Scientists Are Oddballs - Tumblr Posts
you forgot the parts where 1) Schrodinger, Dirac, Bose, and some other folks broke everything even more simply by thinking about really small stuff just a bit too much, and 2) Hawking tried to fix what Einstein and the quantum weirdos broke but only ended up breaking the pieces into stranger and more complicated pieces.
oh and also Feynman took the pieces, gathered them up in a dustpan, and gave them LSD and now we have string theory, which keeps getting more and more metaphorical LSD added to it all the fucking time because string theorists have no goddamn idea what they’re doing.
Yeah fairly accurate I believe
as I’ve heard from some engineer friends:
“hitting the damn thing until it works”
translates to
“percussive maintenance”
if you read in a frog paper “specimen was released in the field immediately after capture” chances are very good that what it actually means is
“i dropped the damn frog and despite the fact that we fell all over each other no one could recapture it”
@kagansune you strike me as a rock puncher, given your ostensible hill-dwarf ancestry
Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad
A lot of people mistake a scientist so heavily domesticated that they can’t function with a feral scientist and that makes me sad.
Domesticated scientist:
Wears a lab coat outside of the lab
Wears sweater vests and suits inside the lab
Uses equipment for making coffee and other non lab things, contaminating all the vacuum flasks
Complete disdain for any subject outside their specialization
Feral Scientist:
Looks like a hazmat monster in the lab
Completely unrecognizable outside the lab
Uses a random brick from outside as a streak plate, repairs the $2000 centrifuge with a paper clip and burner-melted plastic dice
Has a bunch of totally unrelated skills and interests
if anyone ever wanted more reason to resent arthropod geneticists, there’s a single gene in a bug-infectious bacteria that controls the production of toxins which destroy the immune system and hydraulic muscle capacity in insects within 24 hours of infection. this gene is called the “mcf” gene.
wanna take a guess what that’s short for?
this fucking disease that is basically arthropod rabies depends on a gene called makes caterpillars floppy.
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Ok so I'm taking a genetics class right now and in lab we've been given fruit flies with different mutations that we need to breed over the course of the semester.
Now, first thing I learned: fruit flies don't eat fruit. They eat yeast. They eat the yeast on fermenting fruit. They can not actually eat fruit. Their name is a lie.
Secondly, one of the two mutant lines I was given to cross are flies with the apterous mutation, aka they're wingless. I feel so bad for them, they can't do the one thing they're named for, they cant fly.
And then I realized. My fruit flies are in truth insects that eat yeast and can't fly.
Anyways, I've been calling them my yeast crawls and I am their god now.
THIS IS WHY WE HATE THE GENETICISTS
BECAUSE THEY PULL THIS BULLSHIT REGULARLY
Scientists identify substance that may have sparked life on Earth
Based on laboratory studies, Rutgers scientists say one of the most likely chemical candidates that kickstarted life was a simple peptide with two nickel atoms they are calling "Nickelback"
Bro if we solve abiogenesis and it gets named after Nickelback I am going to have an aneurysm
entomologists are the most fucking wild people ive ever met
i pointed out a cool wasp to one and she just picked it up with her bare hands and started showing me different features she was using to identify the species
on a walk with another one he just paused, turned, violently shoved his hand into some rotting wood and offered me a tunnel web spider like oh okay i guess-
sometimes when I'm bored, I go through the list of recent bad faith Wikipedia edits that have since been reverted. a lot of them are politically contentious/offensive topics that attract crazies and trolls in general, but sometimes there are completely innocent inoffensive articles that people attack for no reason. some guy yesterday vandalized the article on the chemical element francium
