See, kids? Scientists aren't one note lab monkeys. They all have engaged in outdoor physical activity at least enough times to they can get a good picture of themselves doing something outdoorsy to go on their personal website so they don't seem like a one note lab monkey when applying for jobs!
(Okay that isn't totally fair but every time I see one of those "please note, as you are looking at my publication record, that I have also been on top of a mountain!" pictures it makes me laugh.)
I could submit some really fucked up pictures to that site. "Look I'm a scientist-in-training, and I also do... wait, what the hell is going on there?"
Or do a parody site of just people wasted at conferences. Hm!
I have a Ph.D. in theoretical High Energy Physics but I also perform in a local children's theater.
Oh dear.
Heebie, I had a really whacked out dream starring your house. You asked me and my partner to stop in and check on your kids while you and Jammies were at work. They weren't there, but you had about a million donuts and other baked goods, which I gorged myself on. Also, your house was attached to frat housing and there were a lot of bros around. And possibly some sort of dead body as we tried to get out of the house and were being asked many questions by neighbors worried about what exactly we were doing there....and then I woke up.
I know dreams are of no interest, but that was just a positively weird one. Also, your addition looks nice.
If you're a scientist, ice the bros and send a picture of it to the web site in the OP.
Anyhow, I think this site does a much better job of communicating with the youth of today. (I mean, I think it's sort of stupid usually but I'm old so obviously that's not relevant.)
This site showing what kids wrote about a trip to Fermilab is fun.
The class of 2016 will be reluctant to become scientists because they won't want to be self-consciously cultivating deliberately quirky hobbies.
My problem with that Tumblr is the jaw-dropping lack of international students. That is NOT what a modern department looks like.
11: Ha, that was the one that caught my eye as well.
Wow, so science is so unpopular now that it needs to borrow taglines from feminism? The other side really has won.
A scientist needs a lab coat like a fish needs a pair of steampunk googles.
"Local scientists are waiting to chat with you. Call 1-800-SCIENCE. 18 or older only. $4.95 for the first minute and $1.50 each minute after that."
"I used to think scientists were cool, like Albert Einstein. Now I know they're more like Cory Doctorow."
Lord knows I shouldn't be making fun of anyone for having hobbies more interesting than drinking wine and waiting for the apocalypse.
Instead of just waiting for the apocalypse to happen, learn some science and you might be able to make it happen.
A while back our lab paid a friendly visit to a local neurosurgery clinic - where they actually wear white lab coats over crisp, smart attire - and we were appalled at how crude their experimental methodologies were. A colleague of mine who is also an MD told me afterwards that that level of sophistication is pretty much par for the course in the medical field.
We use leeches for post-it notes, but other than that it is just as sophisticated as any field.
21: To be fairer to them, they knew their methods were a bit lacking, and that was a big reason they had invited us over. Also, their main priorities are cutting tumors out of people's brains and dealing with the resultant aphasias, not doing fine-grained cognitive/neurolinguistic experiments.
But, yeah, I did expect experiment design to be a bit further along than 1950s level.
I DON'T KNOW HOW LINKS WORK BECAUSE I'M SO OLD-TIMEY.
As long as they use a sterile ice pick.
I'm giving advice to new grad students and I think they think I'm a fraud. The dude who was just in my office seemed really skeptical when I suggested he might not want to spend too much time taking math classes and told him to spend his time going to dinner with seminar speakers.
Oh, the issues weren't to do with stats, but stimuli presentation/design. We have no standing whatsoever to criticise anyone on the application of stats, given the howls of despair any research from our field elicits among statisticians/mathmos.
I only care about the application of stats. Whether or not the experimental manipulation is right is somebody else's problem.
26: my adviser was really convincing on the uselessness of classes in grad school. Of course, I may have been more receptive to that line of thinking than the average incoming student.
Scientists are people who don't wear lab coats, try to avoid classrooms, and think too much about acquiring free dinners and free alcohol.
I thought about sending something to that site but started being worried that I am not fun or interesting enough to be a scientist.
My office net nanny won't let me see what a scientist looks like because of purported "adult/mature content." This is making me really want to find out.
"Scientists" is a group of people for whom the depiction in children's entertainment consists of stereotypes that are about 80 years out of date, while the depiction in adults' entertainment is no longer stereotypical and approaching accurate. It seems like if you watch an episode of "Drake and Josh" they use the same signifiers for "scientist" and "professor" that were used in the Three Stooges.
Obviously I don't have children so I don't know what other fossilized signifiers are still in there. Probably the monocle/opera-based stereotypes of wealthy people.
"Scientist", "dinosaur", "talking cat".
Wait, the stereotypes made sense 80 years ago?
re: 26
Heh, I remember giving some advice to some students about to start the Bee Fill, along the lines of being wary of students from a different graduate school culture. Which they, I think, took as me engaging in some veiled racism, but which was intended along the lines of, 'The American grad students are much more career savvy than you, and will drink your metaphorical milkshake, so start kissing the right arses from day 1.'
Drake and Josh was created and produced by "Ricky," the fat neighbor kid from Better Off Dead, speaking of nerds who grew up.
Heh, I remember giving some advice to some students about to start the Bee Fill, along the lines of being wary of students from a different graduate school culture. Which they, I think, took as me engaging in some veiled racism, but which was intended along the lines of, 'The American grad students are much more career savvy than you, and will drink your metaphorical milkshake, so start kissing the right arses from day 1.'
Snerk.
I have a feeling I am never really going to adjust to being in a department with the word "science" in its name, given how entirely not a scientist I am. What's a scientist look like? NOT MEEEEEEEEE! Sorry, students.
But remember, departments with "science" in the name aren't really science. No problemo!
39: I'm a scientist in a German and Dutch philology department, in a German university. I speak no Dutch and horrible German.
35: I guess Nikola Tesla was the last real scientist. So, 100 years ago.
I think that should be Philology Science department.
But all German departments have 'science' in the name. Literaturescience. Languagescience. Peoplescience.
Philosophiewissenschaft. Mathematikwissenschaft. Physikwissenschaft.
43, 44: I'm particularly fond of 'Geisteswissenschaften', which is a nice way to think of the humanities.
I thought it was Literature Know Shaft. Language Know Shaft. People Know Shaft.
People Know Shaft.
You're daaaamn right.
I don't know that scientists are in need of much of a PR boost. My kid's "graduation" from her preschool class featured a segment where the kids said that what they wanted to be when they grew up* and I'd say that about 50% said they wanted to be a scientist of some kind, if you include paleontologists. Definitely tied with cop and fireman.
*one kid said "realtor" which was cute.
Scientists are people who don't wear lab coats, try to avoid classrooms, and think too much about acquiring free dinners and free alcohol.
Scientists are grad students. Check.
There's one of these for philosophers, too.
It's the hot new trend! We should start one for bloggers.
When I grow up, I wanna be a corporation!
Props to that first philosopher for being able to do the foot behind the head thing at all, but if you can't do the pose with the proper upright form, why don't you take a photo of yourself doing a different pose? I'm sure bird of paradise would look just as impressive.
Encouraging people to go into science in this funding environment is just mean. Encourage them to go into something with a future, like busking.
57: We need to teach our children to be warriors and political revolutionaries, so that our grandchildren may become scientists.
Heh. Only met two or three of those philosophers.
another swpl site which lacks that, "self-aware"
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This article shellacking Sex at Dawn might be of interest to the Mineshaft.
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A friend posted some "This is what a scientist looks like" thing a few years ago, and it really pissed me off. Is she really angry that when a child thinks of a lab scientist, she thinks of someone in a lab coat, working in a lab? Like, I'm glad you play harmonica and row dragon boat on the weekend, but I would not expect a child to come up with that image as quintessential to your profession.
Like this, for example. Is it more accurate to say the thing on the right than the thing on the left? Because, let me tell you, Amy, I'm glad you met that woman, but that guy exists too.
From the link in 62, final paragraph: "[R]ather than a plausible potential explanation of our evolution, [Sex at Dawn] reveals itself as a contemporary middle-class, child-free, sex-obsessed, male fantasy projected back onto prehistory' (p. 209)."
Does "middle-class" not sound extremely odd there?
Not really. I'd think of "We should be warmly affirming and non-judgmental about promiscuity" as a middle-class ideal, at least in the US. I mean, I'm all for promiscuity, but I don't think that's completely unrelated to my class background.
"We should be warmly affirming and non-judgmental about promiscuity" as a middle-class ideal, at least in the US.
At least in the nowhere anywhere near Texas or any red region of the country.
A friend posted some "This is what a scientist looks like" thing a few years ago, and it really pissed me off. Is she really angry that when a child thinks of a lab scientist, she thinks of someonean older white man in a lab coat, working in a lab?
Uh, maybe?
There was an earlier one of these for philosophers than the one I linked above, prompted in part, I think, by the profile of Kripke in the Times some years ago that said, among other things, that Kripke looks like a philosopher.
At least one grad student (female, asian, young, not decrepit) in my department thought that was a little much, and, I think, rightly so.
I'd think of "We should be warmly affirming and non-judgmental about promiscuity" as a middle-class ideal
Maybe it's a difference on what "promiscuity" means here, but I don't think I agree at all. I mean, not condemning women who have ever had sex outside of marriage, sure [though I don't think that's a particularly middle class value, just something that huge numbers of people think is OK].
Lots and lots of sexual partners and no thought of settling down? Even for men, I don't think "we should be warmly affirming and non-judgmental" is a particularly common belief, or that a propensity to share that belief is particularly middle class.
This is what I want scientists to look like.
Okay, I should be tighter than 'middle class' there, because you're both right. Um, liberal/urban/well-educated/upper-middle-class, and what I mean by 'warmly affirming' is more 'vaguely nervous about but believing that it's rude to be judgmental on the topic.'
An alternative criterion for scientistiness.
she thinks of someonean older white man in a lab coat, working in a lab?
A few years ago someone did a project where they had a bunch of kids draw pictures of scientists before and after a visit to FermiLab.
The "befores" were almost all balding white men in lab coats, the "afters" were much more diverse.
If I'd been wearing a lab coat*, I would have spotted 9.
*because they make you read Unfogged more scientifically.
My Indian manservant lab assistant reads the comments for me.
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Hey, this is totally the thread to ask: what are people's go-to non-wiki LaTeX references? I'm getting tired of constructions like "The answer is in the command \graphicspath (that should not be used... see l2tabu)".
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liberal/urban/well-educated/upper-middle-class
I figured that was closer to the set of signifiers she was going for, beside "childfree" and so on. I just couldn't think why it was specifically the middle class: concerned with gas mileage, paying the mortgage off early, secure retirement, and making sure their sons can score bountifully at a value-priced college? Surely the 1% is just as invested in ideals of no-strings-attached sex...
(I assume the "Sex at Dawn" people's response to this critique is that its author needs to get laid, but I don't particularly want to check.)
Could have been worse -- instead of saying middle class, the writer might have said 'hipster'. Or SWPL.
72: You want scientists to look like designers?
My office net nanny won't let me see what a scientist looks like because of purported "adult/mature content."
Au contraire, I kept hitting "next" hoping for a little skin. Nothing doing.
If you follow the actual arguments in that Sex at Dawn critique you can see why there might be a liberal ideological push for promiscuity. Basically the article is saying that female promiscuity is unnatural because on the veldt tribal societies were based on stable pair bonding, strong families, and the inducement to paternal investment created by restricting female promiscuity. Modern mass society has in certain ways evolved beyond the need for the family, or is not based on it in the same way. The emancipatory project can thus turn to prying sexuality loose from reproduction and the family.
re: 79
Basically just the 'Not so short guide to LaTeX', plus some reference card things I found for AucTeX and AMS-TeX, and googling.
http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf
If you've not seen it already. I'm sure there's some sort of huge O'Reilly book, but fuck that.
86: just grabbed. I think I'd seen it at some point in the distant past, but lost track of it. Thanks.
However there are a lot of very useful packages that the not-so-short guide won't tell you about.
If you have specific questions the TeX stackexchange is a good resource.
My specific question right now is "Why can't you make my figures look reasonable without my having to hardcode all the layout and so on, motherfucker?"
TeX stackexchange is good. TikZ is pretty great for putting illustrations together. Figures, I don't usually have a huge problem with?