gww

I’m in a similar boat. I really enjoyed SO for a long time. I’m have around 44k reputation and haven’t answered a question since late 2020. I mostly stopped by the end of 2018, when I finished graduate school. Part of it was having less time as a postdoc and academic, and part of it was that the questions started to feel either repetitive or too specific and outside my areas of expertise.

I think one issue is that the admissions for medicine are getting harder and harder. In many places you practically need a 4.0.GPA, volunteer work, great mcat scores, research experience, sometimes a post grad degree like an MSc and PhD etc. This selects for highly competitive and intense personalities that are not always suited for every medicine specialty. Most of them don't want to go into family medicine and pediatrics because it's more work, less money, less prestige etc. The friends I had who wanted to go into family medicine couldn't because of the admission requirements. Their only alternative was to have family money to pay for medical school in places like Ireland.

Edit: I should have mentioned that pediatrics and family medicine represent a large proportion of available residency spots each year and are rarely full.

I have multisensory aphantasia. I assumed everyone was like this until I read an HN thread a long time ago. I have a very strong inner monologue. For example, I can hear part of a song in my head. Ie the guitar but it's my inner voice initiating the sound of a guitar. But I cannot hear a whole song. Maybe it's what rhythm had always been a challenge for me with guitar and piano.

A few of the older 3d MMORPGS did try to instill some of those mechanics. Examples include:

1) Asheron's Call (which had a very active mod scene and now an emulator scene). I don' think the servers are nearly as popular as UO though.

2) Shadowbane (this one was heavily guild based but it was fun being a bit of an outlaw and PvPing random people and guilds).

I have worked at a sequencing center before. DNA contamination is easier to mitigate because the lab disposables aren't made out of what you are testing. Disposables are almost always plastic and tend to have minimal DNA contamination. Environmental DNA contamination is largely mitigated with PCR hoods and careful protocols/practices. However, these procedures don't mitigate DNA contamination at the collection level, which is likely where the statistical models you mentioned help.

I can't imagine wafting your hands over the tubes would change the plastic amounts substantially compared to whatever negative controls the papers used. But again, I am not an expert on this kind of analytical chemistry. I always worry more about batch effects. But it does seem like microplastics are becoming the new microbiome.

I haven't really read the studies but shouldn't they have negative controls to negate these effects? Wouldn't that let the author's correct for a baseline contamination level in the lab?

That is how I became serious about programming. I played around a bit but I never really wrote anything useful until I started playing Asheron's Call. I learned C++ to write bots and other plugins for Decal (an embedded mod framework).

There are other examples of oncoviruses including: Epstein-Barr virus and Human herpes virus 8 (Kaposi's Sarcoma).

Makes me wonder: Is the cancer "industry" searching for causes or just after-the-fact treatment?

There are billions of dollars spent on this problem through huge DNA/RNA/Epigenomics/Chromatin Accessibility sequencing initiatives. There is also a huge amount of model system work such as mouse models.

ed was the hardest thing for 12 year old me to understand.

I played Aardwolf briefly but I mostly stuck to a nightmare/LP MUD that is still around but essentially empty. I learned to code (which ended up being a gateway to C/C++), grief, and be compassionate to new players.

I have a different problem with my M3 Macbook Pro. If I leave chrome (sometimes other apps too) open with the macbook plugged in and the lid closed the computer will get very warm and stay very warm until I unplug it / close chrome.

Edit: It's also not warm when plugged in and using chrome with the lid open.

Reminds me of one of my favorite Simpsons lines: "Aw, you can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that"