Stuff Scientists Like

Posted on September 12, 2008
Filed Under Science | 4 Comments

Since I now work in a chocolate factory and not a laboratory I might not have a valid basis for saying anything here. Still I kind of dug this post “stuff scientists like” that I noticed at Razib’s site. (He added his own list) Some things I quibble with. (I have a great quote on the side bar’s quote list from Peirce about whether proofs really provide certainty for instance) Here’s my list with comments though.

1. Salvage. Back at Los Alamos they had this great salvage site with everything from old oscilloscopes to lathes that were no longer quite precise enough to transformers to just weird metallic junk. Once every now and then (I want to say month but I can’t quite be sure that’s right) they’d let the public in. Which mainly consisted of scientists that actually worked at the lab. It was a free for all. But you could make the coolest stuff. My business partner (who I actually met at the lab) used to make giant Tesla coils and the like with equipment from the lab. Think of it as a flea market for scientists. One of the things I really miss about working at Los Alamos in the 90’s. (In the mid-90’s they closed down the salvage and an era ended)

2. Statistics & the Press. Especially misused statistics in the press (which is probably the majority of statistics in the press although even when they say it right one wonders how the public reads it). I had a prof who would start every class off with an example of a bad statistic from that morning’s paper. Probably led to an early cynicism of the press on my part. A closely related popular thing for scientists is lambasting how badly the press reports science stories. There are a few places that do well (NPR for instance) but in general they play up the sensationalism and get half the facts wrong.

3. Math Proofs and Numbers. Weird numbers like pi or e are of course popular. Anything that seems certain. Although scientists tend to take a much more “flexible” approach to mathematics than any mathematician would countenance. (There really is a world of separation between the two – I had a math major and a physics major and the math department was quite the cultural change) So what counts as a proof to a physicist and what counts as a proof to a mathematician is often quite different. (And frankly both groups often have “leap’s” in their thinking – it’s just that physicists have more and in different places)

4. Mathematica or Maple. There’s probably a few who use Sage also. (That’s what I use since I can’t justify paying for Mathematica or Maple right now) I remember when I first used Mathematica on a NeXT machine. It was wonderful. I had one class that required its use to solve physics. It was probably akin to what people in the 70’s when calculators became ubiquitous felt.

5. Passive Voice. Someone mentioned this in Razib’s comments. But it’s so true. I remember the technical writing class which was oddly taught by English majors and not scientists. There was this huge conflict between the English folks who hated anything passive and the science students who’d assimilated this preference from the environment. Much hilarity ensued.

Crosses in Z’s and 7’s. I still put a line through mine when I write. People sometimes still give me a weird look. A close runner up is greek symbols in equations. (And of course people then ask how you decide which greek letter is a an operator like summation and which ones are variables and which ones are constants. I have no good response to that.)

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Comments

4 Responses to “Stuff Scientists Like”

Wow, your list reads almost nothing like mine—likely because yours is heavily skewed for physics, whereas I am in biomedicine. Mathematica or Maple? I do my calculations on the back of a Kimwipe, thank you.

I’m right with you on the passive voice, crossed 7’s, and snickering at the press though. I always find humor at what the camera chooses to film for a story—they love multi-channel pipettes, biohazard signs, and shaking incubators, even if these items had nothing to do with the research being reported on.

Here’s some I’ll add to your list:
1) Cooking. It’s a lot like lab work except the payoff is faster and tastier. (Okay, so I don’t really know how tasty my experiments are.)

2) Running/cycling. Even when I worked for an outdoor retailer there wasn’t as high a percentage of avid runners/cyclists among my coworkers.

Great post. Here are my comments on yours:

1) Especially cool glassware. Nothing says you’re in the know like drinking from an Erlenmeyer flask.

2) Yes, 75% of scientists love looking at bad statistics.

3) My favorite? e^(pi*i)=-1, how in the world can you raise one transcendental number to another which has been multiplied by an imaginary number and get a ordinary integer? That is so strange. This alone turns me into a Platonist .

4) I’ve been writing Mathematica code all day! It’s gotten better and better. The graphics rock and if you do cellular automata like me there is nothing better.

5) The third person is also not to be underestimated.

6) For me 7’s yes, Z’s no. Must be a biological thing.

My additions:

Science Magazines, Shorts and T-shirts with something cool on the front, Far Side Cartoons and at least one Matt Groening cartoon somewhere for graduate students.

Science toys – I always loved going to the 1st year physics demo room as a kid (my dad was a prof). It was better than the toy department at Woolco. I now find sites like zerotoysequally as hard to resist.

Reducing ideas – who doesn’t enjoy reducing ideas down to their essence? You know you have this trait when people ask you what a movie was about and you immediately start commenting on theme not plot. Similarly, who doesn’t like it when page long algebraic expressions get simplified to 1?

Passive voice – silly English majors, the passive voice is our friend. Distance in writing isn’t a bad thing.

7 – I’ll third the cross on the 7’s and z’s.

Homemade lab equipment with lots of hanging wires – What looks cooler a tidy factory produced laser or one without a case and with a bajillion wires going everywhere and under everything?

I was in an honors writing class in college and had the misfortune to select Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) for a topic. The professor got all over my case for using too many gerunds instead of action verbs (!). As if there was any other way to talk about the topic. Worthless class. I consider my C grade a badge of honor.

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