Well, yes, I did mean OSX, though in fact it's been true for both. (OTOH, in MacOS days, I was something of a Mac fan. It's a relative thing. I grew up on UNIX in an academic enviornment, and tended to favor Macs if the alternative was Windows.)

The command line is of course the least irritating part (almost non irritating, but often installation of common open source packages is somewhat more cumbersome that what I'm used to - it's gotten a lot better, though.) But it's the GUI that people tend to rhapsodize over... and I just don't get it.

More than a few minutes. The head of our lab is an Apple fan, so many of the lab machines are Macs and I end up doing a fair bit of server admin stuff. So, for some weeks at a time I'll be using them so several hours a few times a week... and then I'll go for months without. Of course, the less painful part of that is done remotely, which barely counts. (My first mini was a 512K Mac when they first came out. So I have fond memories*, and certainly maintained a preference for Macs through my Microsoft days, though I'll admit not being thrilled by many part of the business model.) And, of course, there are a lot of programming and analysis tools that we end up using on Macs - not even to mention helping my research students set of Python or whatever environments on their own machines - though they do tend to be open source tools and set up often seems cumbersome compared to working in a Linux environment.

What I haven't done is used them heavily as my main boxen for an extended period of time. And it's possible that might clinch it for me. Though one of my closest friends in the department made the experiment and ended up installing linux on her apple laptop after some months of trying to learn to love OSX, and we tend to have similar aesthetic tastes.

* Admittedly of things like my father convincing me to learn Modula 2 from German documentation because he thought it would be the next big thing and then I could teach him.

Well, no. At one point years ago my mother was trying to Lynx from a terminal window on her rather ancient Mac, and it ended poorly. (I never really did figure out what happened. She said the sysadmin told her she accidentally released a wild lynx on the server. I can only say what I was told.) She then went on to use Windows for some years (mostly because she could get me to get her software from the company store) and about seven years ago, when I was in town and showing her my new Lenovo tablet with an Ubuntu install got as far as Synaptic and said "I want that OS. I want it right now." So I posted a note to LJ, and within a few hours a friend produced an install CD, and the rest is history.

More helpful doesn't seem that unlikely, especially since it's not made explicit who exactly Microsoft is more helpful than. There's also always the question of what numbers he's using. Microsoft has been claiming to be more inexpensive for some time. They have numbers. There are certainly business who have moved over to OSS and had very different experiences. I don't even know that it's not true for organizations where the primary computer use is a desktop / laptop environment and users aren't particularly technical.

I'd like to think not - anyone have case studies? But that's the environment I understand the least. I moved most of my less technical family members onto Ubuntu years ago, and they're much happier with it - and my sister, who still describes herself as not a geek, is cheerfully working at the command line and modifying config files and hacking scripts. But they're my family. (Also, Synaptic is about the best thing ever for them.) But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use. And Windows irritated the ever living crap out of me even when I was working for Windows. So there's clearly something I'm not getting.

So, that sounds impressive, but at most you patch clamps neurons, not nerves, and the relationship between activity nociceptive neurons and perceived pain is complex. Even were you able to record the activity of all nociceptive sensory neurons responding to the stimulus, you could not from that predict how the pain would be experienced in the brain, where the experiencing part is actually happening. (Heck, right now I'm working with sea slugs, that don't have brains, but instead just a number of ganglia, and even in that system of vastly fewer parts we can't make that kind of prediction.)

The canonical use of the term patch clamp refers to pulled patches - where you remove a small piece of membrane from a neuron to examine the activity of one or a small number of ion channels in that patch. I suspect what you're thinking of is whole cell patch clamping* where you use similar electrodes to create a similar seal, but rather than pulling a patch away from the cell, you blow the patch and instead clamp the whole cell, measuring the change in voltage or current in the whole cell (the "clamp" bit refers to holding one steady while measuring the changes in the other).

* Which, to be fair, is a ton of fun. And whole cell patch clampers - which is what I learned first - often use the term patch clamp without modifiers, just to confuse things.

While it's true that it's difficult to ask a mouse about its gender, sexing them isn't that hard.

Actually, I am laughing.

(Biomed, by the way, is one of the fields with great gender parity, but since previous generations - at least of mice - are in question, your point holds.)

There already is body of research about various hormonal reactions in mice that are sex specific. So, likely, yes.

Well, no, it suggests that a male one might well. (The summary is incorrect.)

...though in fact, it's men that do. (The summary is wrong.)

It describes that it is a preventative measure for food poisoning, not so much how.

I love to know exactly what kind of pathogen they're envisioning - something that infects the mash (which admittedly is a rich culture, and if it starts out sterile it's not going to stay that way for long) and then infects the cows in a way that will be a problem for humans. E. coli is already in the cows (hence the regulations concerning the use of fresh manure on crops likely to be eaten raw) and cows will do a lot of their own processing. Milk products are generally pasteurized anyway. Somehow I'm not exactly seeing a spent grain prion vector...

I'm doubting this will go through. Now, if they're really worried, funding a small study to look at whether it's a likely vector might make sense.

(Not that I'd be sad to see more spent-grain bread. Tasty, that.)

One of my old jobs was managing this transition, with a lot of performance analysis, reliability, scability and disaster failover / recovery work as part of it. At least in that environment, the majority of devlopers I worked with were highly unreliable wrt these issues. (And I successfully pushed for getting involved with the projects earlier - and to have access to the test resources associated with the development teams so that my folks weren't totally overwhelmed or bogged down with scut work - so that more of these concerns were being addressed earlier in the dev cycle.) Yeah, sure, they could get their code to run beautifully in under simulated load on their own machines, but they had little understanding of how their hothouse flower systems on a box differed from a production environment and how to do failure analysis, etc. etc. And yes, some of this is a matter of education, hence getting involved earlier and maintaining a liaison to work with the dev teams - but some of it is just a different mindset.

It was always pretty hard to find people who had the right combination of skills to be part of my group.

Depends on the tech level - not hard to produce, but not something I'd want to be dealing with under really primitive circumstances. (Sterile conditions may be easy, but antibiotics are not.)

The biggest limitation has to do with space and distance - you don't want to have a long weapon in too close of quarters, that will suck. And it's not going to be at its best for someone who has succeeded in closing with you.

But yeah, spear is pretty awesome. And I really need to do more of it.