murphyslab

Joined 9 years ago

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877
Submissions
202
Member since
Aug 22
Scientist. Chemistry and Nano/Materials
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Comment · 12 days ago
The original German of the poem does say, at the final line, "Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte." That is, "When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest."

So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.

It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.

Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.

However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":

> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"

Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.

So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:

> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessing_Church#Aftermath

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marga_Meusel

Comment · 1 month ago
I wasn't aware that the number of cases was so small that it might spoil for others. I see now, trying it on a desktop, that there are just 68 cases at present; there isn't an indication of that on the mobile version.

Moreover, I cannot edit my previous comment.

Comment · 1 month ago
That was incredibly fun, although challenging on a smartphone. If you can guess the character it's a lot easier (100%, 99%, 96%, 85%), but even with ones I couldn't guess, it gave a reasonable score (Hollow Knight: 74%, Steve Harvey: 84%, Sirenhead: 69%) for following the directions.
Comment · 2 months ago
NB: The post was updated twice. The first changed the link to the Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article; the second changed it back to Derek Lowe's blog post with the NRDD article in the body.
Comment · 2 months ago
My apologies for the lack of clarity in my prior comment; it was composed in haste. To be clear, I am a bit of a Derek Lowe fanboy. I value the work that he does in offering insight on his areas of expertise to the public at large because he has both the necessary understanding and the ability to communicate clearly. Few people have his level of background knowledge alongside the capacity to wade into the depths of pharmaceutical chemistry and then communicate that information and his personal perspective to enrich the commons.

What I was getting at with the issue of credibility is that I (or most others) would have time determining if a particular scholarly author in pharma is a good person to listen to on the subject. But having evidence that Derek Lowe is an honest broker of information in that domain, given his long history of commentary as well as other chemists I know who eagerly read his commentary, I'm willing to defer to his assessment.

Comment · 2 months ago
Derek Lowe is someone whom I greatly admire and his work as a science communicator is a true service to the profession and to science at large. It is not intended as an insult in any way. I've known a great number of competent chemists, but few are as effective as communicators as he is.
Comment · 2 months ago
Derek Lowe as a science communicator, and others like him, is sorely needed to understand the real meaning and significance of the study and others. I say that as someone with a PhD in chemistry who's been to plenty of presentations on drug discovery topics.

It's difficult to calibrate statements made by other scientists unless you're well embedded within a field: Is this someone whose opinions matter? Are they the subject matter expert they make themselves out to be? Is this research itself truly impactful? Is it really 5 years until it will be realized outside of academic labs? Etc...

It's difficult to decipher questions around credibility because they rely on real-world interactions and associations that extend beyond the physical tokens of paper counts, publication venues, citations, and author lists that typically lag behind the front of human knowledge which is generated from real-world interactions. It can be simple things, like the insightful question a grad student, with minimal publication history, asks in a seminar.

Of course, the paywall is also unhelpful too, but a good, brief commentary by an appropriate commentator is a better link for 99% of prospective readers compared to most "peer reviewed" (scare quotes because that's a real question nowadays) articles.

Comment · 3 months ago
Men in Black: https://floor796.com/#b2r4,541,605

Naruto: https://floor796.com/#t2l4,684,675

The author continues adding and refining the project, so if it isn't in there yet, perhaps in the future.

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Noticing all of the Costco hot dog listings on the map reminds me: There's also an incentive for businesses to pose as users and misreport prices of competitors. My local Costco gas station constantly has a set of users misreporting the price of fuel, reporting the price as several cents higher than in actuality, seemingly in order to prevent consumers from refueling there. Something to watch out for.
Comment · 3 months ago
> I was aggressively recruited for education as a math undergrad.

Was it because you were male or because you were studying math? Many schools struggle to find good math teachers; it's one of the qualifications in perpetual shortage.

Comment · 3 months ago
Suggestion: Require a user to hit ENTER or SPACE to clear the word, even if it's a wrong word. Being able to see the letters laid linearly is useful to solving. Automated clearing of wrong words is unhelpful.
Comment · 7 months ago
> I have never, ever – not even once – seen a graphical abstract that usefully “summarized the contents of an article”.

The author has never worked in chemistry. They are absolutely ubiquitous in scholarly journals for chemistry and I'd say that most people trained in chemistry often only read the graphical abstract when initially deciding whether the paper is worth a deeper read. Perhaps chemistry is a naturally visual field, given that we rely on visualizations of reactions and mechanisms from the very start of our university education.

The table of contents (TOC) graphic usually shows a key chemical structure (thus bonding connectivity, angles, elements, and electronic configurations), reaction mechanisms or conditions, models, or even core results as graphs. Now I do not claim to understand what is implied in every TOC graphic, however I can immediately see which branches of chemistry the article relates to faster than I can process the title, especially in a multidisciplinary chemistry journal.

That ability to categorize to identify relevance is a bigger issue in reading a multidisciplinary chemistry journal like the Journal of the American Chemical Society:

https://pubs.acs.org/toc/jacsat/current

But graphical abstracts are still immensely useful within a subdiscipline such as organic chemistry, which I suspect were the early adopters of TOC graphics:

https://pubs.acs.org/toc/joceah/current

The better graphical abstracts tend towards simplicity, but it's a challenging task to distill a year or more of research into a single picture. And, unfortunately, graphic design is not a subject for which scientists generally receive additional training, despite it being a core element of digital communication.

Comment · 8 months ago

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