Via Mad Mike, a discussion of why it sucks to be a biomedical scientist: 87% of my blog-related e-mail is from unhappy, bitter, troubled, distraught biomed grad students, postdocs, technicians, and early-career faculty. Others write to me with problems, but these tend to be of the “I’m frustrated with my advisor” sort rather than the… Continue reading Your Problems Are Not Unique
Category: Blogs
Scientific Thinking, Stereotypes, and Attitudes
A few more comments on the scientific thinking thing, because it’s generated a bunch of comments. As usual, some of them are good points, and some of them have completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. so let’s take another crack at it. While the post was worded somewhat strongly, I’m not really trying… Continue reading Scientific Thinking, Stereotypes, and Attitudes
Everybody Thinks Scientifically
Everybody’s favorite science blogger did a podcast with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has been posting highlights of it. One of these, on scientific thinking, has a bit that I don’t quite agree with. Tyson says: I think the, if it were natural to think scientifically, science as we currently practice it would have been going… Continue reading Everybody Thinks Scientifically
Who Are You People?
I gave a talk today on blogs as a tool for science communication (basically the same as this one, with a few minor updates), and got asked “Aren’t the people who read science blogs mostly scientists already?” Which reminded me that it’s been a while since I did a “Who are you people?” post. So,… Continue reading Who Are You People?
In the Open Lab 2010
It occurs to me that I’m kind of dropping the ball on my shameless self-promotion because I haven’t mentioned that one of my posts made the cut for this year’s fifth edition of the best-of-science-blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. The post included is Science Is More Like Sumo Than Soccer, a discussion of the importance… Continue reading In the Open Lab 2010
First Impressions, In Person and Online
There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress: Let’s start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are… Continue reading First Impressions, In Person and Online
2010: The Year in Blog
Because I’m sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here’s the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form: In case you can’t numerically integrate that in your head, I’ll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to… Continue reading 2010: The Year in Blog
Replacement for Delicious?
As has been mentioned in countless places over the last few days, Yahoo plans to shut down Delicious, the social bookmark service that lots of people use for lots of things. My interest in it is pretty narrow, but important for this blog: I use Delicious to generate the quasi-automatic daily Links Dump postings here.… Continue reading Replacement for Delicious?
Monday Miscellany
A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don’t have anything better to post this morning: — When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books… Continue reading Monday Miscellany
Science Is Not Irreducibly Complex
The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I’ve mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter… Continue reading Science Is Not Irreducibly Complex