Also trust in PCR cyclers ist often low... PCR is often not straight forward, chemicals can go bad, primers don't work reliably, input DNA has inhibitors, etc. So people are quick to blame the thermocycler if things don't work for an unknown reason, or some have their favorite cycler that "always works for me", and don't what to switch to an unknown one. I guess part of the reason is that there is no log where you can check the exact temperature in every well of the block after the run. Failed PCRs cost money and especially time, so I can see why people don't want to try machines some guy built in his garage.

Yeah, tell the thousands of PhD students who question their life choices over non-working PCRs every year that it's "optimal". ;)

In normal biology labs real-time PCR is used much less than normal PCR, I'd guess 5% of PCRs across labs are run in real-time machines.

Here is a nice video with slow motion footage of the bees in flight, and an interview with the researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jje1LPrsHbc

The aquarium is great, but when I was there I found the penguin exhibit a bit sad: it's completely indoors, the penguins will never see the sun or sky...

The general state of animal welfare in Japan leaves a lot to be desired.

Aw, that is pretty sad

The Calgary Zoo has a mixed indoor/outdoor habitat for the penguins. During the winter the King Penguins are outside, and they even organize a daily walk for them where they get to leave their enclosure entirely

How would a penguin take Japan's outdoor climate?

Tphakala recently also published a cli tool to process recordings, it can also use other models such as Google perch.

https://github.com/tphakala/birda

My travel health insurance lately warns of Egyptian hospitals and doctors trying to charge absurd amounts for simple procedures for tourists, and pressuring them to pay, arguing they can get it back from their insurance. Similar story.

I wonder if they are profitable, or if some sort of government support is involved. I don't think power for all those lights is particularly cheap in Singapore, and the competition in the surrounding countries has cheap labor and lots of free sun and rain.

If you look closely enough, everything is government supported. However farming is explicitly government subsidised everywhere.

Bringing necessities (water, food, energy) local is worth subsidizing. For those who doubt, just look at current events. Two morons with the right levers can upend countless critical processes.

That's a hard thing to have introspection in as just about every productive source of food probably has some government support.

Just about everywhere has understood "bread and circuses" and "let them eat cake" to the point of monetarily promoting food production.

One of the big distinctions between feudalism and extreme capitalism in my mind is forgetting this.

This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites. The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.

Web of trust weakens anonymity, but doesn’t eliminate it.

- You know who your online invitees are, but not your invitees-of-invitees-of-…

- You can create an account, get it invited, then create an alt account and invite it. Now the alt account is still linked to you, but others don’t know whether it’s your friend or yourself. (Importantly, you can’t evade bans with alts; if your invited users keep getting banned, you’ll be prevented from inviting more if not banned yourself)

You have to click on the channel number in the first column.