Perform what though?

• “this fucking pipeline finally works” beer
• “Congratulations on the acceptance of your manuscript…” Beer
• Post Dark Souls/Elden Ring boss kill beer
• Dark Souls/Elden Ring boss killed me beer
• post 10k, “I EARNED THIS” beer

Yes, I think it’s okay to enjoy whatever it is you enjoy so long as doing so doesn’t harm others or yourself. I also think it’s important to be mindful what it is that makes you feel like there’s a moral quandary, and it’s also worth considering if the media you’re consuming is the work of a group of people or a single individual.

For example, I really enjoy the movie Chinatown, but Roman Polanski is a piece of shit. I don’t think his shitness diminishes the quality of the movie because it was acted well by Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway; the writing is incredible as is the cinematography; and credit where credit is due, Polanski directed the movie masterfully. He’s still a child rapist piece of shit though.

I’m happy with the work I do—I find it rewarding personally and the inkling of a possibility that it might be useful one day for any number of biological applications is exciting.

Unfortunately, I am entirely replaceable, compensation is meh for the level of education, and society as a whole does not place much value in basic sciences so career prospects are bleak (and this was BEFORE the current administration).

I use polident to clean my Zojirushi container.

So, this line-up suggests there’s room for a cross-over story where the football squad wearing the color changing dress pounds the main character’s ass.

-Futurama all the way up to the end of the comedy central reboot; I haven’t seen the newest ones. -30 Rock -Fargo -Derry girls -The Last of Us -Broadchurch -Slow horses -True Detective S1, 3, and 4. -Rome

Thanks for joining penis and intermittent organ facts.

Did you know that the “tail” of the male coastal tailed frog is actually an extension of the cloaca effectively acting as an intermittent organ?

Reply ‘more cock’ for more facts about penises and intermittent organs.

Hemipenes (and penis/intermittent organs) are really diverse in terms of size and shape. A lot of lizards and snakes have little nodules and barbs that vary from species to species. Not sure what the ornaments do, but it’s interesting. Also interesting is that having two (i.e. one on each side) potentially means that there’s a handedness in terms of the preferred side used for mating.

Other fun facts about penises and other intermittent organs: cats and other felids have barbed penises that force ovulation in the female. Tangentially related are the pseudo penises of female hyenas.

More fun facts: damselfly males have intermittent organs that are spoon shaped so they scrape out the sperm of rival males.

Respond ‘cock facts’ to learn more about penises and intermittent organs.

Respond ‘stop’ if you don’t want to learn cool shit.

I’m a biologist/bioinformatician—a lot of my presentations require some schematic representation of the analysis or pipeline.

I tend to build simple pipelines with PowerPoint and add animations (makes it easier for me to talk through step by step). If it’s complex, I build parts in some other thing (R, illustrator/Photoshop), and animate the PDF/PNG in.

Equations I try to avoid because most of my audience tends to gloss over them. On the occasion that I’m talking to more computational folks, I’ll build the equation elsewhere, export it as an image, and animate it in with annotations.

Again, I’m a biologist and present mostly to biologists, so some of this may seem stupid or nonsensical to folks in other fields.

Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.

Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.

In other groups it’s not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.

Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.

Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.

Eukaryotic sex determination isn’t a binary and it isn’t even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It’s a grab-bag of whatever doesn’t perma-fuck your genome.

Source: me, I’m a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.

A few points worth clarifying:

As another user pointed out, pseudoscientific journals and predatory journals aren’t the same. As you pointed out, pseudoscientific journals are generally easy to identify because they have a very clearly stated agenda typically. This means they will publish anything that places their ideas in a favorable light and are generally not objective. They tend to push garbage “science”.

Predatory journals are journals and publishing firms that have what is effectively a pay-to-play scheme, where authors are enticed with minimal peer review at relatively high publishing cost. Meaning, any crappy study can/will be published so long as the authors pay the publication cost. There’s a list online (Beall’s List) of what might be considered predatory.

Now, I will also point out that the authors paying is not what makes this unethical and damaging to science. The vast majority (if not all) scientific publishing is contingent on the authors paying the publication cost and these costs are going to be especially high in open access journals (e.g. PLoS, which is not predatory). These costs are only incurred when the journal agrees to publish after getting positive recommendations from reviewers. Predatory journals forgo the review, and simply publish.

Fraudulent work (i.e., faked data) is likely to be present in any reputable journal, albeit at low frequencies. I say “low” because science is increasingly moving toward an open data model of publication where the raw data sets associated with study must be available publicly, including code used to produce results. While there aren’t loads of people reanalyzing published datasets, the possibility that someone might could be enough to deter most people from making shit up.

I wouldn’t let the Wakefield example spoil the wealth of good studies that’s been published at the Lancet. At this point the only people giving that study any credence are Brain-worms and his ilk. A better bet is to look for retractions issued by the journals. This typically happens in the event of fraud, non reproducibility, fundamental flaws in the study, etc.

Source: I’m an academic scientist and actively publishing.

Tldr: look at Beall’s list for predatory journals; don’t worry too much about fraud in reputable journals; look for retractions if you’re really worried.