{"id":350,"date":"2006-06-27T12:14:41","date_gmt":"2006-06-27T12:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/27\/you-might-be-a-scientist-if\/"},"modified":"2006-06-27T12:14:41","modified_gmt":"2006-06-27T12:14:41","slug":"you-might-be-a-scientist-if","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/06\/27\/you-might-be-a-scientist-if\/","title":{"rendered":"You Might Be a Scientist If…"},"content":{"rendered":"

An open thread comment<\/a> over at Making Light triggered a discussion of what words and phrases could serve as reliable markers of SF fandom. (It continues for a good while, but at times is nearly buried in discussion of Japanese knotweed.).<\/p>\n

This got me to wondering about what phrases would serve as similar markers for scientists– that is, what are the words or phrases that would reliably mark someone as a scientist (other than a tendency to start sentences with “So, …”<\/a>)?<\/p>\n

My best guess for a general science phrase would be some variant of “[really hard thing<\/i>] is left as an exercise for the reader.” That seems to be a standard feature of science textbooks of all sorts, and anybody who’s taken a good number of science classes would probably recognize it at once.<\/p>\n

Another good one, on the experimental side, would be the phrase “typical data,” which is used in papers and presentations to mean “the nicest-looking data set I could find.” I’m not sure if there’s a theoretical equivalent, but even theorists seem to know that “typical data” is a phrase to be wary of.<\/p>\n

In the physical and mathematical sciences, something like “In the limit of large\/small _____” or “For large\/small values of _____” is probably a good marker. I often refer to my old group at NIST as working in “the Infinite Money Limit,” which isn’t entirely accurate, but which resonates pretty well with a lot of physics people. I’m not sure how well that works for bio types, though.<\/p>\n

Suggestions of other recognition signals for science nerds (other than, you know, terrific dress sense and great social skills) can be left in the comments.<\/p>\n

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An open thread comment over at Making Light triggered a discussion of what words and phrases could serve as reliable markers of SF fandom. (It continues for a good while, but at times is nearly buried in discussion of Japanese knotweed.). This got me to wondering about what phrases would serve as similar markers for… Continue reading You Might Be a Scientist If…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}