Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others… there is no reason to go on being foolish forever. – Bertrand Russell There is a pervasive belief in science that unless you’re an obsessive workaholic you can’t be successful — there is overwork for some and scientific starvation for the rest. Further, there is a glorification of the singleminded pursuit of [read on...]
One way of retaining one’s job in these difficult times is to make oneself indispensable. For example, in the era of cutbacks to IT departments the person who can unjam a printer, successfully turn a computer off and on again, or google something can be so essential that their flaws like eating all the biscuits in the tea room and bad personal hygiene etc can be overlooked. Indispensability can be achieved two ways; by actually being useful or by sabotaging [read on...]
I don’t know about you but I spent most of my primary school years running around the playground trying to avoid girl germs. Apparently things haven’t changed all that much in the playgrounds of Pennsylvania. A paper this week looks at the transmission of flu in a school and community in Pennsylvania and sees that the fear of girl germs keeps the real germs at bay. Transmission studies of disease are hugely interesting: they look at us how we are, [read on...]
[fb-like] Numbers. They’re easier to round up than cats… Firstly, just to clarify: there’s nothing wrong with arbitrary round numbers. Some of my best friends round down from early thirties to mid twenties. When I used to sit at a lab bench, stuffing yellow pipette tips into the small holes of pipette tip boxes from which I would subsequently remove them, and with some science in between, I often contemplated the futility of science. Sitting there in some sort of [read on...]
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