Scholarship: Part of the Scientific Reward System

I may have been slightly snarky. :)

Also: scholarship ;)

— DynamicalSystemsSIAM (@DynamicsSIAM) June 20, 2018

"The Pole Arm of Archaeology" and Other Epic Scholar Visualizations

Dan Hicks posted some epically bad scholar visualizations as a Twitter thread. My favorite one is The Pole Arm of Archaeology, which is about as epic as it sounds. ;)

"The Pole Arm of Archaeology" (1977) #WorstAcademicDiagrams pic.twitter.com/l8pwq6XYdF

— Dan Hicks (@ProfDanHicks) May 16, 2018

(Tip of the cap to Brian Cox.)

Practicing for Scholarly Censorship in Modern Dystopian America

I figure that I should get practice at censoring my scholarly research, which naturally is neither evidence-based nor science-based (even when I publish it in a journal called "Archrival-of-Nature Advances").

(Where is George Carlin when we need him?)#CDC7words pic.twitter.com/WvNuUSpKn5

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) December 17, 2017

Scholarly Journals: Screwing Over Authors for 150 Years and Counting

Hey, look: Scholarly journals were screwing authors over 150 years ago, and scholars were expressing their indignation about it.

Some traditions are alive and well...

(Tip of the cap to Ursula Martin​.)

Academics Write Like Crap

Well, at least most of us write like crap for our academic writing. Additionally, most of us don't include humor in our scientific articles either.

I do the best I can to buck this trend, though others will be the judge of how well I do. I certainly attempt to put humor in some of my writing, and quite a few of my papers (e.g., this one) contain easter eggs. I do think that I am a good writer, and at minimum I am definitely very anal about my scholarly prose.

Although I don't agree with everything in the article about what we do that is bad --- for example, I think the paragraph with "The rest of this article is organized as follows." is genuinely useful for many readers, especially if the article is long --- but I agree with a lot of it. Also, I can't overemphasize how much my scientific career has benefited from my experience in journalism at Caltech. (Yes, being a Tech Editor has been amazingly beneficial. It's one of the best and most important things I did for my education.)

(Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.)

The Importance of Being Curious

One of the attendees of Dynamics Days 2014 (I am not at the conference) posted a picture of one of the speaker's slides. This slide is paraphrasing Richard Hamming and has the following three questions: (1) What are the important problems in your field?; (2) What important problems are you working on?; and (3) Why are the answers to (1) and (2) different?


I reject what appears to be intended by the speaker's take-home message on that slide.

Here is my two-part answer to question (3):

(a) You should work on what damn well interests you --- forget about whether it's important. If both are true, great! But you work on whatever interests you.

(b) From a practical perspective, you make progress where you have ideas of how to make progress. If that includes what you consider to be the most important problems, so much the better.

Grants can fund important problems, but not every problem one works on is funded by a grant. To me, science is about pursuing things for curiosity, and I need no other reason for choosing what problems I work on.