pazimzadeh

However bad the ergonomics are of a touchscreen laptop, they are still better than touching invisible screens in the air.

won't be an M6 pro, they are saving the ram and other components for the M7 series

Doesn't the high resale value of Macs not make it worthwhile to hang on to your old one as long as possible?

Also why would you have to spend $6000? You can get a refurbished 16-inch M5 Pro with 48 Gb RAM and 1 Tb SSD from Apple for $3000.

The first time I tried my friend's iPod I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Holding down the Play/Pause button is not discoverable at all but once you knew it was perfect. Your thumb never had to leave the wheel.

> If you have any specific examples that you believe merit review you are free to forward them to me.

Sure, I have been wanting another opinion for a while. Do you want me to post here or via email?

> Literature reviews summarise the state of knowledge in a given field, and given Wikipedia articles are about the knowledge on a subject rather than the contents of a specific paper

every paper has a review section built into the background section, which goes through the same peer-review process that a review does. usually these are much better and more up to date than review articles since they're written by scientists trying to put their findings into context, rather than reviews which are often handed by professors to their PhD students/postdocs who need to fill their CV with papers after a few 'dry' research years, and often peddle their group's take on a given topic rather than being neutral.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've read something in a review then gone on to read the original cited paper and found that the review inaccurately summarized the paper. often the review author didn't even read the paper, just summarized something from the title or abstract. this happens for primary papers too, but reviews are in no way more reliable, and in my opinion the farther you get from the source data the more errors propagate.

it's also a bad policy for seemingly controversial topics. the medical establishment is composed of humans with plenty of biases and groupthink, so a perfectly good idea can be shunned or ignored for decades if it's inconvenient to the establishment. this creates a chicken and egg problem for finding funding to study those ideas, or to know they even need to be studied.

in grad school we learned to 'embrace the controversy' in grant writing. instead of picking a side, steel-man the different opinions and evidence for each, and cite the differences as a reason for further study & explain how you'll figure it out.

wikipedia doesn't need that last part, but I think it will be a good habit for editors to learn to truly critique a primary paper.

the only thing reviews have going for them is they are more accessible/skimmable to the average reader. my guess is that the rule about citing was written to make it easier to be an editor. anyway, technically the wikipedia regulations don't outright ban primary literature as long as you give the necessary caveats, but there are plenty of megalomaniacal admins don't care about nuance (e.g. MrOllie)

it is a rate-limiting step.

previously you'd inject a rabbit or other small mammal with what wanted antibodies to bind against, plus an adjuvant compound

then you'd need to screen the antibodies and figure out what they do. some antibodies will bind to your target but not neutralize it, so have to rule those out.

then I think you'd have to do amino acid sequencing on it I think and then clone the sequence in some B-cells to produce it.

there's probably a way better approach than what I just said but it's usually still going to start with stabbing an animal with your target.

yeah and for some reason primary literature can't be used, except when it can, but review articles are allowed. makes no sense.

animals are very expensive, but usually you learn something about biology even if mouse results don't always translate to humans.

wasting time and money on a drug that only works in a test tube/organoid/co-culture model is also very expensive.

we should keep funding both, and if the non-animal are good enough, it won't be difficult to convince scientists to save money by using them.

I think that oversimplifies it. One approach is use animals early because if there is no effect in animals, then you don't have an effect.

Once you have an effect, use in vitro models/cell culture to figure out potential mechanisms, then test again in animals to confirm.

If you are doing a PhD (or whatever), do you want to spend 5 years not knowing if your discovery only works in test tubes?

> reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal

this sounds good, but how do you actually define that? how harmful do you consider giving an animal a UTI (which has the chance to infect kidneys, etc if untreated)?

> For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives

I agree on principle but for infectious disease you can't really do this without potentially releasing lab strains into the wild.

Something you didn't mention would be to try to use as many parts of an animal that you sacrifice as possible, but then again you're just cluttering expensive -80C freezer space with random tissues if you don't use them. But sometimes when doing ex vivo experiments you can turn one mouse intro multiple samples if you cut the tissues up and expose each one to different conditions, rather than treating the whole mouse. That can save mice..

the dose makes the poison

yeah but the best designs also come from designers