Some posts you might have missed over the summer

Summer is over, not that we’d know it from the weather in Southern California. Anyway, the full complement of students are back. In the event your eyes were not glued to Small Pond over the summer, in no particular order, here are my favorite posts that you might have missed:

People are irrational. I come to terms with the fact that people are, by default, not rational. I tell a funny story about a guy who gets ants confused with snakes and doesn’t want to be wrong about it.

Why aren’t undergrads more like 8 year olds? Catherine Scott reports on her time from a science summer camp.

Universities that want research but don’t want researchers. It’s frustrating when some universities want to up their research game, and might invest into having more research, but don’t invest in the people who actually are doing the research. You can’t have it both ways: if you want research on campus, that means you need to support the people that make it happen.

I explain why I chose to not put a pasta strainer on my head for my driver’s license photo. As atheism is slowly becoming less of a weird thing in the United States, the visibility of punchable atheists is growing, and this isn’t good for science education.

Some email from ResearchGate slipped through my spambox and I discover that this is actually an important way of getting papers to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access. Why I’m not ignoring ResearchGate anymore.

This is what I had to say about the Tim Hunt brouhaha. (In short, he doesn’t seem to be a monster, and he does seem to have been an advocate for specific women in science who have been in his lab. But he failed to capitalize on the events to advocate for women in science and ultimately it does seem that he thinks women in the lab cause problems for the men, but doesn’t seem as concerned about how men in the lab cause problems for women, which is a much bigger problem.)