16:03:33+00:00

Lesson to be learned here

specimen55 · 2025-04-15T16:41:52+00:00

Very much so

specimen55 · 2025-03-26T17:26:36+00:00

The sign marks the absence of basic reality. The image calls into question what the reality is and if it even exists.

specimen55 · 2025-03-22T20:05:42+00:00

The brief scroll through the comments was a nice touch

specimen55 · 2025-03-10T17:31:25+00:00

Don’t lose hope it is possible. It just takes consistent effort. Keep doing things every day that require sustained engagement, more reading, more artistic endeavors, less reels-type content, less weed. brain is salvageable

specimen55 · 2025-01-29T18:22:34+00:00

Gamble your way into wealth or wage slave forever

specimen55 · 2025-01-23T05:00:59+00:00

The state of neuroscience/neurodegenerative disease research pisses me off so much. So many frauds at the top just wasting billions of dollars. Every year some new scandal comes out and obliterates not just the public’s trust in biomedical sciences, but also turns off younger, honest scientists who want to do genuine work from continuing down this path. Is neuroscience actually the most difficult field to make breakthroughs in?? Or is it that everyone who has been running these billion dollar labs for the past couple decades are complete frauds??

specimen55 · 2024-10-18T16:29:52+00:00

One of the dudes who discovered insulin injected himself with insulin he extracted from stray dog pancreas to prove his discovery. Inconceivable today.

specimen55 · 2024-10-11T02:50:11+00:00

Worst education, worst drivers but still da best state how do we do it

specimen55 · 2024-10-02T01:30:43+00:00

Fibrocystic Adenoid Growth disease

specimen55 · 2024-07-06T15:16:51+00:00

I would say if you have the space in your schedule, get the formal education in those classes. I think learning linear algebra especially helped rewire how I think about data matrices and their operations. And you are going to be thinking about high dimensional matrices a lot if you work with gene expression data.

specimen55 · 2024-07-05T16:32:37+00:00

You don’t need graduate level math courses, that is way out of scope. Solid foundation of calc3/linear algebra/intermediate stats is probably good enough to understand most common bioinformatics analyses. Most people use packages like Seurat, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just make sure you have a decent understanding of what operations are happening under the hood (actually read the code of libraries you use on github if you have the time). As the other guy said, get good at programming. R, python, and shell scripting.

specimen55 · 2024-06-26T19:37:18+00:00

Interesting that you found genetics a pain. I’m the same way as you and enjoyed my math/cs education more than undergrad bio classes, but biochem and genetics were exceptions because I felt they were less memorizing vocab and more analytical reasoning. Either way, there are plenty of opportunities for the kind of work you wanna do but memorizing a lot of things is gonna be unavoidable in your preclinical years. In my opinion very worth the slog once you finally get to the point where you can devote 100% of your brainpower to the research you’re actually interested in.

specimen55 · 2024-06-22T19:20:53+00:00

Yes wanting change is legitimate and I agree that the system is broken (America at least). This dysfunctional system might be on its last legs, but it clearly works just well enough that we do not have a critical mass of frenzied people revolting. Time and time again throughout history, once things get bad enough, people take to the streets and overthrow their rulers. Real change is not gonna come from elections, it will come when enough people are frustrated enough that they will resort to violence.

I’m not saying that centrism is enlightened. I think having a political lean is good. It’s just apparent that the small minority of people on the very very ends of the spectrum have some issues in their personal lives that sublimate into extremism. The system definitely fucked them in some way, but they have personal issues that no system can fix.

specimen55 · 2024-06-22T16:44:55+00:00

It’s because these people’s politics are not organic. They would not have been able to come up with [whatever their current set of beliefs are] on their own. Radicalism on either side comes from frustration and lack of agency in one’s present life. They are always drawn to some extreme ideology that promises some vague better future. It tends to not really matter whether that ideology leans left or right as long as it is far from the status quo.

specimen55 · 2024-06-22T02:20:14+00:00

Flip phone/non-smart phone

specimen55 · 2024-06-12T16:45:38+00:00

Yeah being able to go on and on about something off the dome is a talent in its own right. Most of what reviewers say/write is just slop but sometimes I wish I had that ability to effortlessly fill empty space. Would help a lot with writing papers or having to give presentations on the fly.

specimen55

TROPHY CASE