Scientist’s oath

Of all the many, many forensic crime shows on television right now, Bones is my favourite.

I recognize more of myself, and the people I work with, and the jobbing scientists I meet at conferences, in the characters in Bones than in any other police procedural. Sure, the show’s characters are caricatures of scientists, but like all good caricatures, they work because they accentuate what is genuinely there.

I get Temperance Brennan and her literal-mindedness and her bluntness. I get Hodgins and his slightly goofy excitement over running the experiment that gives you the answer.

The Bones writers have a better grasp on the mentality of scientists than most other shows. On most other shows, the scientists seem more like a mouthpiece to show off the writer’s clever research. Sometimes they’re good characters – even great and engaging ones – but they don’t generate that same feeling of recognition that I get all the time watching Bones.

Case in point: The most recent episode, “The Body and The Bounty” (Season 6, Episode 4), has a B story where Brennan is asked to appear on a kid’s science show with Bunsen Jude the Science Dude (a clear nod to Bill Nye the Science Guy). In the end, we see the show, and Brennan leads an audience of kids in a “scientist’s oath”:

We see big stars
Tiny atoms, too
Because that’s what scientists do
We get the facts
And say what’s true
Because that’s what scientists do
We use our minds
And praise what’s new
Because that is what scientists do

And damn it if that didn’t get to me just a little bit. They got it. They managed to encapsulate a lot of the things that matter to me as a scientist.

You can watch the episode online. It’s worth watching all the way from the beginning to get the payoff at the end.

Less quoted than Newton

If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.

– Murray Gell-Mann

Quoted here, but the original source of the quote is unknown, according to Wikiquotes

Mondo boffo scary boo!

Someone who is certain can be scarier than someone who is crazy.

The difference between experts and scientists

An expert compiles existing knowledge. A scientist generates new knowledge.

Comment made in response to Simon Bostock’s question on Twitter yesterday.

Goal for the year

Be more dangerous.

Decade

I've had this quote in my Blogger profile since the beginning, and it feels particularly appropriate now.

“There’s no looking back. Only forward.”

Problems of reality or perception?

Randy Olson often says scientists are handicapped by their blind obsession with the truth.

Rory Sutherland puts it this way:

And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality. When actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.

I love that quote, but you should do yourself a favour and watch his whole TED talk. It is brilliant.

And I’m not just saying that because it features Shreddies. (Homesickness trigger.)

“Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated”

This article by Jeff Ello is about information technology (IT) professionals, but it also applies to scientists:

While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated.

That last sentence is one of the best summaries of why scientists are, as Randy Olson puts it, “handicapped by a blind obsession with the truth.”

It’s not good intentions

The road to Hell is paved by people telling themselves, “Just this once.”

Quote of the moment, July 2009 edition

After spending most of the weekend chucking paper from my office and still having a long way to go before I hit anything approaching “clean,” this quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine felt appropriate:

Humans have a compulsion to keep records and files — so many, in fact, that they have to invent new ways to store them microscopically. Otherwise their records would overrun all known civilization.

(For the sticklers, that’s Constable Odo in the episode “Necessary Evil.”)

Invert science keeps food on table

Simon Leather has a good short article about the problems of working with invertebrates in biology. The problems are not intellectual, but structural. He argues that if you work on invertebrates, you really don’t have much of a chance of getting a job at a major research institution. Some of Leather’s claims are backed by references. But phrases like “it is obvious that” crop up, which are always warning signs for opinions trying to pass themselves off as facts.

It contains this short blast:

Unless something is done soon to remedy the situation, it will be too late and the only animals that the general public will be able to recognize will be polar bears and tigers.

Why we should care, according to Leather, is because of insect pests and their effect on agriculture. Leather misses an opportunity to draw stronger links between invertebrate research and food security. I was surprised not to see honeybee pollination mentioned, for instance. Or the importance of invertebrates as a food source in their own right, either for fish (krill are the base of much of the oceans’ food webs, after all) or for humans (for example, lobster fisheries).

As an invertebrate researcher, I share Leather’s concerns. A couple of things may help. First, as I’ve written before, there is always the possibility that vertebrate researchers are going to price themselves out of the market.

Second, not every academic or research institution is a major research institution. Not every academic job will need publications in Nature or Science. Given that not every institution has the same resources, those that can’t support full blown research on large vertebrates could become centers of excellence for invertebrate research.

Reference

Leather, S. (2009). Institutional vertebratism threatens UK food security Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.05.002

What we have going for us

In an article in Science on Darwinius (Ida), paleontologist Christopher Beard (Carnegie Museum of Natural History) provides something scientists like myself should remember:

The only thing we have going for us that Hollywood and politicians don't is objectivity.

The fate of flash drives

You wouldn't expect an article on computer backups to contain a good one-liner, but this one does:

Be wary of memory sticks. Once full, they fall prey to the same monster that eats socks.

Setting the bar low

Gail Patricelli is quoted in New Scientist as saying:

The males are trying to copulate with cow pies all day.

This from an article about courting birds.

And on that thought, happy Valentine's Day.

Quotes that scientists hate: Part 1

Mark Twain blamed Benjamin Disraeli, but, as far as I can find, nobody has found when Disraeli said:

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

I hate that quote. Or, to be more accurate, I love its humour, but I hate how it gets brandished around like a club.

I was reading about possible lottery fraud, and this comment popped out at me:

Statistics can be shown to mean whatever they want.

Whenever someone wants to dispute a finding that relies on numbers, Twain's quote is never far from the surface. People bring it out as though it were some logical proof or eternal verité, instead of being a punch line.

For the non-scientist, numbers are slippery, unpredictable and untrustworthy things. You can't look them in the eye. You can't question their motives.

For scientists, numbers are the real deal. You dispute the interpretation, the analysis, the experimental design, what have you... but it is highly unusual to dispute the numbers. One saying goes, "Interpretations may change, but the data should be valid forever."

Fortuitously, this article in New Scientist makes a similar point. When climate scientists say "Very likely," they are expressing a confidence that the probability is more than 90%. In comparison, nearly half of non-scientists thought the probability was less than 66%.

Such things tap into of important differences between how non-scientists and scientists approach problems.

Consider this when if you're writing a syllabus

Teresa Neilsen Hayden wrote:

Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

She's talking about internet moderation here, but this can be applied to many other situations.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 23: Bad presenter thought

The opposite of a great presenter is a bored presenter, not a scared presenter.

Hard lessons

Nobody reads the rule book.

One of my mottos

Science is what you can get away with.

One for the quote file

Science is like a good friend: sometimes it tells you things you don’t want to hear. It tells you the truth.

- Charlie Booker, "Charlie Booker's Screen Burn" for 2 August 2008, The Guardian