Here are some collected Twitter ramblings from August 2021.
This poor fellow walked into a minefield when he tried to argue that methyl groups don’t matter. A good number of people stepped up to school him, including yours truly.
There aren’t too many things I care about in the entertainment world. Who hosts Jeopardy! is one of them. This was the beginning of the brief Mike Richards affair. I grew up with Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: TNG, and I also love LeVar Burton’s podcast “Levar Burton Reads”. He’s the host that Jeopardy! needs for the 21st century.
Everyone has an idiot cousin. Including me.
We miss so many learning opportunities because papers are written with a deeply scrubbed version of the truth. Mistakes and setbacks are the true teachers.
One of my other side obsessions is space exploration. I think if I’d been a different kind of scientist, I would have done something in aerospace or something math-y like orbital dynamics. But I’d also mop the floors for SpaceX just to work for them. I’m an enormous fan of what SpaceX (thus Elon Musk) and others are doing to open up the final frontier. What SpaceX is doing in South Texas is not on everyone’s radar, but they are quietly changing everything about space travel.
Accuracy matters.
I try to keep my disdain for all of the anti-science in our society in check. Having helped more than one vaccine hesitant person get over the hump, the one thing they all have in common is that they want to be listened to with compassion — not belittled. I’ll make an exception for Emily Miller. She and her ilk are why we can’t have nice things.
Yet another side project is hiking. I go hiking almost every weekend. It started before the pandemic, but the pandemic kicked the habit into high gear. At a time when there were so few other “normal” things we could do, and when I was trapped working from home, getting outside became a big stress relief valve. Now I take some of the crew from work on an outing once a month.
Vide supra.
Jen Heemstra continues to inspire me with academia-industry parallels.
This is a true story. Loyalty is a two-way street. Your company won’t be loyal to you anymore. They’ll feed you to the pigs if they can make more money that way. Never feel pressured to be loyal back. Look out for yourself and your career.
Jen Heemstra inspires. Again.