auritracen

[auritracen]

My apprentice that I've taught and mentored throughout has killed himself. And I've only just heard the news, 3 months after he died.

I am nothing but devastated.

[auritracen]

My boss is such a kind person.

Me in email: I'm sorry for the massive block of ccs in the emails with admins

Boss in reply: I'm sorry for admins not being helpful

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The main reason behind my burning dislike for biomaterials (especially hydrogels and 'synthetic cells') is the fact that this subject is built upon a basis so unsteady that often data massaging (quoting a certain person here...) is necessary to make it appear workable.

Regarding how rampant data massaging is, I have four anecdotes:

Friend of mine, when she was starting out, the postdoc she was assigned with told her to replicate a set of experiments. She spent a month following the exact same protocol used but all data that came out were obviously not the same.

Said postdoc above once remarked to my friend: the error bars on your data are too large. You need to massage your data.

Same postdoc has a biobattery published on Nature in 2022. The idea and protocol used were exactly the same as a Nature paper in 2019. Obvious problems with innovation aside, he openly claimed on multiple occasions that the biobattery can last 30 minutes to 2 hours with an output of 1.9 V, but when he tried to replicate his own experiments in another lab, he failed hard and blamed the collaborator's microscope incubator for being faulty. Quoting the collaborator: "He says it can last for 30 minutes to 2 hours? More like 30 seconds."

Another person in said lab has a project where her assumptions were built on an earlier paper from the group. That paper deliberately didn't include lots of data that should've been there, and acknowledged "we have lots of unpublished data that supports our findings" in the text. Both me and my friend thinks this paper has been significantly massaged, and this unfortunate person spent 4 years trying to make her project work but it never did.

In practice there's indeed no way to figure out if the data has or hasn't been massaged just by looking the current-voltage figures they've put on the paper. One can easily take a system that has previously been established to be working, then adjust the input manually so that the output looks like what you want. One can also splice multiple different current-voltage traces together, something often done in dishonest Western blotting.

And I'm fucking glad I've left this field.

[auritracen]

My meeting profile picture is Phil Baran, and my friend's profile picture is Dale Boger, just to make things match. When she logged in today this happened...

Former big boss: I think Dale Boger's back.

Friend didn't hear shit. I was already hollering on the other side of the phone call.

Friend: well I'm gonna start listening to what they have to offer now...

Me: you didn't hear that?

Friend: hear what?

Me: big boss going "I think Dale Boger's back".

Friend: what the hell? I didn't hear shit.

Me: I've only made out the "Boger's back" part but I did hear a very clear Boger.

Friend: don't log in now! This is danger zone! Wait till I give you the all clear!

Me, the scorned one, logging onto former place's group meetings as entertainment, under my friend's name.

Friend goes: I have an idea. If anyone asks me why do I have two zoom accounts, I'll say: "one account can't play the sound, and another account can't show the screen".

[auritracen]

Me, the scorned one, logging onto former place's group meetings as entertainment, under my friend's name.

Friend goes: I have an idea. If anyone asks me why do I have two zoom accounts, I'll say: "one account can't play the sound, and another account can't show the screen".

[auritracen]

Oh and also, especially after collaborating with my friend who currently does research in biomaterials and is about to leave the field, I've acquired a burning hatred with her towards so-called soft, biodegradable, biocompatible, wearable materials.

People were so hyped about fullerene in the 1990s, saying it's going to allow artificial sunlight harvesting, room-temperature superconductivity, and so on so forth. But the entire thing turned out to be not such and it's now stuck as something abhorrently embarrassing to read*. 20 years later graphene was also hyped up and it turned out also rather nonsensical.

Moral of the lesson: think, before jumping on the hype train. If anyone would've thought that maybe, just maybe, the electronic structure of fullerene isn't actually that special... so much time and money wouldn't have gone to waste.

*: at least for me. I'm still bitter that research on hypoxic environments in cancer got rejected by Nature in the 1990s, while at that exact same period, shit filled with fullerenes swarmed inside and were accepted. There's a whole track record of dye-sensitised photovoltaics involving fullerenes (what's so wrong with, uhm, not using fullerenes? I know people are trying to push the Shockley-Queisser limit but don't stoop THAT low) in Nature back in the 90s.

[auritracen]

People were so hyped about fullerene in the 1990s, saying it's going to allow artificial sunlight harvesting, room-temperature superconductivity, and so on so forth. But the entire thing turned out to be not such and it's now stuck as something abhorrently embarrassing to read*. 20 years later graphene was also hyped up and it turned out also rather nonsensical.

Moral of the lesson: think, before jumping on the hype train. If anyone would've thought that maybe, just maybe, the electronic structure of fullerene isn't actually that special... so much time and money wouldn't have gone to waste.

*: at least for me. I'm still bitter that research on hypoxic environments in cancer got rejected by Nature in the 1990s, while at that exact same period, shit filled with fullerenes swarmed inside and were accepted. There's a whole track record of dye-sensitised photovoltaics involving fullerenes (what's so wrong with, uhm, not using fullerenes? I know people are trying to push the Shockley-Queisser limit but don't stoop THAT low) in Nature back in the 90s.

[auritracen]

Me: Donkey (someone from my ex-workplace) is literally like Don Quixote. Blind faith in his flop of a project [to be fair there are no reasonable projects coming out from there since 2018], picking fights with a windmill all over the place.

Friend: Don-keyxote.

Me: And his mate who sits next to him in the office. He leaves so fucking late every single day yet he didn't manage to get any meaningful data. He basically did nothing. I didn't even see him working in the lab. Is he chatting the entire time with Don-keyxote?

Friend: Seeing how close they are, I suppose so.

Me: That's his Dulcinea del Toboso!

Friend: No, he's Jia Baoyu. Because when his Lin Daiyu, i.e. Don-keyxote dies, he's gonna lose the will to continue.

[auritracen]

Friend had her big research talk today. She was in the middle of her presentation showing the structural model of a peptide we've built as a starting point, when her boss interrupted with a question.

Friend's boss: I mean, the crystal structure is already available, why would you build it again?

Friend: there isn't a crystal structure for our peptide online, since ours is a consensus sequence and not the original bacterial transporter sequence. What's online is the original transporter sequence structure.

Friend's boss: it's available online.

Friend: we checked, it's not.

And the meaningless conversation was repeated just like that for multiple times; the boss with 45 years of experience in chemical biology just didn't get that a consensus sequence isn't the original sequence... despite the fact that my singing teacher, with a degree in English, understood what's a consensus sequence and how's it different after I've explained to her once.

I hate this bullshit so much.

[auritracen]

Context: my friend's computational project is logged under her little boss' (boss L), but she has filled her big boss' (boss B) name and department under the departmental affiliations.

Me: how's boss L doing with funding?

Friend: she's fine, but the majority of her funding comes from medicine at cancer research, not chemistry.

Me: *about to say something*

Friend: I know what you're thinking, the advanced computing wall time money is logged under boss B. [who is by far the number one income generator in the entire chemistry department]

Me: oh, let me request 48 CPUs with 3.5 hours wall time for our protein equilibration then! Hahaha!

[auritracen]

My boss is horrifyingly good with words. I'm trying to channel his spirit when writing funding proposals. Hope this works.

[auritracen]

Conversations with two friends last night.

Conversation 1.

Me: do you by any chance can look up the birthday of the PhD student who’s my mentor?

Friend 1: let me check on facebook… holy shit since I was in the same year group as him I actually can. It’s xyz.

Me to friend 2, who reads bazi (eight characters of destiny) very well: you know what to do now…

Conversation 2.

Friend 2: he’s a prideful type, family has a bit of money but isn’t obtained from investment. Probably from technology related. Family probably is very educated, and he strives to be of that type? He pushes himself a lot. Though I see bad things in his personality, but he’s not the type who will be malicious to you. He’ll also be extremely flirtatious after his late 30s, and his luck will go downhill from there, especially in his 40s but won’t be too bad.

Me: but again, will he be malicious to me??

Friend 2: well, he’s wood and you’re fire. Wood grows fire. More like he’ll jumpstart your career.

Conversation 3.

Friend 2: the people singing outside sounds like a rhino yelling.

Me: I just had a cursed thought. I suspect the PhD mentor will sound like this after he’s drunk.

Friend 2, in the context of the PhD mentor has overly flirtatious written: but will he send weird videos (lab drama from my old group, some PhD student emailed a dick video over to another PhD student) over when he’s drunk??

Me: at this stage my standards are very low. Send other people weird videos all you like. Just don’t send them over to me, that’s all.

Friend 1: Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

[auritracen]

I have a bad tendency to automatically social mask (I don't like this!! I think this is disingenuine), and my social mask is rather dysfunctional. Examples given below.

Situation 1: with one of my teachers, I kind of regress into the personality when I first met her just to be on her good side??? My entire tone automatically thins down, which is extremely weird and not conducive to the self consistency I desire!

Situation 2, yesterday with someone in my year group:

A: I think I've forgotten my scarf... *looks in bag* Oh it's there. Now I can wrap it around my neck.

Me, trying to be funny, blurted out: You've got your rope for suicide back!

A: Wow.

In hindsight that didn't went well.

It's how and why do I unconsciously perceive it necessary to switch my already bad social mask in front of people? Have I indeed gotten a lot of shit from other people even when I act normally, i.e. according to average? It's like: oh, other people are doing it, fine. But now you've done exactly the same, you're under the spotlight and we'll endlessly torment you for this!

[auritracen]

Friend: boss wants us to submit a paper outline. But we can't wait.

Me: I think we should start writing the full paper right now.

Friend: Then we'll just send the completed manuscript to the boss!! Hahaha!!! That way he'll have no way but to edit the manuscript as soon as possible!

[auritracen]

I hate the fact that when I miss a meal, my entire eating habit gets fucked over for a week.

Missed a meal then had chicken gyro as dinner, with leftovers for next morning? Next lunch is now no more since I had the leftover gyro in the morning, appetite suppressed further. Still not hungry in the evening.

Now reduced to drinking nutritionally complete meals in a bottle just to NOT die from hypoglycemia...

[auritracen]

I just wanted to make some extra money. So I asked a friend to suggest me to the tutoring company he's working at, got sent a contract, which I read in great detail... Apparently the contract is written very poorly??? Lots of loopholes that doesn't protect the company nor me, if legal trouble somehow happens.

So I asked the staff who sent me the contract asking for clarification on these. She told me to ask her boss. Her boss then says I'll tell you in detail tomorrow.

Once I receive a reply tomorrow, I'll make what I want clear (flexible hours, short contract, no unapproved advertising because some stuff on my CV can actually get me into big legal trouble if publicised). If no, I'll find some other place to make extra money.

[auritracen]

Somehow I never liked writing code. Always thought it as pure torture either way.

Last year I thought drawing out graphs in python was good. This year I tried out matlab. And this felt much more dang excellent. I love matlab even though I hate coding.