mmmh but is it in german tho?

I haven't done lab work in 15 years, I'm probably not going to be very good at it if I started again tomorrow?

Small Gods [B-minor remix][120% slowed down +reverb]

No one starts a script with two lines of comments that state their name and email address anymore, because of AI

This is another great point: doing stuff is the FUN part of our job!

One of the reasons I am in the lab pretty much every day, and a assistant on all my student’s assays: if you aren’t practicing those skills, you are losing them (and one of the best parts of this whole profession imo)

they had _actual_ bluetooth, which they showed to their good pal Harald Gormsson, who then adopted it as his nickname

and the timeline matches

And at this critical juncture, it would be a critical mistake to replace GISAID by a kinder, gentler GISAID. Unless the replacement is explicitly, fundamentally, ontologically committed to supporting and advancing the PABS system, this will not be substantial progress.

But why open science? Because this is, in large part, a debate about access. We, also, wrote at length about why this is a fundamentally colonialist perspective on science, and why it makes a mockery of what open science, and the right to science, should be: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Whether it's COVID27, HPAI, or some other unanticipated threat, we cannot trust data that is ultimately used to save lives into the hands of poorly regulated groups that can make unilateral decision about access.

The pandemic preparedness side of things is self-explanatory, and @colincarlson.bsky.social and I wrote at length about it recently - www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/to-f...

Maybe COVID dashboards are not as relevant as they once were (no opinion on that), but we need to future-proof the system.

I definitely agree, and this is why I think it's important to emphasize _core_ skills. I tend to think of them as "skills that are necessary for my current scientific identity". Everything else is what collaborations are for!

This is very true, and I think that core _technical_ skills are some of the most beneficial for research. It gives a very different perspective on what is achievable (broad-scale research questions) and feasible (project-scale design).

The de-skilled leading the unskilled is not what academia should be about.

Last spring, I was asked to give carreer advice to grad students. And the one thing I told them was: our best skill is our ability to learn difficult things -- it's also the first skill you will lose unless you intentionally don't let yourselves go.

But now, when I hear "well, I use chatgpt because I can code in R / analyse my data / do literature review again", my answer is systematically: no, you cannot.

I think the loss of technical skills is dangerous for research, because it prevents a sound understanding of feasibility.

Very early in my position, someone I met at a conference told me "you know, you've peaked, and now you're going go start losing skills - it's normal, we all do".

It's not normal, we don't all do, and I certainly did not. I'd run circles, technically speaking, around my postdoc self.

8/ House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsy. What if Pratchett's Small Gods was very bleak? The character arcs are all extremely well done, and this book has a perspective on war that is not common enough in the genre (I think).