I teach college chemistry, and half the time it’s to STEM majors that see the obvious applications, but the other half the time, my students are going into nursing or other “STEM-adjacent” fields and I try and try to get them to see that the applications are there, if they just look, but many of them never do.

Every time I think I can’t love Zach Weinersmith any more, he goes and makes a comic like this

You could be mixing up correlation and causation. The divorce could have happened for any number of reasons and the ensuing loneliness and alienation could have been what led the husband to seek validation in manosphere bullshit

I mean, he’s not wrong. 90% of the time I hear someone wax poetic about how amazing math is, they haven’t the faintest clue what they’re talking about.

Scientists and mathematicians appreciate the beauty of the universe, too, but it’s more in the “we are tiny bits of matter trying to understand the vastness of the cosmos” sense (at least in my experience as a chemist who loves talking about this shit with my microbiologist and mathematician friends)

I’m going to make a generalization and say that someone in a PhD program (any PhD program) is more practical and better at handling financial planning than 95% of all professional athletes.

I guess murderhobos gonna murderhobo

This is why you play Pathfinder, where the PC’s can be the traditional “monstrous” races. It seems a lot more like slavery or kidnapping when there are PC’s with the same ancestry

I was mildly amused by the meme and took a sip of coffee. Then I read the title and now I have coffee in my nose.

Haha, Mörk Borg go brrrr

Edit: any system that’s described as “a pitch-black, apocalyptic TTRPG” and uses “scum” in place of “player characters” is ok by me.

FFS, the official tagline is “a doom metal album of a game. A spiked flail to the face. Light on rules, heavy on everything else;” what more do you fellow grimdank dorks want?

My dad is one of those “worryingly concerned about self-defense” boomers and I got an LED/lithium ion maglite-ish flashlight last year for Christmas.

It still doubles as a bludgeon and it’s rechargeable and puts out like 5k lumens, so while I didn’t think I needed anything like it, it’s quite handy if you live in the mountains like I do. Nothing scares off a couple coyotes or a bear like just blasting them in the retina with a high-end LED photon cannon (short of an actual shotgun with bean bag rounds like my neighbor uses)

I do love the feeling of disorientation I got from the first book. The whole thing felt like I was in a fever dream and I was never sure if I was losing my mind or it was the book.

Of course a big chunk of that could be the sleep deprivation that came with having 2 kids under two at the same time as reading the book.

2meirl4meirl

Rounders has a young Matt Damon and Edward Norton and is entirely about gamblers making their living as poker players in the late 90’s or early 2000’s.

It’s pretty good

Edit: I just realized you said not entirely about cards, but I still highly recommend the movie. The plot revolves around cards, but it’s also about ambition and knowing when to cut off deadbeat friends

Fucking Onion keeps giving them ideas; the GOP might as well start paying them as policy advisors

That’s because you’re thinking of it like a particle moving a distance, but matter at that scale actually behaves more like a standing wave that only has discrete solutions.

Or at least that’s how I think about electrons and Schrodinger’s equation. I dunno, I only teach about stuff that’s as small as an electron, but it’s a useful tool for thinking about quantum numbers, so I assume it applies to smaller matter, too.

I don’t know that you’re wrong, because those MD/PhD programs are exceptionally demanding (but are a good way to avoid med school debt for some). It’s more that even for pure MD’s, research is a very, very different career path than practicing physician. I think researchers still have to go through residency, but after that they’re mostly designing and arranging clinical trials, writing grants, interacting with related university departments, etc.

So, you know, research stuff rather than patient stuff.

edit: to address your actual question, I have no idea what the numbers for each path look like. A lot of those fields get so interrelated that it probably depend a lot on how you define “medical research.” Does genetics count? Genomics? Biomedical engineering, definitely, but what about the material scientists that develop the new dental polymers? It all gets pretty hazy when you drill down on specifics

Edit 2: I also suppose I should say that my experience with science research is almost entirely in public/university research from about a decade back, so current private sector research could vary a lot from my experience. I don’t think it’s that different though, given what I’ve heard from friends and coworkers.

There are medical researchers that have MD’s, but they are not practicing physicians (usually). There are MD/PhD programs that are aimed toward medical research fields (usually with the PhD being in biology or chemistry as you mentioned), and lots of biological and biomedical engineers working on certain medical fields as well (especially using stem cells and other chemical cues to regrow tissues). So yeah, biology- and physiology-adjacent sciences are where most of the actual advances are happening.

Actually practicing medicine is basically like being a mechanic that specializes in keeping one particularly poorly designed piece of equipment running.

I’m aware of and support her current work and I agree that she’s much smarter than her public persona would lead people to believe. However, she still comes from a place of unbelievable privilege and telling people to “stop being desperate” is incredibly tone deaf, IMO.

Two things can be true at the same time.

“Stop Being Desperate” has a real “Let them eat cake” feel, especially coming from her.

As someone who teaches chemistry to premeds, this is not surprising at all. To make a sweeping generalization, premeds, med students, and the MDs they become are some of the most entitled, condescending, and oblivious people I’ve ever met.

There are exceptions of course, but in general, I can’t stand most premeds and I really can’t stand how our culture puts MDs on a pedestal.