At work we have a scale sensitive to the 1/10,000 of a gram. 4 decimal digits. It’s so sensitive it needs to be encased in a box so tiny connection currents don’t make it go frantic! Even in the box the number changes a lot. 15 0s is nutty.
Mine can tell if I’m sitting next to it’s desk or not. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s the deformation of the ground the desk is sitting on.
It’s really a silly amount of precision for what I use it for. But It’s so fun to lock g on .0000, even if only for a few seconds. Anyone who has a target of a specific amount of 0s can do it themselves. After the first 2 shits pretty random.
The more PhDs I know and the closer I am to grad school, the more it feels like getting a PhD is about being stubborn than it is about being smarter than everyone in the room.
In my experience it’s being stubborn or possessing a robust resiliency to mental health damage. Being smart, or better yet from a family that is wealthy enough to support you just makes everything a fair bit easier.
Also, making friends with your advisors doesn’t hurt either.
Memory Masters destroying the last of their childhood memories so they can add another 80,000 digits of pi to their mind palace.
contextMemory Mastery is a technique where you force your brain to remember random information by formatting it in a certain way, some people have gone on to use this trick to memorize millions of digits of pi. A study recently came out confirming that every time you make a new memory it destroys an old one, so every time someone makes a “memory palace” it comes at the cost of older memories, such as in childhood.
A study recently came out confirming that every time you make a new memory it destroys an old one
If that was true, babies would forget their first memory every time they remember their second memory. There’s no way it’s true. It might be partly true, but it can’t be completely true.
Well the way memory works is that it allocates certain clusters of neurons to storing information. When you’re young there’s a lot of blank space that you can store stuff in but as you get older you start having to pick and choose as more and more brain space gets taken up.
Here’s a cool video on the subject: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY Fun fact: because of how memories are formed in chains you can tell if you’re on the precipice of forgetting something if you try to recall it and you start trailing into another memory. You can experience this for yourself by trying to recall the beat of an old song and note when it starts morphing into the beat of a newer song. It’s also worth noting that every time you recall a memory you destroy the original and rewrite it, bringing it back to the top. That little asshole is like 90% of the reason why our memories suck so much shit and are so prone to outside manipulation.
No no no. The error compounds every time you math so if you math a lot at 40 digits you might end up with like 30 digits of correct precision. Totally unacceptable. Literally unplayable.
So, is it literally just repeatedly creating the necessary conditions and hoping the stuff will react the right way? Or is it a strict process that needs to be done just so or it’ll ruin the whole thing? Or both?
Yeah, kind of a little bit of both. Assuming that this is about bacterial transformation, it kind of goes like this in the lab. It’s from 2012 so there are probably easier techniques with fewer steps.
Biochem is incredibly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in conditions or procedure. A former coworker of mine had to change careers after the procedure she had to follow to run the assays for her master’s thesis gave her severe RSI. She couldn’t alter the procedure for ergonomics, though, because even something like changing the angle that she held the pipettor at could throw off the results.
In biopharma work, it’s not at all uncommon when trying to manufacture a biologic to find a process that works reliably in the lab but doesn’t give the same results when scaled up to production-size bioreactors, such that there’s often a whole stage of R&D devoted to taking a procedure from the lab and reproducing it on successively larger pieces of equipment, while working out all the tweaks and adjustments needed to make things work and optimize production.
Alas, my knowledge on the topic is limited – I work as a lab planner, and what I wrote above is most of what I’ve gleaned over the years of designing process development and scale-up labs. Past a point I just ooh and aah appreciatively at the big robotized bioreactor arrays my clients are putting in. Hopefully someone with a deeper background can point you in the right direction!
You get that level of precision in a standard “double” floating point number. So that’s basically the normal level of precision you get without trying.
I called an associate professor by a common nickname derived from his actual name, thing is that it draws the thought to some drug addict from the 70’s. When I got my phd, he took to calling me by my title as a revenge.
Yes, sorry. It is a problem that started over the weekend. I thought I had patched it by doubling the server’s RAM and adding a core, but that was not enough. Some process is causing the RAM use to spike and the image backend is crashing because of that.
Thanks. I noticed and reset the server a few minutes ago.
Something has been off recently. The CPU is spiking and the RAM gets used up, which crashes the pict-rs container. The pict-rs won’t reconnect until I reset the lemmy Docker container.
I doubled the RAM and added one core, but that was not enough to stop this problem, which means that whatever is causing these spikes is unconstrained. I need to look more deeply into Docker memory management to see if I can limit RAM usage such that the crash can be avoided while remaining functional.
Thanks. I have looked into it a bit more and I think that it is the postgres database grabbing all the memory it can. I have set a hard limit for the postgres container. Hopefully this resolves the problem!
On a road trip through Ontario one year we met a couple of teenagers at a country gas station near Ottawa with pupils in the shape of a cat … a vertical almond shape. I freaked out when I saw the girl first and jumped back. She was used to the reaction and said she just looked like that and it wasn’t a trick. She then said her brother had the same thing and he came to see us.
This was about 25 years ago before novelty contact lenses were around … they may have been around but I had never heard of them at the time.
It’s a weird thing to see just these tiny differences to the human anatomy … it immediately makes you think that something is wrong or not right. It makes you realize just how easily prejudices are born.
The two people were really nice small town people and we had a good conversation and we even left them a tip before we never saw them again.
Then again that is the special thing about differences though … I’ve seen so many 'normal looking" people in my life and none of them stand out, but I can still picture these two and I’ll never forget them.
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