Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).

Yay learning

Do you apply toppings right to the edge? I’ve never had this problem despite using an absurd amount of cheese, and I was puzzling to figure out why. I think it’s because the crust rises up to act like a boundary that encloses a big lake of cheese.

I agree that sometimes it’s possible to separate the art from the artist. Sometimes that’s pretty easy to do, but sometimes it’s pretty ambiguous.

A grey area for me is the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He was a Nazi, and this definitely comes through in some of his philosophical work. Some of it doesn’t seem to be informed by his Naziism, but I’m still pretty averse to reading it, because how do we separate the person from the Naziism? If I were a philosopher, my own political viewpoints would inevitably permeate everything I wrote, even if the texts weren’t directly political. Perhaps I’d be better able to discern the line in Heidegger’s work if I were a philosopher.

I always worry about missing bad vibes in text, because especially as an adult, I have discovered many areas in which I didn’t even notice problematic things in media (antisemitism being one such area). I cringe when looking over Harry Potter as an adult, for example, and not just because of its author’s awfulness since the books were published.

I think we need to allow people the benefit of hindsight, as well as the space to have complicated feelings. Like, sometimes there might be some news that’s comes out about a person, which causes us to look over their work with a more critical or more mature eye. Without this space, people are much more likely to dig their heels in and refuse to change.

I’ve heard from a few transfem lesbian friends that one of the hardest parts of coming out to themselves as trans was that it would also mean acknowledging they’re not straight, because if you’re someone who feels like you’re failing at being a man, attraction to women can be pretty grounding. “It was the one normal thing about me” - whole lot of internalised misogyny/transphobia/homophobia.

But that’s our assumption, it’s true that it might just be a dude that likes being feminine, no trans involved.

Quite right; labels like straight get pretty wibbly in situations like this. I find it sad because the current prevalence of homophobia and transphobia makes it hard for us to collectively understand what would it mean to be a cis-het femboy who takes HRT — for us to conceptualise of a world where that isn’t a contradiction. Bigotry makes it harder for people to explore their true selves, regardless of their gender or sexuality.

Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.

That’s a mood. I came to the conclusion that to do a lot of the big and difficult tasks I’ve been needing to, I need to start by putting some tasks on my to-do list that were just for me, because whenever I did have free time, I’d piss it away and not even feel rested; I needed to carve out some active self-enrichment time. Unfortunately, burnout and concrete time limitations make that pretty hard to do, so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I saw your comment and desperately wished I could give some advice that could help, but how much is reasonable to expect a person to be able to do to resist a fucked up system when simply surviving is A Lot? Surviving is resistance though, especially when the system doesn’t like people who understand how fucked the system is. So in lieu of advice that would rely on metaphorical bootstraps we don’t have: Solidarity, friend. I’m sorry that you’re going through this and I’m sorry that I understand.

Seconding the FOSS advice from the perspective of a fellow learner.

I’m a scientist first and foremost, so I’m learning programming on the side. A lot of code that’s written by scientists is pretty grim, so attempting to understand and contribute to FOSS projects has been useful in understanding how a complex project is organised, and how to read code as well as write it.

Contributing can be pretty small, even opening a git issue for a problem, or adding some info to an existing issue. You won’t be able to just dive in and start solving problems all over, and it can feel overwhelming to try as a relative beginner, but it massively improved my skills.

I really respect people who edit comments to acknowledge when they’re wrong, but leave the original mistake intact (but usually strike through). Like this:

I delete my comments when I’m proven wrong because it’s embarassing and I don’t want to perpetuate misinformation

Actually, I’m leaving my mistake up, because then people can follow the conversation easier and see how I came to realise I was wrong

I cannot count the times that I have gone through the legitimate path to read a paper, by clicking “AcCeS tHiS pApEr ThRoUgH yOuR iNsTItUtIoN” and I log in through my university, faffing with 2FA, only to be told “nah, you don’t have access”. I just go straight to scihub nowadays.

“In Sweden, having drugs in the bloodstream is punishable with prison”

Oh wow, I didn’t know that

What do you expect her to do instead?

What’s your favourite scent/scent note? (Either scent to work with if you make perfumes, or just something you personally enjoy for your own use)

On paper, the Equality Act 2010 is great in a bunch of ways. In practice, it’s exceedingly difficult for the average person to pursue justice through it. I imagine the barrier is similar to how it works in the US, except the UK has way less of a litigation culture.

I need to add that to my quotes book, it’s great

Sometimes I need to ignore American politics, because I’m not even American and it makes me feel sick to think about how impacted the entire world will be by this election, and most of us don’t even have a vote. Makes me feel pretty powerless

It sounds like you already have a decent handle on juggling self care alongside your activism, but I still feel compelled to remind you to be kind to yourself and take breaks if you need them. Perhaps it’s because I know too many people who are working to save the world, who forget that they are a valuable and necessary part of that world that’s worth saving too.

If you like video essays, Dr Fatima on YouTube has a brilliant video about colonialism in astronomy which covers some recent Hawaiian protest movements

When I find myself becoming irked by someone offering help I don’t need, it helps me to think of things in terms of people who slip through the gaps: the system that the social worker is a part of strives to help those who need it, and you not needing that help makes you a false positive. You were likely flagged because sometimes when someone is living in their vehicle, this is a symptom (and reinforcing factor) of their life being in disarray. That is to say that some people who superficially look a lot like you are in need of support, and not catching these people would be false negatives. Bonus complication is that many people who do need this help may also be resistant to support (for a variety of reasons).

Given that no system is perfect, and the error rate will always be greater than zero, we can ask the hypothetical “is it better to have fewer false positives and more false negatives, or more false positives and fewer false negatives?”. Put a different way, when you’re bothered, that’s you slipping through the gaps in a system that has opted for more false positives with the goal of helping as many people who need it as possible.

Unrelated to everything else I said, I’m glad you’ve been able to find a way of living that you’re happy in — it is a challenge when the life that is best suited for us is one that society considers “abnormal”, so I’m happy to hear about anyone who has broken into what works.

I thought the same. What kind of music do you reckon they’d play?

I can’t help but wonder whether some people are aiming to scapegoat her. Like, this is a huge trial, with many defendants (I’m unsure whether anyone else besides her was sentenced to death at the first trial), but maybe pinning more stuff on her will make others (who may be more culpable for some of the charges than she is) less likely to get the death penalty.