My latest cartoon for New Scientist

Origami Around
trying on a metaphor
Sade Olutola
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosmic Funnies

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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
sheepfilms
Cosimo Galluzzi
Show & Tell
DEAR READER
Claire Keane

Love Begins

pixel skylines

★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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todays bird

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@stem-imposter
My latest cartoon for New Scientist
every time I see some bigshot scientist revealed as a fraud my knee-jerk reaction is "hell yeah elisabeth bik got 'em good" AND IM RIGHT
PubPeer enables scientists to search for their publications or their peers publications and provide feedback and/or start a conversation ano
SHE NEVER QUITS!!!!
ICONIC!!!!
> Elisabeth Bik is on patreon <
She is not directly paid for her work to vet papers, she has been hit with legal action & death threats by scientists who hate that she's exposing them and their financial fraud, and she keeps at it every single day, combing through thousands of papers to make science more fair. Please consider supporting her!
actually beautiful
Elisabeth Bik is a renowned microbiologist and science integrity advocate known for detecting image duplication in scientific publications.
Some of our favorite quotes from Artemis ii so far:
"Copy. Moon joy."
"I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working."
"Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow that will help out my vocabulary a little bit, that would be great. Thank you."
“If you’ve ever seen the top of the spotlight of the top of the Luxor at night in Vegas, this looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”
"To all of you down there on Earth... we love you, from the moon. See you on the other side."
"We just went sci fi.
"It is so great to see Earth again. To Asia, Africa, and Oceania: we are looking back at you. We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too."
"We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."
“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.” (The name of Commander Reid Wiseman's late wife)
"Amaze amaze amaze."
"I said that we do not leave Earth, but we choose it. And that is true."
"Christina has been sleeping head down in the middle of the vehicle, kind of like a bat"
"It's really fun to be floatin' around, it just makes me feel like a little kid."
"Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful."
"'Homo Sapiens' is all of us, no matter where you're from or what you look like. We're all one people."
"We're going to power cycle the toilet from the ground."
"I'm proud to call myself the Space Plumber."
"We were all eagerly awaiting the chorus." (After Mission Control cut off Pink Pony Club early when waking up the crew)
"Copy heart. Copy bracelet." (In response to Wiseman giving his daughters heart hands and showing them the bracelets they made him that he was wearing)
“Welcome back. We are still here. They are in space.”
"Copy. Bubble wrap nominal."
"We have rediscovered the chocolate snacks."
“The truth is, the moon really is its own body in the universe. It's not just a poster in the sky that goes by, it is a real place."
“We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers, we will do radio astronomy.”
"I've seen a lot of new perspectives, but my perspective has not changed because I launched with the perspective that there is enough for all." (After being asked if they had a new view on humankind.)
"On behalf of all Canadians, we wanted some reassurances of your preferences for maple syrup over Nutella on your pancakes."
Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)
"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.
White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
Take veterinary school for example:
In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.
One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)
Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.
Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!
It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.
Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.
A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)
School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.
But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."
very good tags from @downwarddnaspiral
literally saw this tweet this morning
I saw a dude say with his whole chest that biology isn't really STEM
Take a wild fucking guess as to which major has the most female students
Scientific disciplines with more women have lower funding success rates and researcher quality scores , are considered ‘soft sciences’, and see average pay drop as women enter. This is BECAUSE women do them, not a function of women mysteriously choosing lower-prestige, poorly-paid fields.
My go-to example on this last aspect is computer programming. It was initially heavily female (and at least in the US was a significant employer of Black women in mathematics and related fields, cf Hidden Figures etc), and a lot of those women had mathematical backgrounds, but it was described in terms like ‘precise’ and ‘detail-oriented’ - basically a more technical version of secretarial work. Then when men started moving into the field in larger numbers, the language shifts to describing it as creative and visionary, and the pay and prestige moves accordingly. Yeah.
It's ironic that women today must fight for equality in Silicon Valley. After all, their math skills helped launch the digital age
Women were welcome as computers partly because the work was viewed as a dull, low-status activity. Men with elite educations generally wanted no part in it. Not only were women hired, but so were blacks, polio survivors, Jews and others who were routinely iced out of job opportunities, Grier points out.
“The reason that these pre-electronic computation jobs were feminized is they were seen as rote and de-skilled,” says Mar Hicks, a historian and author of Programmed Inequality. It wasn’t true, though: “In a lot of cases, the women doing these computation jobs actually had to have pretty advanced math skills and math training, especially if they were doing very complex calculations.”
and later:
Though women programmers have made strides in some fields—such as “front-end” programming, for browser applications—the salaries in those specialties tend to be lower overall, simply because the industry regards anything being done by women as easy, according to Miriam Posner, an assistant professor of computer science at UCLA. It is becoming a pink-collar ghetto in coding, Posner notes, rather like the status of female human computers.
(most of my existing knowledge on this is from the UK and US but here’s another link on the UK)
From as early as the 1840s women have made important contributions to the development of modern computers. Discover the stories of three pio
No actually that’s a great point, that’s on the post too now. (I did recall the trans:compsci association and wonder how that affects people amid all this, but also don’t know the field that well and wasn’t aware of any large-scale data on how trans people might factor into industry pay trends etc, or how people are treated after transitioning, given that we’re still talking about a pretty small population who often aren’t safe to be out. But I didn’t think about this as an identifiable event)
Also shout out to the Conway Effect as another factor in all this
Lynn Conway, a trans woman and advocate for LGBTQ rights, was underappreciated and often underrecognized for her work in chip design
Like many other women in computing, however, Conway felt that she had been denied her due credit because of the way that her male co-inventor of VLSI, Carver Mead, was repeatedly given more credit and incorrectly perceived as the lead on the project that led to this important innovation. Although Mead did not necessarily seek to unfairly take credit for himself, what Conway dubbed the Conway Effect led to him getting more, or sometimes all, of the credit.
The Conway Effect is a slightly modified version of what is known as the Mathilda Effect: Women’s scientific contributions are often attributed to the nearest man working on the same topic. The Conway Effect states that people who are “othered” in computing, including women and people of color of all genders, form a group that society does not expect to make great advances, and so they are not given full credit when they do because they are literally overlooked.
(Leaving in “Mead did not necessarily seek to unfairly take credit for himself” because some other posts in this thread are trying to make this about evil men consciously and deliberately trying to suppress women, and the thing about patriarchy and other social oppressions is that they don’t actually require that)
I don't use Chat GPT. I stare blankly at a piece of paper for hours like God intended.
how to read a paper.pdf
I close my eyes. I enter my Mathemagical Mind Palace. I see the object before me. I'm working out the differential equations. The derivative of the function with respect to time is equal to a constant times the second derivative of the function with respect to distance from the origin. A billion vectors rendered in with ray-tracing. I see the phase portrait. I see the three-dimensional manifold in a four-dimensional space. The shadows on the wall and the ancient beings who make the shadows. I peer into the amethyst eyes of the unyielding serpent. I have done my calculation.
Out of the suggested cooking time of "18 to 20 minutes", I will be cooking this pizza for: 19 minutes.
This is a contender for my new favorite fusion paper. How does it feel to be the realest god damn scientist on the planet Dr. Smiet
I do not "subscribe to journals", I do not "access through my institution". I paste the DOI into Sci-Hub, and if it's not in the database, I KILL MYSELF
This was revealed to me last night as I was falling asleep and I decided I needed to inflict this on you guys as well
this is still one of my favorite explanations for gender
Astronomers are just a little insane for the amount of work we will do to keep things free and accessible. Anyways, here's this almost ~700 page textbook on statistical machine learning for astronomy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12230 , by Yuan-Sen Ting
The book starts with the basics of probability (what is a random variable, Gaussian distributions, etc.) and works from the ground up to MCMC and neural networks.
PhD "anti-acknowledgements" by Dr. Rachel Los
I believe one of the most underrated math/coding websites of all time is projecteuler.net. As one of the top 2000 ranked in this website, I feel like I can say just how amazing this website is. Here is a list of everything I love about it.
Well thought out idea: This website is full of math problems in which (almost) all of them can only be solved by code, but you cannot just use brute force. You need to use the best of math and CS to solve the problems.
Good problems, and not just a couple. This website has >900 well thought out problems that can be solved in under a minute even on incredibly slow computers
Variance in difficulty: There are problems that will take you under 5 minutes to complete, and others will take you weeks without making a lick of progress (looking at you #177). Even if you don't know anything bout number theory or CS, there will be problems you can solve and learn new concepts with. Just dost skip to the recent problems, they're VERY hard.
Price: I won't sugarcoat it. It's free. Completely. No need to pay for problems. No missing features. No ads. Anyone can make a free account and have the exact same experience. This might be it's biggest selling point in my opinion.
These problems have made me spend hundreds of hours confused and dumbfounded until I find a solutions. Now, there are definitely sites you can find that will give you the answers But don't use them for solutions or else you'll be cursed for life. They're good places if you want to see how others solved it, but it is 233168% better to just skip on these websites and solve them yourselves. Even after all of this time, I have never copy-pasted an answer, purely because I prefer the struggle, and I believe that I learn more by finding out the necessary info myself.
Overall, stop reading this and go to the website (projecteuler.net). It deserves all the praise it can get. I hope you enjoy the problems like I do :)
Some of my personal favorites:
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
The first “hard” problem, but becomes simple once you find out a clever algorithm.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
This one took me a while since I was new to competition coding, but it is overall a very fun exercise.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
Mathematically, the hardest problem in the first 100. I think that is a valid label.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
The problem I find hardest in the first 100. This one is just 60 but much harder. Good luck.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
This problem either takes you an hour or a week. I am the latter.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
Very clever problem, that’s all I’ll say.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
This is my favorite introduction to a mathematical concept (if you solved it, you know what it is).
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
Everyone I’ve seen since this one has solved it differently.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
Mathematically, the hardest problem in the first 150. I think #147 is harder
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
The hardest for me personally in the first 150. Don’t overthink this one, yet overthink this one.
I did this one back in high school and it absolutely fascinated me. It's not all that hard but it does teach you a cool fact about pascal's triangle.
A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming
the biophysics students
examining life on all possible scales
reading a dozen papers on just one molecule
marveling at the work of early x-ray crystallographers
untangling a complex NMR spectrum as if it's a logic puzzle
deducing a chemical structure one piece at a time
hours spent perfecting a computational model
grounding your work in quantitative theory
a disciplined approach to problem-solving
the satisfaction of clean mass spec data
becoming comfortable with complicated equations
chilly air in the temperature-controlled equipment room
understanding the physics that grounds all larger phenomena
pages of instrument printouts cluttering your desk
seeing the contributions of a single atom to a wider system
safety goggles sized perfectly to fit your face
diagraming electron spins and magnetic fields
loyalty to your favorite graphing software
savoring a cup of coffee while you wait to collect your data
dreaming of the contributions your work will make one day
late nights at the lab computer
doodling protein ribbon diagrams on your homework
ALL HAIL CECILIA PAYNE