WebTV largely worked better than I think it often gets credit for, and I echo the sentiment elsewhere that it felt "futuristic" in a sense. I had a Windows desktop, but we came into possession of a Philips WebTV box since my father was in sales and his company had a catalog of sales incentive items you could get for meeting sales targets. I really did not want use AOL like it seemed everyone else did, and the WebTV subscription was pretty reasonable compared to other options. We had the version with the hard drive and wireless keyboard. The hardware was really pretty decent- the keyboard was ok, I could print with it, and the feature I thought that really set it apart was the ports for video capture. I don't think they ever implemented a good way to use that capability for video, but I used it to capture screenshots from our family camcorder and attach them to email or post them on the webtv personal "website" or print them.
My early use of eBay was through WebTV, with both buying and selling, and it largely worked. You could browse webrings and read email from the couch!
When free ad-supported dialup services came around (Juno, Bluelight, NetZero) I alternated using those and WebTV for a while. As pages moved away from simple text/table/image based sites, page rendering quality unsurprisingly degraded. I think the version we owned had some Flash support but it was slow.
Looking back on it, it's impressive how legible text was on a 20" CRT TV in the interface (through S-Video). It was more usable than some modern "smart" TV interfaces.
Speaking of WebTV music, I was a huge fan of the original Philips WebTV dialing music. Sometimes I would just let it loop in the background when I was doing housework. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZYWcGgg4Y Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of years later I started listening to a lot of music in the Demoscene.
Japanese culture also has a number of "ritual purity" elements, such as taking shoes from outside off in the genkan (vestibule) before stepping into the main part of a house, and ritual cleansing with water when visiting a shrine. I understand that Japan is far more economically advantaged than India, but even so, the difference in how clean things are between New York City (for example) and any major city in Japan is quite stark.
[I'm from the US but lived in Japan for a year. Haven't been to India but I know a lot of people from there.]
One thing that works for me is to just start writing figure legends. That seems easy, it doesn't feel like "writing the paper". I end up basically writing the results section for that figure or table, so I just cut and paste most of it to the actual results later, and keep a summarized version for the actual figure legend.
By coincidence, I'm trying to submit a PhD thesis today (Genetics/Computational Biology).
A lot of this is due to advances in imaging, particularly two-photon microscopy, that enable acquiring images (and video to some extent) in live subjects, e.g. mice and rats, below the top surface of tissue. For neuroscience, you can either thin the skull or install a window, and image more than 100 microns into the brain, in live animals that are anesthetized or otherwise immobilized. Here's a nice article with an overview of two-photon for this purpose (direct PDF link): https://www.hifo.uzh.ch/research/helmchen/publication/helmch... that paper was published a while ago now, but the basics are still relevant. Two-photon played a big part in the identification of the "glymphatic system" initially as well. The Nedergaard lab does a lot of imaging, and they've built custom microscopes as well. (Source: I used to work in their department, and I'm doing my PhD work in the same building. edit: in Rochester, not at KU, though I visited there when they were first outfitting the lab space in Copenhagen.
Alphafold is a big improvement, but a structure of a single protein in isolation isn't representative of how these things exist in vivo. Binding substrates can modify protein shapes, and proteins often function in complexes, which can form some pretty complex arrangements, where positioning is critical to function.
I think training set bias is an issue to some extent, even with single-protein prediction. For example, I've been looking at a family of transcription factors, and most of the resolved crystal structures are of just the DNA-binding domain, crystallized with the substrate (DNA) bound. Alphafold predictions for homologous proteins that haven't been experimentally resolved but share a decent amount of sequence similarity thus have high confidence for the DNA-binding domain, but lower confidence in other parts of the protein, even if they're "ordered" regions (e.g. helices and sheets rather than floppy loops), and all the predictions for the DNA-binding domain look like the bound-to-DNA conformation. So we don't have a good way yet to predict different "modes" of a protein that has interaction-dependent conformations.
Technically with Alphafold if you were interested in modelling a protein that had similar experimentally resolved both with and without substrates bound, but were interested in sampling just one of those states, you could customize your sequence database to include one or the other, which would be mostly manual curation.
I've been testing out the multimer (protein complex) mode of Alphafold recently, to see if could predict interactions for a family of proteins where some members in the family are known to form complexes, but others previously were found to not form complexes at least when expressed in vitro rather than in vivo. So far I've found that if you try to throw two completely unrelated proteins together, they won't be modeled with any contacts, but for the ones in the family I'm interested in, there's always at least one (of the five models per run) that has them interacting such that there's something that looks like a real DNA-binding domain. For the latter case, it's presently hard to know based just on Alphafold output if it's a structure that could actually form, or if it's just due to bias in the training data, with perhaps the rest of the structured regions of the protein being conformed in unrealistic ways due to less training information for those parts.
TL;DR Alphafold results are biased by existing experimentally resolved structures, and not based on simulating physics, so proteins- or parts of proteins- that don't have good coverage in existing experimental data are not going to be predicted with high confidence.
Same for me, I try to make it meditative in a way. I don't use earbuds or anything, just try to continue existing and moving. Sometimes identify birds. Practice talking to myself in languages I'm studying.
In races it turns into body state monitoring and trying to determine when/if to adjust pace. Check in on form. On heart rate. Pick someone up ahead to try to catch. Count down to the next gel or electrolyte tab or water station.
I've done quite a few 2hr+ runs (half marathon to marathon) and 100 mile bike rides, and after a while for me it turns into a psychological game.
Trail running, if you haven't tried it, is much more "stimulating" I might say, depending on where you are there's a lot more focus and attention required to stay on the trail, to stay upright (slipping on mud, ending up in a river), to dodge trees and rocks as required, etc. I personally find there's much more of an aspect of being "in the zone" for trail running, and especially in races, when I miss a turn and have to stop and backtrack, it becomes really obvious that I was in some kind of "flow" state and then got pulled out of it.
There are other weird VHS-based formats, such as WVHS, which was used to store HD-ish analog video on VHS- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-VHS
Alesis also developed an 8-track digital audio recorder based on VHS, ADAT, which used SVHS tapes and could record 20-bit 48khz. ADAT was pretty popular in smaller studios, and was great for the time before multi-gigabyte hard drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT
My early use of eBay was through WebTV, with both buying and selling, and it largely worked. You could browse webrings and read email from the couch!
Most of all, the dialing music was fantastic and I still listen to it once in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZYWcGgg4Y
When free ad-supported dialup services came around (Juno, Bluelight, NetZero) I alternated using those and WebTV for a while. As pages moved away from simple text/table/image based sites, page rendering quality unsurprisingly degraded. I think the version we owned had some Flash support but it was slow.
Looking back on it, it's impressive how legible text was on a 20" CRT TV in the interface (through S-Video). It was more usable than some modern "smart" TV interfaces.