Oh, I stand corrected: Indoor plumbing will only take 347,000 years.
106 karma · joined June 4, 2019
It took 349,800 years for us to install a toilet. Constructing a pyramid took 346,000 years. Granted, the survivors of climate disaster will have the benefit of legacy technology, but surviving in these new conditions well enough to create a society capable of widescale adaptation of our current society's abilities will take several thousand years at best. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Even working at negative pressures, you can easily end up with a positive-pressure manifold if your sample is unexpectedly evolving gas at a higher than usual rate, or your valves aren't configured as intended. To be clear, these aren't academic exercises; I've actually seen all of these happen. With closed systems, you have to anticipate explosive pressures and plan accordingly. HF is incompatible with that kind of failure.
How is that safer than neutral-pressure, aqueous HF? I'm perfectly comfortable with bottled HF, to the point that I literally handled it in the dark (light-sensitive samples), but I'd never set foot in the same room as a pressurized HF gas canister. A spilled HF bottle is a major incident, but ultimately straight forward to contain, whereas an HF canister leak would kill off an entire lab.
I've done enough manifold setups and worked with enough gas cylinders to understand that they can leak in all kinds of ways, even with a wealth of experience. As I said initially: you are definitely not paranoid enough about this setup.
Even at lower concentrations, you still need specialized gloves, apron, and ideally a face shield, in addition to standard PPE. Source: worked with HF for 3 years.
Essentially, the path I'm recommending is a career in microbiology. It's admittedly the long road, and not a well-paying one at that, but it's one way to do it!
Conservation is the cognitive understanding of whether or not the amount of a given (inert) solid or liquid will change despite its presentation. For example, human toddlers don't grasp conservation, and will erroneously believe that pouring water from a tall glass into a wide bowl makes more water, since it "looks" bigger in the wider container (e.g. it takes up more visual space in a wider vessel, and therefore must be "more"). No other animals possess this skill either (thank you Wikipedia [0]).
Combine that with the nebulous nature of gas - it's not intuitive to understand that an empty glass is, in fact, full of air - and understanding phase changes become that much more difficult.
It's kind of like how most people won't intuitively understand how discrete phases can break down at higher temperatures and pressures, or the differences between different lattice configurations of the same substance. If it's not something we encounter every day, or aren't taught at an early age, the intuition simply won't be there.
We could all learn a lot more from each other if everything wasn't a contest all the time.
Ultimately, you need a team with a combination of strengths if your product requires multidisciplinary work. Otherwise you end up with hilariously wrong equations/assumptions in your code base. But, full disclosure, my background is math/science.
You're convoluting the simplicity of each step of an experiment with the level of complexity of the field itself. Memorization is a crucial component, but if you believe that's all there then you are severely underestimating the study of life. It would be like claiming that since CS can be boiled down to 0's and 1's that it is therefore a simple field of study.
I vehemently disagree with the claim that biology is a simple field, and I'm especially surprised to hear this from someone who did work in this field for 11 years. Anyone who has taken an intro biochem class would back me up on this: life is complicated!
It's a wax on, wax off thing. The repetition gives you a chance to reflect on the rationale for your technique and bigger picture of what you're doing, in addition to getting hands-on experience in the field.
And even when they are specific, it's not very accurate since there's a game of telephone from the person administering the test and the recuriter.
I study hard, I learn new languages and skills, only to get a completely different test. If I'm studying for the LSAT and am handed the MCAT, it's not a realistic indication of performance.
Stay strong, OP.
Calling out your bullshit is not shouting abuse at you, and it's definitely not condoning it. And, for the record, people shout "Fuck Muslims" and similar sentiments all the time. With much greater frequency. Often right to my face.
So, welcome to the club buddy!
Edit: Also, this gem: "shouting 'fuck white people!' might get you a job"? This isn't Stormfront, be coherent.
What fucking year is this again?
This is actually my main point. I'm not intending to reduce or dismiss (bio)chem through the lens of applied physics. I'm saying that anyone competent in biochem understands these properties on an intuitive level, and further understands that the root of these systems' behavior lies in quantum mechanics, even if they're not crunching wave equations on a daily basis. (That said, discussing s and p orbitals are a pretty routine part of figuring out organic reaction mechanisms.)
The field considers the quantum effects on these systems as a matter of course - as with your example about ion channel flow and caveats on bulk properties versus a single ion. There's still no question that quantum mechanics affects these systems, it's just a question of when it needs to be factored in to not throw off the calculations, and when the scale is large enough that its effects can be considered negligible.
For instance, not factoring in steric factors (e.g. uncertainty principle) or electron tunneling in the transfer of electrons during photosynthesis or cellular respiration would probably throw off your models. Biochemists are well aware of this; you couldn't effectively understand chemistry without understanding quantum mechanics.