Will Bradshaw

Excited to see the results from the Genetic Engineering Attribution Challenge published today in @NatureComms! Congrats to the fantastic @altLabs_tech team and all the challenge participants! 🎉 nature.com/articles/s4146…

We're looking for a promising technician to help us build the Nucleic Acid Observatory, a reliable early warning system for future pandemics (and more). Please share. media.mit.edu/about/job-oppo… naobservatory.org arxiv.org/abs/2108.02678

One advantage of taking time between drafts while writing is that, occasionally, you discover that your first draft was damn good.

@Aella_Girl Since Aella is popular in my circles, I just want to say that I 100% *loathe* required-dress-code parties. No better way to tell your introverted friends that you don't want to hang out with them than deliberately making socialising even more costly.

4. Dress code. Lots of people come to parties with only one foot in the door, where they're not committed to bringing all of themselves to this party. You want to encourage buy-in, so requiring a dress code (aggressively stated in the invite) is important.

How I Throw Parties: A Thread (I am not the *most* experienced party-thrower, and most parties I've thrown have been for heavy nerd populations, so my strategies are targeted for this. And maybe my points are obvious to anyone who throws parties, but I like listing them anyway)

On round 4 of ping-ponging between my employer and insurer trying to get access to health insurance. To be honest, after everything I'd heard, I'd be disappointed if my first encounter with US healthcare *wasn't* a Kafkaesque nightmare of some kind.

MVP most commonly refers to

@CmSpare1 @trevorjtweets @calebwatney I see people say all the time that they think C is better for science but we should use F for everyday, but I think the economic & tech-progress costs of that disconnect are likely to massively outweigh any marginal gains from F as an everyday scale.

@CmSpare1 @trevorjtweets @calebwatney It seems pretty bad to create that kind of comms barrier between scientists/engineers and ordinary people unless really necessary – which it isn't, we already know that C works perfectly well as an everyday scale.

While we're changing standards let's get the whole world to jointly agree on the metric system + fahrenheit

@Xeynon @calebwatney See my other comments. The fact that Celsius goes negative for temps below freezing is a good thing, it makes the scale more informative. As for the rest, I see a lot of claims like this but nobody ever offers any actual evidence – striking given the use of "objectively".

@daniel_eth @ne0liberal @calebwatney I think most people who care about this advocate for ISO dates nowadays.

@ne0liberal @calebwatney Also US dates are better than UK dates. You don’t like that it’s inconsistent by going medium/small/big? Guess what - I want to know the context of which month before pinning down which exact day.

@ne0liberal @calebwatney Actually-smart-person: having a clear indicator of whether water outside is frozen is actually very useful.

@calebwatney Virgin Celsius: "but but the boiling point of water, round number!" Chad Fahrenheit: "0 is really cold weather, 100 is really hot weather"

This is your regularly scheduled reminder that daylight savings time is a dreadful idea and we should all abolish it immediately.

Fun fact for Americans: traditionally, in Britain, "stocks" means "bonds". Until I cashed it out to move here, I had a "Stocks & Shares ISA" (tax-exempt investment account) with Vanguard UK.

One unexpected minor cultural difference: US companies really really like security questions. I've had to provide something like 4x the number of security Q answers in moving here than I'd expect in the UK.

Switzerland abandoning neutrality over Ukraine seems really bad to me – for the world and the future, but plausibly also for Ukraine.

@anderssandberg Yeah, for many years I avoided long games altogether in favour of well-contained story games, in part for this reason. (The other is that I find long games generally less fun-dense than short ones.)

@willbradbio I have been afraid of trying new games for years, given how obsessive I can be. But your descriptions made me realize that these games are *finite* stories, rather than the near-endless build of my personal addiction SMAC. That might be a solution.

Dear Esther is free to keep on Steam until Wednesday 16th Feb! store.steampowered.com/app/520720/Dea…

This roughly captures my feelings about adopting US units & date formatting upon moving to the US: poets.org/poem/do-not-go…