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From the comments on the Facebook post where I saw this: "And yet raises prices every year to and claims it is part of their extensive process."

I continue to believe there is value in the traditional system. Specialized , , peer review, even fees and paper copies—although really the number of paper copies needed is minimal, and subscription costs should be too. The major journals have done a lot to encourage high-quality and spread , and I hope they keep doing so for quite some time to come.

None of which means any *specific* journal or publisher should continue to exist, and this shows why. The system is way overdue for a serious mucking out.

This is a really good overview of current methods for () identification in . Every person who cares about which TFs are doing what (which is most of us, I suspect) should think really hard about the relative virtues and flaws of the major methods, and not lean too hard on any one of them.

Thiago Carvalho  
"A number of methods can be used to identify differentially-active TFs through the accessibility of their DNA-binding motif, however little is know...

Actual conservatives won't be the first people purged if the Nazis get into power.

Won't be the last, though. When the fascists come for them, they'll have a moment when they wonder if they should have been braver when their friends and family started to turn.

"What would your course of action be if you saw a healthy, -bodied individual get out of a vehicle that they just parked in a space?"

"A number of people close to me have invisible . They *look* healthy and able-bodied, but they’re really not. Their conditions are just as real and disabling as those of anyone who needs a , a , or a to get around. And their agree, which is why they’re authorized to park in handicapped spaces. Unless you have the appropriate training and have conducted a thorough examination, you have no grounds to dispute this.

"So if *your* course of action is to challenge them, shout at them, threaten them, or demand that they prove to your satisfaction that they’re “really” disabled ... *my* healthy, able-bodied course of action will be to introduce you to what feels like, up close and personal. That process won’t be fun for you, but you’ll have a much greater understanding afterward, for whatever remains of your miserable life."

Usually I try really hard to avoid being Internet Tough Guy, but there are times it's the only possible response. Speak the language your audience understands.

Look, you either believe the concepts of and apply to platforms, or you don't.

You can say the only applies to the , not entities—which is undeniably true—and therefore sites have no obligation to provide a platform for speech the owners of the site don't like. This is a reasonable and defensible position.

Or you can say social media sites are the new , and therefore the owners have a moral if not legal obligation to allow anyone to say practically anything using their platforms. You can even point out that the government charters corporations, and is responsible for a lot of , so by allowing censorship in that particular environment, the government is at least complicit in interfering with free speech rights. This is also a reasonable and defensible position.

Maybe you can even try to find some kind of well-articulated middle ground between these positions, although I have to say I don't remember ever seeing anyone do so. I think most people *do* hold opinions somewhere between the two, but they don't tend to spell it out.

What they do instead is argue either side as it's convenient, which is irritating as hell. And *yes*, this is a rare bit of "both sides" on my part. I see a whole lot of leftish folks, who are generally not big fans of corporate power, deploying the first position against right-wing types—while complaining about the arbitrary and often clearly biased way et al. censor left-wing statements.

The complaints are justified. Hypocrisy is not.

Just pick a position, be honest with yourself about what that position is, and stick to it. No matter where you fall on this spectrum, you have to be aware that the mechanisms of speech, and by extension the press, have changed dramatically over the last thirty years and will continue to do so. Knowing where you stand is important.

The single worst job I ever had involved no hands-on patient care at all.

Now, I experienced some very bad days as a , and more as a . I worked on , in , and in safety net . I saw suffering on a scale I had never even imagined before. Of course I did my best to relieve that suffering—both because it was my job, and because I'm a decent human being—but a lot of the time I just couldn't, and neither could anyone else. I celebrated my successes and mourned my failures. The memory of the former sustains me to this day, but the accumulation of the latter did lasting damage to the inside of my head. Practically anyone who's ever been in the biz can say the same.

But all the and car and and cases and long, steady descents into the grave, over the course of years, didn't burn me out like two months in a practice.

You may wonder why. Okay, cardiology patients are generally pretty sick: you don't get assigned a , rather than having your primary care provider take care of it, unless your 's in bad shape. Even so, could it really be worse than all the above? After all, cardiology offices tend to be clean, well-lit, organized places. Patients have *appointments*. Fairly routine care, and if there's really bad news, it's the who have to give it—which is not the situation in , let me tell you.

Well, it did, and here's the reason. Like I said, I wasn't taking care of patients directly. My interaction with them was brief, in exam rooms after they'd already been checked in and seen by their providers, and I never touched them. It was all paperwork.

My job was to be their advocate with the companies. I did most of my work in an office, with a comfy chair and a phone and a coffee cup close at hand. The job was actually supposed to be an position, but I impressed them enough at the interview to get it, and I got paid more for it than any other medical job I had before or since.

I read their and , studied insurance claims, and—now we come to the crux of it—looked over the reasons those claims were denied. Sometimes very elaborate reasons, with lengthy justifications. Other times the feedback from the insurance companies was basically just "NO."

And then I called those companies, and worked my way up through the phone tree until I got someone on the line with some actual decision-making authority, and explained to them in great detail why they should approve a particular medication or procedure that would keep our patients from dying.

I succeeded ... maybe a quarter of the time? Probably less. Occasionally the failures weren't complete: I couldn't get them to approve whatever the cardiologist had recommended, but I could at least squeeze something out of them. Something that would keep our patients, the people entrusting us with their lives, going for a little while longer. Some sliver of hope for the patients and their families. Some human connection that reminded the people on the other end of the line that their job wasn't actually to condemn people to death, at least not on paper.

Usually not. But often enough to keep me there for a little while. The nightmares stayed under control as long as I had a bottle waiting for me when I got home. Now that I think about it, that may have been when my drinking problem got serious, although it would take several more years to fully manifest. Good thing it wasn't a practice, I guess.

A friend's post dredged this memory up. I was going to leave it as a comment there, but I didn't want to make it all about me. They have enough of their own problems. Just know, if you're fighting this particular war right now, I'm with you.

Oh yeah, also? . Specifically, if you can't vote for someone who will make it better, at least vote for someone who won't make it worse. Because it can always get worse.

From a conversation with a friend on a recent Facebook post. A memory of a memory, ghosts haunting the dusty rooms of my brain.

I once spent a very enjoyable afternoon in the of department library reading through century-old bound volumes of , which is now a somewhat obscure , but was in its day instrumental to the development of . All the great names were there—, , , et al.—and it was a clubby little world back then. Everybody who was anybody in statistics knew everybody else.

Just like today, they used a lot of space in their papers refuting each other's papers. But the writing style was completely different, much more personal: many of the papers read more like conversations than the structured, pedantic language of modern journal articles in practically every field. "First I tried this, but it didn't work, so next I ..." "Like I said to so-and-so in a recent letter ..." "According to whosit, such-and-such is true, but frankly, whosit is an idiot."

Well, I recognized what they were doing: forming and having slow-motion . Everything old is new again. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off stripping out the modern pretense of detachment.

The "" death , like all cults, always . Most of the lies are stupid ones, but the cult does have some smart members, who know how to lie very well, and give each other cover. This is one example out of many. Always read with a critical eye.

Thiago Carvalho  
"When asked by Nature how the papers made it through review, a Sage spokesperson responded that the publisher relies on journal editors to make ind...

For anyone who's wondering about the precise phrasing above: yes, travel backward in time, while anti-chronons travel forward. Our *perception* of time going forward is created by all the chronons rushing past us in the other direction. It's one of those odd historical naming conventions like having a negative charge, or an "east wind" meaning air blowing west, that we're stuck with now.

You'd think that with our current understanding of temporal mechanics, we could fix this—but every attempt has failed, often messily. I suspect it was written into the same that keeps alive.

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It always fascinates me how in both the distant and far change, decade by decade and even year by year, at exactly the same rate and in the same way as the present. My is that whenever anyone starts a or production, the (or anti-chrononic, as the case may be) sends a signal backward or forward in time to subtly alter reality and keep everything consistent. Otherwise the would fall apart. Trust me, I'm a .

: "You look so yummy I could just eat you up! Be my valentine?"

: "No."

(art by Tuomas Koivurinne)

Real are fascinating, beautiful, awe-inspiring creatures. were pretty neat too. I really wish people could appreciate the actual animals without feeling the need to mythologize them.

quora.com/Is-there-any-dog-bre

One of my favorite concert memories is of being at an show when some yob in the audience shouted "set shit on fire!" ... and snapping back, "We do not need to set things on fire. We have to do that for us."

"For example, there’s a good argument to be made that , , and all belong together in one , either or . It’s only our desire to see ourselves as something special that causes us to put them in one genus and us in another. If —probably the smartest **living** , although some give them a run for their money—were building a , they’d undoubtedly lump us together with our close relatives. But they might go to great lengths to separate themselves from !"

I like to think I can still turn a nice phrase now and then.

dinosaursworld.quora.com/If-Tr

It's been at least a decade since I thought, "I really need a ," and a good bit longer than that since the thought was followed immediately by the action. But it's been on my mind much more recently, for reasons it's not my place to discuss, and even if it weren't for those reasons I'm not sure it would ever quite go away. For everyone who will never stop or anything else: I will happily help you celebrate every inch of ground you take back and hold.

quora.com/Why-do-teetotalers-l

I get the appeal of climbing . It’s not something I’ll ever do myself, but if I were younger and richer, I might consider it as a goal. My beloved here in can be plenty challenging, but they aren’t even to the —more like foothills to the foothills. So yes, I understand the draw.

down? I don’t get that at all. It’s not , just pointless showboating. I won’t say I’m glad this guy perished in the attempt, but I’m not sorry about it either.

extremelyinterestingfacts.quor

From a long-ago Facebook post: " *generally* aren't scientists. But let's be honest here, what hasn't at least occasionally looked at the sad state of grant and been tempted to run up the Jolly Roger?"

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