Nope - the area pictured is subject to fairly high levels of Photon Beam Radiation - so it's usually clean and empty (of people and coffee mugs ) You are correct - only things than need to be there are there. Calibration is a big thing, we have whole teams dedicated to setting up each part. Overclocking - we generate enough heat from the sheer amount of PC hardware! (for example, some of the new detectors require 16 10Gbe links to output data real time) (If you are interested, you can take a 'virtual tour' here: https://www.diamond.ac.uk/Public/Explore-Diamond.html . The picture in my last post if from I11 which you can find under beamlines - there is a video of the robot loading the instrument) No problems - I'm glad to be able to share something from this side of the workings. Yeah wait time is a big thing. For example, the Cryo-EM's run on a day-block booking system. We currently have 7 operational - I have never seen a calendar like it! (There are more bookings than actual time in the day) Not seen that out in the open - have just had a look on the google machine and can see that there are a couple of places stating that (I worry it has been taken out of context, '....' mid sentence, finished with a ',' “This is a unique situation where we as a company simply cannot take the risk if in ... four years the vaccine is showing side effects,”
Jesus, man - that is next level. I won't pretend to have understood everything I read there but the "accelerating things to be 10bn times brighter than the sun" stood out. And there are experiments that go on continually over 2/3 years (luckily not vaccine-related)... If you don't mind, how on earth did you fall into working there?
Yeah some of it is waaaay over my head. Yeah it's a pretty bright light we generate - but that's what you need for an atomic level microscope (the best layman's terms to describe what it is). Yeah some of the long-term experiments are cool, there is a big one one looking at battery tech and the refinement/replacement of lithium cells which is really interesting. I'm a Mechanical Building Services Engineer - Was looking for a job 3 years back, with my previous work experience + qualifications I managed to get myself a 2.5 Hour technical interview, that was that. They are regularly recruiting in most areas, esp 'Scientific Computing' - the whole machine basically runs on Linux
To be clear here, preprints are not peer reviewed papers, but are academic manuscripts in the same format as a traditional peer-reviewed paper. Although most preprints are submitted for peer review at some conference or journal at some point. The traditional peer-review process usually takes a lot of time because there isn't really much pressure to do it quickly, hence reviewers aren't always the quickest. Additionally most journal papers will undergo several revisions before final publication. As a result journal papers tend to take a loooooong time (years even) to get published. Another common alternative is conference papers, which usually only have a single accept/reject phase with no revision process, but that's still something that takes time. Hence pre-prints of submitted papers are typically made available on preprint repositories arxiv and biorxiv (which also bypasses publication paywalls). Of course, just because something doesn't go through the traditional peer-review process (which people seem to ascribe some mythological status*) doesn't mean it isn't critiqued, and they're a great way to quickly communicate intermediate work. *Loads of really really really crappy stuff never makes it through peer review. It's not an infallible catchall for quality of science but one part of a larger ecosystem of self-correcting measures.
Ha! Linux - brilliant. That'll be a feather in the cap for the supporters. And good for you, sir - impressive stuff. Certainly a more interesting workplace view than the beige and grey pseudo-Noctua scheme they decorated our place with...!
After Britain, Canada now accepts Pfizer vaccine. Hopefully, more countries will follow suit. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...-checks-us-15-m-cases-los-angeles/6499047002/
Quote of the day from this morning's news re: the five day rule gap: "...we have to trust the British people."
The other highlights that I caught through sleep-fogged ears above the noise of two kids not wanting to go to school because they were smashing out hit records on an electronic keyboard were: there is a new strain of coronavirus it may not respond to the vaccine schools will stay open carry on as normal over Christmas At which point I did an eye-roll and went to work. I'm just waiting for Veridian to get involved in vaccines, then it's popcorn time.
Hancock has done a bit of a number with this new strain. Back in April it was thought there were at least 30 strains in circulation and we didn't get headlines for each new one that was discovered. The vaccines work for all the previously known strains and there's no reason yet to think this strain is any different. I worry this was dropped as a bomb to try and encourage compliance over Christmas and as a reason for why lockdowns are still required, whilst failing to realise this has the potential to cause further confusion. An interesting piece on the potential harm of the "it's just a joke" brigade https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/55101238
Yeah, but this time it is a strain that is supposedly spreading fast in London. Had the strain been found in Leeds no one would have cared.
Lads, wonder if anyone here is clued up enough to offer some quick rebuttal services. I had a customer recently who was a full anti-vaxxer and tinfoil hatter re: coronavirus, thought that it was entirely overblown, made a number of interesting claims: "nobody's actually died of it. People die of complications or other subsequent infections or [memorized scientific jargon] but not of coronavirus." "they did a test where they found that people with the virus had more of the virus on the outside of their masks than on the inside. Therefore the masks do more harm than good." "the masks can't stop it. The particles it's on aren't stopped by ordinary cotton or polyester, it goes right through." "The whole thing is because the Gates foundation owns the WHO, and they're in each other's pockets, etc. etc. [various anti-globalist conspiracy theories were namedropped involving big pharma and corporate interests]" "They're just overreacting because they recently formulated a plan for how to deal with pandemics and Bill Gates stands to make a huge amount of money through it, they're overhyping it so they can sell vaccines" Pretty much the only tinfoil he didn't mention was the whole 5g/injecting a microchip shite. This encounter upset me because he's not a stupid man, just clearly has some issues in the way he parses information and selects sources, as well as a healthy dose of confirmation bias - one of those "I want to believe" situations. Question to you guys is, how would you respond to someone like this? He's not unpleasant, and I enjoy talking to him, but ofc I know basically dick all about coronavirus and medical science and recent research, so when he namedrops all this internet research he's done I can't really respond meaningfully, even though I'm quite sure in my own mind that he's gone off the deep end. I hate knowing someone's wrong but not being able to back up my hunch with evidence. Is there something I can point him to?
No-one's ever died of being hit by a truck, it's always complications like organ failure or blood loss or the like. But I'm afraid these people aren't open to being educated, they prefer to be smarter than all the sheep like yourself, wise to some big secret that makes them feel important. It must be difficult to go through a world that expects you to be well educated and well informed when you're not, I can see the temptation to make things up to achieve that standing another way.
Yes, yes he is. In my head, a spinning roundhouse size ten steel toe capped boot to his temple. IRL, mutter '****', walk off and avoid him at all costs lest my last vestiges of sanity snap and I throw my monitor at him.
Sounds like he got all that from Facebook, sadly familiar bs. Negating and arguing isn't going to cut much through him unless he cut himself away where he's getting the crap from.
My response would be to avoid him like...well, the plague. If what you have outlined guides his behaviour in terms of COVID then personally I would classify him as someone that is more likely to be a carrier/spreader. He has already demonstrated he cannot parse reasonable sources of information, so it's unlikely that will change if the same information comes from you.
Google, Facebook, social media algorithms in general rope you in with click bait. Yes, Google. It's designed to give you results it knows will interest you and will do its darnest for you to click through. So even if this guy didn't inform himself on Facebook, Google isn't any better. It also depends how do research. Do you research one view and keep following up on it or do you research a view and then its opposing view? You can't really do this with Google or Facebook. Your best research tool will be duck duck go. All this to say, just dismantle your friend's research even if you aren't too hung up on the topic itself.
