wjs018

That style does work well for presentations

I honestly prefer presentations to writing for the reasons you pointed out. I have never been too nervous when it comes to public speaking, and I feel much more able to convey my point through a more conversational style. However, my presentation style (specifically slide design) has had to change a lot over the course of my career.

When I was in grad school, my preferred method of presentation was to have a slide with a single graph/image/diagram on it and then verbally talk through all the things I wanted to convey for that slide. It allowed me tons of flexibility, kept the slides from becoming cluttered and distracting, and created a more conversational atmosphere as people felt more empowered to ask questions as I was going (this also helps keep the audience engaged).

However, as I moved into a professional setting, I had a mentor sit me down and tell me how great my presentations were, but they were not really effective in a corporate setting like this one (global company, split across timezones, etc). The simple reason being that the slides I was making were being shared to others who couldn't make it to my presentation and a good chunk of the actual audience of the presentation only ever got to see the slides, without the benefit of my talking to help them understand. So, this has led me to move more towards including text on my slides. I basically have to ask myself if there is enough information on this slide to understand things without my explaining it, but without anything extra to make it confusing.

Since the pandemic, I have also had to change things up a bit to make presentations more amenable to presenting via Teams/Zoom. This means things like removing videos, complex animation, or any audio. It just doesn't work reliably enough through screen sharing and if you can find a way around it, then it makes everybody's life easier.

Speaking of tangents, this has been a long one, but I care a lot about effective communication and specifically presentations. So many people are so bad at giving a good presentation, and I find it frustrating personally, when I have to sit through so many.

I actually agree with you about math education and math texts. It is really bad at conveying understanding and my math-heavy courses were the toughest for me (E&M in grad school was awful). Too often math textbooks simply present things and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader, or they will lean too far the other way and present formal proofs for everything. Either way is not helpful for developing an intuitive understanding of what is going on.

The things that helped me develop communication skills the most were simply doing it a lot followed by having some good mentors that I found to be good communicators. My grad school advisor was great at communicating physics and one of my early bosses in industry was an excellent presenter. So, I would often bounce either writing or slides off of them for feedback.

I am guilty of writing walls of text as comments, but I try to stick to my lane. You can see my most recent wall of text about freeze dryers as an example. There are a few things that I think need to come together to create a good, high-effort post:

• Passion - If you don't care, you aren't going to spend the time to write about something
• Knowledge - For some topics this may be less required, but I tend to create walls of text about technical issues. I have a PhD in physics, so that gives me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to work from in this regard
• Writing Ability - You need to be able to write effectively to make a wall of text worthwhile. This is a skill that gets better the more you do it.

The other thing I tend to do when writing a high-effort post is I actually proofread it before making it. I try to cut out unneeded tangents, reword things that might be confusing, or supplement things that aren't motivated enough.

For me personally, this doesn't take me too long to do since I have been writing and presenting about extremely technical topics for about two decades at this point. Like I mentioned above, informative writing is a skill that gets better with practice. So, doing it regularly as a significant part of my job as well as providing feedback to others on their writing/presentations, has provided me with tons of practice to improve these things.

If you want some formal guidance on scientific writing/presentations specifically, two books I have found informative (mostly on presentations) have been:

• The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley
• slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte

The products I work on are mostly monoclonal antibodies (and the occasional gene therapy product mixed in). So, the types of diseases they are used to treat vary. To be honest, I work on the process/formulation side of the development pipleline and the actual clinical treatment part is pretty much inconsequential to what I do. Some of the past programs I have worked on include treatments for asthma, eczema, multiple myeloma, breast cancer, MS, hemophilia, and tons of others that I don't remember. Often, when dealing with antibodies, the same medicine can be effective for multiple indications.

The finished vials, post-lyophilization, sealing, labeling, and packaging, are sent to infusion clinics. There, clinicians will add water to the vials to reconstitute the drugs and then administer them to patients via IV (usually).

Watching TC do a video about something I do professionally has been a bit of a trip. For context, I work with freeze dryers (we call them lyophilizers) in pharmaceuticals rather than foods. I help design the lyophilization cycles for biologics and gene therapy products that get preserved through freeze drying. Until this video, I had no idea that people used these instruments for at-home food preservation (which is kind of insane imo).

The instruments that I work with are typically a much larger version of the bench-scale machine that he is using (usually one of the LyoStar line). However, I have used smaller, bench-scale units as well for some quick and dirty work. I included some pictures at the end behind a spoiler tag. Happy to answer any questions people have.

Some differences in how I use lyophilizers in a scientific setting as opposed to a home-use food setting:

• Typically, we only lyo products that are already filled in vials as opposed to a full tray like he's done.
• We don't pre-freeze our products before they go into the lyophilizer. Instead we refrigerate the shelf that the vials are sitting on to freeze the contents before we proceed to the drying steps.
• Speaking of the shelves, in our instrument, the shelves can move up and down. This is used to compress the vials after the cycle is completely done, fully seating the vial stoppers and sealing them before we open up the main door.
• Also speaking about stoppering the vials, we typically allow some nitrogen into the chamber before sealing up the vials, at a pressure moderately less than atmospheric pressure. This helps keep the vial sealed until it is properly crimped with a seal.
• When it comes to drying, we do it in two stages. The primary drying step is when our product is kept cold, but put under vacuum. This removes most of the water, but not enough for our purposes. The secondary drying step is when the product is heated while the vacuum is maintained. This removes the rest of the water. We typically shoot for a residual moisture of <1% for a good cycle.
• He talks about how long the process takes. I have worked on processes that take from 1-5 days. Typically, the lyophilizer is limited with how much liquid can be removed per unit time. This limit is determined by the geometry of the vent that connects the main chamber with your vials, and the chamber containing the condenser. Also, if you try to dry too quickly, it can damage the product you are trying to preserve.
• He has some discussion at the end about the end of the cycle and the progress bar. What the instrument is doing is comparing the vapor pressure in the chamber using two different sensors. One of those is sensitive to the vapor pressure of water vapor, and the other is not. So, when things are fully dried out, those two are going to read the same pressure. While drying is still occurring, the sensor that detects water vapor will read a higher pressure. So, the instrument will continue to extend drying until those two pressures are the same.

::: spoiler Some Pictures Benchtop lyophilizer that I have experience using. You can see some vials lined up inside the door. I have never used the bottle connections hanging off the side:

One of the trays of vials that is loaded before going into the lyophilizer. The vials that are partially stoppered in the middle of the tray actually contain the drug. All the vials without stoppers are empty and simply there to help hold things in place as well as distribute heat predictably through the tray. The stoppered vials in the corners are there to help distribute the weight as the shelves compress to fully seat the stoppers.

Here are a small number of vials that I ran on a benchtop unit without any spacer vials or the tray. I would never do this for any reason other than to take a picture like this. This is a good view of what a partially stoppered vial looks like. It allows a path for water vapor to escape out the top of the vial.

Finally, here is a vial post-lyophilization. The liquid has turned into a solid, white cake at the bottom of the vial. This is because most lyophilization formulations include sugars that provide structure for the cake and keep it porous. The sugars provide protection against freeze/thaw stress for the molecule of interest as well. The porosity of the cake allows for quick and easy reconstitution by adding water, usually in <30 seconds or so.

This is mine too. I use the hell out of it and YouTube music that comes with it. If we look at $/hr, then this is a no-brainer for me.

I consume quite a bit of anime and manga (just look at the communities I moderate), and I see a number of regular complaints about translation in that space. I personally think most of them are overblown and that translators are doing their best. Translation is far from a science and almost every sentence/paragraph has judgement calls that need to be made by the translator. What some people find annoying about a translation might make the work more approachable to somebody else.

One thing that does bother me for Japanese is the exclusion of honorifics. Most subtitles these days include them, which is a definite improvement over official subs of the past. In subtitle form, honorifics are usually the only indication that a speaker is using something like formal language (keigo) unless you have some knowledge of the spoken language.

As a bit of an aside, if you are interested in professional translation and some of the challenges they face (especially with MTL on the horizon), then Anime Herald did an interview with several of them. Check it out!

I have hosted a wordpress site on my unraid box before, but ended up moving it to a VPS instead. I ended up moving it primarily because a VPS is just going to have more uptime since I end up tinkering around with my homelab too often. So, any service that I expect other people to use, I often end up moving it to a VPS (mostly wikis for different things). The one exception to that is anything related to media delivery (plex, jellyfin, *arr stack), because I don't want to make that as publicly accessible and it needs close integration with the storage array in unraid.

The fraud surrounding Alzheimer's research continues... Not too long ago the fraud was related to amyloid (archive version). That article was even written by the same author and features many of the same investigators.

I work in Pharma R&D (on the manufacturing side) and the company I work for has run trials for Alzheimer's products based on research that has since been found to be fraudulent. As a published scientist myself, I would like to think that this level of manipulation and fabrication is the exception rather than the rule. However, I do think it is worth asking at this point what it is about Alzheimer's research in particular that has led to this being so prevalent and, more importantly, so impactful. Basically, how did it go so far before anything was caught?

I suspect at least part of the answer is due to the large influx of money into the field. Researchers were tripping over themselves to earn those grants and then, once they had them, produce results to keep them. I am not in academia, so I don't have great insight into the NIH, NIA or their processes, but this should be a wake up call to put up a certain amount of guard rails.

Boston and New York are probably the closest to European cities with respect to transit that you will find in the States. Plenty of people live in those cities without cars. I lived in Boston for a long time (now in the Boston suburbs) and plenty of adults I know there haven't even bothered getting their driver's license.

The other Northeast Corridor cities are probably the next tier down. DC has decent transit if you make live and work near transit stops. Philadelphia can work, but SEPTA has been unreliable at best in my personal experience. I haven't really spent much time in Baltimore to be able to say.

Outside of the Northeast Corridor, the only other option really would be the San Francisco bay area with its BART system. It has decent coverage and I have family that lives in the area and enjoys it. However, I don't have much firsthand experience with it.

This largely depends on where you are in the US. I have moved a lot over the years, from dense city centers, to the dirt roads of rural America. Here are my experiences:

NYC would probably be the most comparable to your experience in London, but seeing as I haven't lived there, I can instead talk about Boston. When I lived inside the subway range in Boston (Somerville specifically), my experience matches up with yours. I was ~5 minutes from a supermarket and ~15 minutes from the subway/train stop by foot. I was even closer to a couple bus stops for lines that would take me to places like a mall, nearby universities, or the next subway line over (we don't have an equivalent of the Circle line).

I currently live in Boston suburbs (Metrowest for people that know the area) and can't really walk anywhere as my street and adjacent streets don't have sidewalks. I could try to walk on the street, but with the narrowness combined with the speed at which people drive through this neighborhood, it would not be fun. If I hop in the car, I am ~5 minutes from a strip mall with a supermarket, pharmacy, liquor store, etc. and ~10 minutes from the commuter rail train station that I use to commute to the city for work. If I want to head to a large shopping hub with a mall, then it is ~20 minutes away by car. There is a skeleton of a bus system in my area, but it would require traversing ~1.5 miles on streets without sidewalks to get to the nearest stop for me.

When I lived in a rural area (rural PA), things were very different. To get to the nearest supermarket (a WalMart), it took ~30 minutes worth of driving. If I wanted to go to the mall, it was closer to 60 minutes. I am sure there are even less dense areas than that in this country.

!lightnovels@ani.social for light novels from Japan

!aoblightnovel@bookwormstory.social for Ascendance of a Bookworm specifically (which just recently published its final volume).