JenCo.

Now that I’m a Mac person (Thanks, bossman!), I guess I’ll be eating a lot more hummus and riding a Vespa. Good think I like hummus and Vespas. 

For all of your sound bite needs. 

Don’t want to go to work tomorrow? Don’t want to pay your bills? Use the Lindsay Lohan excuse generate to get out of it!

I’ve come across irreproducible data several times in my (short) career as a scientist. Typically, this happens when I’ve made a stupid mistake and can’t repeat my experimental results or just can’t seem to reproduce other lab members’ work because my head’s in the clouds. 

However, I’ve seen other lab members rely on previously published data and get screwed because the data are not necessarily correct. It’s hard to be critical about published papers, especially as a graduate student. You feel out of place questioning tenured professors and journal reviewers. If its published, it has to be right…right? That reasoning can really slip you up. 

This article voices these concerns as well as gives some hard-hitting examples of science journals’ red tape gone wrong. 

“1. No matter how rigorously obtained, results will be mistrusted if they are more than 5 years old, and the experiments will be repeated. This is doubly true if the results came from someone else’s lab.

2. A co-worker who routinely shows pristine data must be disparaged and suspected of misconduct. A co-worker who routinely shows lousy data must be disparaged and suspected of incompetence.

3. If a piece of equipment sits idle on a lab bench for weeks at a time and then you and a co-worker both want to use it at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, a case will be made for purchasing another one.

4. Unlabeled bottles of reagents have a longer shelf life than labeled bottles. (“Let’s not throw this away,” reasons the grad student charged with cleaning out the fridge. “It could contain something important.” Typically, “something important” means “rampant fungus.”)

5. Random decisions pertaining to lab protocols will become entrenched and will persist unquestioned for years. You can test this one out: If your protocol requires doing something for, say, 30 minutes, change it to 32 minutes and then visit the lab in 10 years. The person who has taken over your role in the lab will still perform that step for 32 minutes without knowing why. Unless, in the interim, someone has decided to test out the random decisions behind lab protocols.

6. Bringing stellar results to the lab meeting will make you almost as popular as bringing cookies to the lab meeting.

7. Grad students will think that the principal investigator (PI) never does any work. The PI will think that the grad students never do any work. The postdoctoral fellows will have children and stop doing any work. The undergraduates will use lab space to do work for other classes. Paid lab techs will do honest work, but no one will give their results any credence because they’re just paid lab techs. Every person will believe he or she does the most work.

8. Safety protocols must be adhered to, rigidly, by everyone else. Not by you, because you’re awesome.

9. There are nerds even within nerd-dom: Even though you all love science, you still think, “at least I’m cooler than my co-worker who won’t shut up about Settlers of Catan.”

10. The expensive computer purchased to run the isothermal titration microcalorimeter will also, mysteriously, run Angry Birds.

11. If you work in industry, much of your time will be spent filling out forms that don’t matter. If you work in academia, nothing you do will matter.

12. If you interfere with someone else’s experiment, you are Satan. Even if it wasn’t your fault. Even if you apologize. Even if the experiment was about to burn down the building.”

Douthat raises an interesting question about the “unnatural selection” of male offspring in Asian countries: what is the crime? Is it the abortion? Is it practicing eugenics? Is it the “death” of these girls?

We make legal medical decisions in order to conform to the wills of society all the time (nose/boob/etc augmentations, birth control pills, lap banding), and none of these are considered social outrages. I would argue that the “crime” isn’t the abortion itself. With the exception of Bible-thumping zealots, most of the first world supports a woman’s right to choose.  

I think that the outrage here lies in the collective undoing of the society. I’d like to compare it to global warming. If one person drives a Hummer across the US over and over, it’s no big deal. If the entire country started doing it, the collective societal experience is tarnished. 

So how do you mend a societal flaw? I’m not one to push for government incentives, but in countries like China whose government has inflicted a one-child rule, it may be the job of the government to fix what it started. 

First, let me just say that I’m super psyched to be using my NYTimes membership so that I can read the paper freely without worrying about my articles expiring. Success!

Ok, now down to business. 

This article made me giggle like a child. I can’t believe that the most prestigious news outlet in the world just made a reference to batwings. For those of you virginal folk out there, urban dictionary happily presents you with a definition of batwings. (Now do you see why it’s so funny?) 

Powder on, men, powder on. 

Kid, 

I know this seems embarrassing now, but you’ll appreciate it when you’re older. 

XO, 

Jen

PS- If your dad is single, please send him my way. He’s totally hilarious.