I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO.
Half a byte of data is a nibble.
There was this guy called Edwin Southern who invented a new method of DNA sequence detection, so they called it the Southern Blot after him.
Then they named the three next methods Northern, Western and Eastern Blots. People laughed at it and all was fun and games.
But as always in science there are still new methods being discovered and now there are Southwestern and Northwestern and Far-Eastern and Far-Western Blots and everyone’s wondering when it’s going to stop.
This post keeps crossing my dash again and again, each time with more and more hilarity added on, so I decided to post it to facebook and tag a couple of researcher friends. This is the response I got within the space of 15 minutes:
“There’s a protein out there by the name of Pikachurin, named so because it acts fast, lightning fast”
“hERG is short for human ether-a-go-go gene, and was named so because when flies with mutated hERG were anaesthetized with ether, their legs started to shake non-stop, not unlike the dance It’s important in drug discovery because compounds affecting hERG are badddd”
“There’s also a badass sounding protein called Son of Sevenless (SOS), named so because there’s another protein called Sevenless. There’s also another protein named Bride of Sevenless (BOSS)”
“I suddenly recall a gene by the name of Ken and Barbie, because mutations in that gene causes a lack of external genitalia, not unlike the groins of its namesake”
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published – freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.
For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.
“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,”Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”
If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that’s because it kinda is. But in this story, it’s not just the poor who don’t have access to scientific papers – journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand – with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.
In case you don’t feel like going through the entire article, here are some important points:
Researcher in Russia thinks it’s stupid to pay so much for articles
makes own site with pirated articles
it really is hella expensive to read articles
Big publishers are rlly mad
they brought up a lawsuit
The researchers don’t actually get any of the money from the fees required to read the article
Also the publishers have questionable processes that promote rapid publication that could easily result in misinformation
It’s unlikely that the lawsuit will result in money even if the company wins
but the suit has implications for the accessibility of information and the role of large corporations in restricting access to articles
To reiterate: Researchers get NO money from articles they publish. Neither do the people who provide peer review to help avoid shitty research being published. The publishers are charging $30+ each (sometimes for 24hrs access, not even a version you can save/print) plus the millions they get from libraries for their “value added” like layout, formatting, and server space.
Further highlights (emphasis mine):
[E]xperts are predicting will win Elsevier around $750 to $150,000 for each pirated article. Even at the lowest estimations, that would quickly add up to millions in damages.
Takin’ no shit:
“I think Elsevier’s business model is itself illegal,” she told Torrent Freak, referring to article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits"….
“If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge,” she said.
Remember kids: Pluto is not a planet, WAS never a planet, and any acknowledgement of Pluto as a planet was an error of assumption
Fuckihg fight me right now viva la Pluto
F u c k you it was a clerical error!! The real ninth planet is out there but it’s not Pluto! Stop ruining science!!!!
A clerical error? Oh, no – the truth is far more absurd.
(Hold on, folks – this requires a bit of background.)
In a nutshell, since the late 19th Century, it had been suspected
that there was a ninth planet, based on apparent irregularities in the
orbit of Uranus. This as-yet-hypothetical planet, whose gravitational
influence would have accounted for those irregularities, was termed
“Planet X”.
The trouble is, nobody could find the thing, no matter how
hard they looked. That seemed to have changed in 1930, when a new moving
object was finally detected on the outskirts of the Solar system. When
word of this discovery got out, the media declared that Planet X had
been found, and the object was subsequently named “Pluto”.
However, there was a problem with the newly dubbed Pluto: its faint
albedo and lack of a visible disk suggested that it was much too small
to be Planet X. In fact, while school textbooks treated the matter as
resolved, the truth of the matter is that we had no idea what
Pluto was – we didn’t even know for sure whether it was a planet at
all, much less that it was Planet X. Though little reported-on by the
mainstream press, the search continued.
It wasn’t until 1992 that data from the Voyager flyby of
Neptune revealed that prior estimates of the masses of the outer planets
had been slightly out of whack. With the corrections enabled by Voyager, the apparent anomaly in Uranus’ orbit was proven to be a math error: there was no Planet X after all.
So what the hell was Pluto?
Eventually, it was determined that Pluto had less than 0.2% of its
initially estimated mass, and that its appearance near the predicted
position of Planet X’s orbit was just a bizarre coincidence. In spite of
this, it retained its provisional planetary status; it had already captured the public’s imagination, and the fact that Pluto
was the only “planet” to have been discovered by an American created
enormous political pressure against classifying it as anything else.
This would remain the status quo until the discovery of additional
outer-Solar-system objects as large or larger than Pluto in the mid 00s –
most notably Eris – forced the classification issue to be resolved.
TL/DR version: Pluto was never uncontroversially classified as a
planet in the first place. It just happened to coincidentally be near
the orbit of a hypothetical ninth planet that was later proven not to
exist, and sort of inherited the planetary status of its phantom sibling
on a provisional basis due to a combination of institutional inertia
and politics.
(As icing on the cake, at the time of this posting, early 2016, there’s new – albeit controversial – evidence that there really is a mysterious ninth planet lurking out there. Note, however, that this conjecture is based on a completely different set of anomalies from the ones that led to the Planet X hypothesis.)
Boring answer, did you say? AU CONTRAIRE, MON PETIT BERYLLIUM ATOM.
Of all the charts and tables and organizational tools for keeping information straight that mankind has invented, none is more impressive or more inspired than the Periodic Table of the Elements.
You might think of it as some tool of the devil that you had to memorize or study, and of which you have no fond memories. But the Table? IS AMAZING. The table is genius. The table is a work of inspired predictive power that boggles the mind.
Why is the Table so cool? Well, for a number of reasons.
As you may know, the Table was devised in 1869 by a scientist named Dmitry Mendeleev. At the time, scientists were trying to find ways to order the elements. Mostly they were trying to use atomic mass to put them in order. That didn’t really work. Mendeleev’s amazing insight (and it was amazing…I can’t imagine how he thought of it, it was pretty counterintuitive) was to group the elements in rows and columns based solely on his empirical observations of recurring chemical properties like melting points, bonding affinities, electronegativity, etc. These properties seemed to cluster and group the elements in ways that Mendeleev noticed and used for his table.
Cool as that is, it didn’t stop there. It became clear to Mendeleev that there were holes in the table where he suspected that other elements existed. And he was right. The holes in the table pointed the way for chemists to discover the missing elements. So the Table not only organized the existing elements, it actually predicted and helped discover elements that were not known at the time.
But there’s still more coolness to come. In 1869 no one had the first damned clue about atomic structure. Orbitals, subshells, electrons…it was all unknown. But as our understanding of atomic structure became more sophisticated, it became clear that Mendeleev’s table was actually organized based on atomic structure. Each new row (they’re called periods in the table) represents a new energy level. As you go left to right across the groups (what the columns are called in the table), you’re filling up each subshell with electrons until when you get to the far right, the noble gases, the level is filled and you jump up to the next period and the next energy level.
So Mendeleev, having no knowledge of subatomic structure and using purely observations of the elements’ physical characteristics, designed a table that actually revealed the way atoms are put together.
I find that pretty damned amazing.
Incidentally if you like this answer and want to reblog it, I c&p’d it from a post I wrote about the table ages ago. That one isn’t an Ask so it might be nicer to reblog.
