The Worst Jobs in Science. (via Blogdex) I'm a little surprised that "Postdoc" was listed as one of the worst jobs. I see it more as extended school. What I found interesting was this: "The fittest scientists are selected, while the rest flee to lesser callings (like … picking randomly here … science journalism)...People with interests in family, art or recreation are the most likely to bail. As well-rounded minds, they're also potentially the best scientists." This statement sounds self-contradictory. Besides, I know plenty of postdocs who have families, are artsy, or are sports fanatics. I always figured that these other interests were outlets and stress-relievers for those grinding 80-hour weeks.
We Got Rhythm; the Mystery Is How and Why. "The music, the researchers reported, activated similar neural systems of reward and emotion as those stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs." So that's why I always feel better when I'm listening to music.
When Books Break the Bank. My collection of textbooks is probably worth a fortune. There was this one term when I was still an undergrad when I had to get over $500 worth of textbooks. I nearly keeled over and had a heart attack when the evil bookstore cashier rang me up and gave me a smarmy smirk. But what can one do? The books weren't that much cheaper online if you added the shipping cost and it was near impossible to get used ones on campus--biology majors are notorious for being selfish pack rats. And I can't really ditch my math books either--why just this afternoon I attended a computational biology seminar with math all over the place. And it's not like I'm never going to dabble in that field--in fact, it's highly likely I'll be dumped into it sooner or later. (In my not so humble opinion, the boundaries between the various disciplines of science are getting so blurred that it's sort of pointless to divide anything up any more.) Anyways, I wish more textbooks were online. I can luckily say that I wasn't completely clueless when I entered college--during the first year we had to take probability and to my luck, I found the entire text online. So I would get up really early, go to the computer lab, and print out two or three chapters at a time. A hundred bucks saved right there!
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More Stuff But Too Thrifty To Make A New Post:
"A couple of weeks ago I asked a librarian if they had a printed list of the Dewey Decimal numbers so I could go right to the section I was interested in, and she looked at me like I was nuts, and said no as if she'd never been asked that before." (from Willa's Journal)
What?! That's really dumb, on the part of the librarian. Every library I've been to has these little bookmarks with the general categories of the Dewey Decimal system printed out. People usually don't look at them, but hey, it's there.
...Find a Blog. For people who attempt to track down current weblog classification systems, here's the nearly year old article in the WSJ. Maybe I got my idea from here? I'm not sure.
