Archive for the 'Humor' category
Hipster science
UPDATE 2/28/11: #hipsterscience shows no signs of slowing down.
I'm pretty sure it is all Zelnio's fault:
kzelnio: I keep my pipettes in organic wool hand-woven napsacks made by local free range shepherds in Big Sur #hipsterscience
kzelnio: I hand grind organically grown fair trade red algae to make my agarose for electrophoresis. I don't buy into "big agarose" #hipsterscience
kzelnio: I was into the coalescent before it went mainstream #hipsterphylogenetics
enniscath: Positive controls are waaaaay too conformist #hipsterscience
superkash: I use my own heirloom goat's milk for blocking buffers. #hipsterscience
JoshRosenau: My primers are organically made by a guy I know. You wouldn't have heard of him. #hipsterscience
drugmonkeyblog: You get a better shave with a blade you've freshly knapped from fair-trade, small producer obsidian @drisis #hipsterscience #hipsteranthro
upulie: I don't publish on the "major journal" labels, I only tweet my work #hipsterscience
CMastication: My parents fund my research. #hipsterscience
noahWG: I discovered the Higgs boson, but fuck if I'm going to ruin it by telling others about it. #hipsterscience
talyarkoni: Hypothesis testing is for people who lack conviction. #hipsterscience
CBC_psi: My data don't need to fit to your "model." #hipsterscience
drugmonkeyblog: The Williamsburg Project was edgier RT @nwerneck @bjkraal: I liked Richard Feynman before he joined the Manhattan Project. #hipsterscience
bjkraal: I liked Richard Feynman before he joined the Manhattan Project. #hipsterscience
DrKlapperich: I'm writing a textbook. It's self published #hipsterscience
dftchemist: If its not fortran 77 its not real code #hipsterscience
dr_leigh: the modern lab balance has only one pan. nowhere to put the mass standards... tragic. #hipsterscience
drugmonkeyblog: replication is for mainstreamers...I prefer to keep moving forward. #hipsterscience
ajebsary: I only publish in PLoS journals, out of principle. #OpenScience is my mantra and impact factor is for jokers. #HipsterScience
talyarkoni: Neuroscientists today have it easy with Brodmann Areas and stereotaxic coordinates. In my day, we used echolocation. #hipsterscience
anaturalstate: I use R for stats because Matlab is so corporate #hipsterscience
drugmonkeyblog: I know he went by Fred, I only use Burrhus to be ironic. #hipsterscience
CMastication My research question? You've never heard of it. #hipsterscience
drugmonkeyblog: Poser. I used the only lecture hall that still has chalkboards. RT @medscholaradaml overhead projector for my thesis defense #hipsterscience
medscholaradaml: Powerpoint? No thanks I'm using this overhead projector for my thesis defense #hipsterscience
TheAstronomist: I like galaxies the way they used to be long ago when they emitted their light, I don't even care what they do now. #hipsterscience
drugmonkeyblog: I build my own electrophys rigs out of parts from RadioShack to remain authentic. #hipsterscience ..oh, wait http://bit.ly/ifs61w
ryneches: Published in PLoS One before everyone thought it was cool. #hipsterscience
dorsalstream: I only work with skinny genes. #hipsterscience
caruanascott: unless you take a day to equilibrate your phenol, extractions are just not very rewarding #hipsterscience
kzelnio My thermal cycler is a fixie #hipsterscience
jillahjillah: Negative reviews validate the innovative nature of my work #hipsterscience
catchpolenet: Infrared spectroscopy is a little passé. I'm thinking purples and browns. Brown goes with my man bag. #hipsterscience
para_sight: I only sequence the anti-sense strand; the conformists can work out the obvious, maybe #hipsterscience
AgileRoxy: I converted my lab notebook to QR codes. #hipsterscience
westius: I like my chemistry organic #hipsterscience
cambrianexplode: Evolution? I like the early stuff but it's all gotten so predictable now. #hipsterscience
drugmonkeyblog: It's just more authentic to pipette by mouth. #hipsterscience
Hard headed applicant?
This cracked me up. In doing a little research for my post over at Sb, I ran across a couple of NIH applications that were funded on the A6 version. Yep, that means somebody submitted an application seven times to get it funded (this was prior to 1996 when you could do this). What sort of person would do that, I wondered?
Click to embiggen so you can appreciate the key point.
ahh, of course. Someone who was in year 28 of his other R01. Unfortunately RePORTER seems to have lost a lot of the historical data that CRISP used to have so it is hard to tell precisely. But you wanna bet this guy had one grant that he renewed continually for decades...then when it came time to write a new proposal had no idea how to deal with critical comments, perhaps from a new set of reviewers that were not his long time cronies?
Boot camp for grant writers?
This is hilarious.
Andrews: well, it’s in my proposal. Pthalates are a suspected mutagen, and I am suggesting that…
Proposal Sergeant: I DID NOT ask you about the content of your proposal, you nematode! Who gives an airborne copulation about that! I asked you why you wrote this as a response to an FOA and not an RFA!!
and even better than that....Downfall, the NIH R01 edition
As if the paper review mashup wasn't hilarious enough....
It is a good day...Third Reviewer Downfall is back up!
It is a very good day. The Downfall folks must have revoked their objection (or asked YouTube to restore access after an auto-ban that they didn't ask for).
Do not pledge to Public Radio
This was cracking me up during my local public radio station's fundraising drive.
It's my night to bring the beer...
yeah, pretty much like this....
Slightly NSFW at the end so I'll put it after the jump...
Continue Reading »
Young Looking Assistant Professors Are Trying to Fit In
With grant success rates dipping ever below 10% in the NIH and somewhere south of gawdawful in NSF programs people are understandably nervous.
BikeMonkey Guest PostWe all know about the struggles young and even not-so-young women professors go through to gain the respect of their students and peers. A youthful appearance can in some cases be a bit of a handicap. Men are not immune as has been described by Prof-like Substance.
I was asked to give a 5 minute
dog and pony showresearch explanation to a political candidate for some district somethingorother. She brought along a contingent of people, including two interns who appeared to think their job of making sure the schedule was adhered to was a life or death posting, and toured the lab. I talked about what we do, including how our science is both good for the state from a job and application perspective. She took this all in as I described the cool equipment we use and how state infrastructure is blah blah blah. A few questions were asked, suggesting the candidate had at least listened. And then... "So, are you a student here?"
Well, some of Prof-like's peers have been adopting a little protective camouflage to fit in.
Young assistant professors in Ivy League towns have stormed the salons with an interesting request: to add a little gray to their perfectly-colored heads of hair.
P. Nus-Whimple of the Crimson Locks, a men's salon and spa in Cambridge, MA explained that grayness adds gravitas.
"We've had that request quite a bit," Nus-Whimple said. "Assistant professors are under tenure stress and need be taken more seriously in their field. At a conference they look around the audience at all the gray manes and wonder how they are being perceived. Twenty years ago, only 2 percent of our business was hair colour, now it's 22-23 per cent. And of the colouring we do, 80 percent is gray blending."
"...like baseball players who've taken steroids."
There's really nothing else to say but "Discuss" for this comment.
I think people with a stay at home spouse should have an asterisk next to their name on their CVs and tenure documents, like baseball players who've taken steroids.
(You might want to also register a vote in Female Science Professor's stay-at-home-spouse poll.)
