The cowboy of chemistry
Regensburg, Germany
Joined May 2016
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Organic chemistry is truly the jock subdiscipline. No math, minimal computers, just vibes and shapes 🤠
Germany is so bizarre sometimes. I have a cold so I bought some Grippostad -- not quite the same thing as Dayquil but it's also for the cold -- and I payed €17. However, if you're buying prescription drugs it's significantly cheaper here than in the US.
yes. they do just suffer. one time when we first moved to Germany my husband got a migraine at work and asked a coworker if they had an ibuprofen, which is a very common thing to do in the US if you need a painkiller. he might as well have asked them for heroin. she was appalled. she said “if you feel sick you should go home, lay down, and drink some tea”. he said “but i don’t want to do that. i am working on something.” “we have sick leave, unlike in America.” “yeah that’s great but i don’t want to go home and sit on the couch with a headache!! i want to not have a headache!!” he left work, got ibuprofen from the pharmacy, and went back to finish the day with no headache. it’s just a total culture clash. we fundamentally cannot understand each other here.
30-Year-Old Tooth Fairy Believer retweeted
If you care about biotech and drug development watch this interview with Matt Gline, the CEO of Roivant, a biotech firm that is now worth $24 billion.
He talks about why he thinks predictions about AI from people like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are overly optimistic.
“If Dario is right and I'm wrong, and he cures every disease in five years, man, are we all the winners from that outcome,” Gline said.
“I think if you work in this industry, it is very hard not to be skeptical of any of those claims. Because, and I've said this in other settings recently too, biotech is a wood chipper that like is built to like ingest souls and shred them. It's just like such a hard business that like someone comes and they're like, oh, but I've built a computer and I'm going to push a button and all of that goes away and it just works. Like that is probably not the way that's going to go.”
They really whiffed on northern Virginia, at least on Fairfax County (plus Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church). It’s been solidly mid-Atlantic aligned since 2000.
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30-Year-Old Tooth Fairy Believer retweeted
städte die hart gehen würden als "millionenstädte":
konstanz
regensburg
heilbronn
solingen
bonn
cuxhaven
bautzen
Just passed what appears to be a sausage (and other meat products) vending machine on my to Edeka. Bavarians are really living in the future
Moving to Germany can be extremely humbling. For the first three months I was here, I would order eine Latte rather than einen Latte. Thank god a German friend corrected me 😅😅
30-Year-Old Tooth Fairy Believer retweeted
living abroad has completely cured me of any phone anxiety i used to have. i call everyone now. you speak English? incredible. this is easy.
It fucking sucks so bad that chemistry twitter is completely dead. This place used to be so fun in like 2022.
One time I ran a bromination — one of those KBrO3/KBr/Acid ones — using a procedure that a CRO gave us; I even scaled it down bc I hadn’t run it before. As I was adding the acid I could feel pressure buildup in the syringe and very suddenly bromine vapor began to evolve. 1/2
My prediction is that humanities and social sciences PhDs will become increasingly valuable. You cannot automate primary source interviews and deep archival research (ie, knowledge and data creation). You also cannot automate critical and original thought. You cannot mass replicate social status and elite human networks (half the utilitarian value of an elite PhD).
You can automate the function of most STEM folks, perhaps with the exception of the cutting edge doing original biochemical/ medical research.
That’s just pure day-to-day organic synthesis, not even things happening at the level of idea generation. I could cite other examples that are more abstract, but I think this is illustrative. How is an AI supposed to do that?
30-Year-Old Tooth Fairy Believer retweeted
They’re calling it the most German sentiment ever constructed.
Old joke: an American mechanic fixes a car. A German mechanic walks by, inspects it, and says, “Ah, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”
30-Year-Old Tooth Fairy Believer retweeted
yesterday I was picking out substrates for a scope, but there was one very simple one that NO ONE sold, had a TON of procedures to make, but all starting materials were crazy hard to come by. and I spent half an hour agonizing over why before I realized: it was meth
30-Year-Old Tooth Fairy Believer retweeted
„oh man jetzt ein gesunder Snack am Bahnhof“
der 19h alte Leberkäse in der Yorma‘s Theke:
30-Year-Old Tooth Fairy Believer retweeted
one of our very important jobs as Americans living in Germany is to stop our countrymen from making us all look like idiots in public
