this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
1113 points (99.4% liked)

Science Memes

10940 readers
1901 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
1113
He did though. (mander.xyz)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] seth 186 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

He owns a yacht. I'd be interested to hear of a single yacht owner who is a decent person. I'm not sure one exists.

Edit: Thanks for the cool examples of decent people with yachts!

[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 months ago

The one guy who downvoted owns a yacht

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Some people live on yachts and that’s their entire home. So like a 70,000£ yacht, then like 300£ a month in slip (berth) fees, including electric and whatnot. I strongly considered it. It’s roughly the same cost but better than caravan living, IMO.

It’s a decent alternative to a landlocked home.

But yeah, millionaires with yachts are a different thing.

[–] seth 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's a good use case. I'd be interested to know more about the idiosyncrasies that come with that lifestyle, like if they go out to sea when a storm is expected, or just weather it out in the harbor.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

They are almost always better in their dock, specifically boats optimised as condos are terrible at sea since open ocean is not in their design brief

Perhaps they might be better up river as far as they can go

[–] chemical_cutthroat 30 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Noah seemed like a chill dude. Man liked his drink, for sure. Loved animals...

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago

Noah would've been a genocide-complicit, doomsday cult prepper, similar to those who build private libertarian cities on the ocean or some planet as a climate adaptation strategy.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

Noah was the original Joe Exotic, except with every single exotic pet in existence

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Noah brought along mosquitos, the guy is filled with hate

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Not sure he could have kept them off the boat.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] grue 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

This person seems decent. Her and her S.O. live on a 50-year-old 36' sailboat that they bought for $7000 and refit themselves.

[–] seth 11 points 11 months ago

That's an excellent exception, and quite interesting. Thanks for the link!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

My cousin did this with her wife and they are very decent.

The thing was a floating money pit though and was usually broken down and was sometimes uninhabitable because of various issues.

Then the hull got damaged in a storm when waves banged it against the dock over and over again.

Now they own a nice little house.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My ex-teamlead owns a yacht (if he didn't sell it). The catch is that yacht is worth about $40 thousands, not $4 millions.

Also there was a person in USSR who built a yacht and circumnavigated the Earth on that, not everyone who do own a yach own that luxury slab of floating gold

[–] AnUnusualRelic 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's awfully cheap for a yacht. Did it float?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

You wouldn't gentrify the oceans 😳

[–] [email protected] 184 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Nestlé has been patenting human milk proteins for decades. To my understanding, this prevents other companies to add such molecules to baby formula, even if somehow methods to synthesize said molecules were developed.

That is a scary notion, a malevolous intent and a gross outcome.

[–] ForgotAboutDre 70 points 11 months ago (1 children)

These shouldn't hold up. Wouldn't the prior work of thousands of generations of mothers invalidate such a patent.

[–] Darkard 111 points 11 months ago (5 children)

"Excuse me madam but do you have a license to use those tits? No? Didn't think so. The content of those bazongas is Nestle property. I'm afraid I'm going to have to clamp those nipples until such time as the proper Bandonkadonk subscriptions are paid"

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

i got this new legal drama plot. basically there's this patent infringer except she's got huge boobs. i mean some serious honkers. a real set of badonkers. packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. big ol' tonhongerekoogers.

what happens next?!

lawyer shows up with even bigger bonkhonagahoogs. humongous hungolomghononoloughongous

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] grue 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Have you considered a career in avian taxonomy?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Who doesn't like the dickcissel or the tufted tit-mouse?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Something doesn't add up here since you can't patent anything for decades.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

I read that as:

For decades, Nestle has been patenting milk proteins.

They've been doing it for a long time, not somehow getting extra-long patents.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Prior work exists, source: all of history lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Imagine Nestle executives finding a time machine and going to all of history's most famous persons' mothers and telling them how they can't breastfeed their kids.

Someone should definitely write a book about that

[–] [email protected] 96 points 11 months ago

"...he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee."

Fuck this guy

[–] [email protected] 67 points 11 months ago (7 children)

I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.

If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.

The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.

I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.

What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.

[–] QZM 24 points 11 months ago (5 children)

If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.

What field are you in? In the life sciences, there's normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

no fees in closed access in organic chemistry, as far as i know. some other subfields can be different

open access can be easily two, three grands, and you better have a grant that covers this

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

It depends on the journal. I've only published in medical related journals, but some journals don't charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] iAvicenna 7 points 11 months ago

This guy probably lives in his own small world. If you want to publish in PLOS as a researcher from say Turkey or Uzbekistan or any other country where the value of your money is nil, you might easily have to pay your yearly salary or half of your funding to get a single paper published.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Tbf he evolutionarily developed that genome all by himself. That's how capitalism works

[–] peopleproblems 25 points 11 months ago

He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don't think that was his intention, but good came from it.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago

What even is this argument?

"Scientists who say they can't afford to do X should do X"? Does he think this makes him sound smart?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago (2 children)

But it's mostly a scam. The costs don't remotely compare to the revenue. Reviewers time is not paid, and there's a price to both publish and access. It's all about the prestige to publish. If you contact the author directly they'll typically gladly send you the article for free.

[–] AeonFelis 8 points 11 months ago

Not to mention that system started about four centuries ago, long before the Internet was invented. I'd assume that back then, the costs and effort of operating a journal really did justify the prices they charged.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Venter is one of the many quacks who promised that he'd find the "aging gene" and switch it off. People threw a lot of money at him about twenty years ago.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Haven't we known about the aging part of genes (telomeres) for like 80 years

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›