Michael Eisen
@mbeisen
I science & try to make science open. Tweets do not represent my employer's views, but are always correct. My conflicts of interest http://bit.ly/2uC3FNF.
We already make incoming PhD students take a whole year of classes on topics they don't know much about and are inclined to think are uninteresting
Unsolicited advice for incoming PhD students: Each semester, audit a course on a topic that you don't know much about but are inclined to think is uninteresting
You run a government infectious disease research agency. You get a grant that proposes to carry out gain of function research into potentially dangerous coronaviruses. If you fund the grant you probably won’t learn anything useful, but 40 million people might die from a lab leak.…
I cite it all the time to highlight the deadly perils of researchers telling the public that journal peer review works to establish scientific validity.
People who quote the 1998 Wakefield vaccine fraud paper as evidence of anything have no credibility when discussing anything ekse
A bomb is about to go off that will kill scientific journals. You have a button that will save them, but if you press it one of your PhD students will fail their qualifying exam and master out. Do you?
What’s the first movie you remember seeing in a theater?
What’s the first movie you remember seeing in a theater?
10^100 tightly packed shrimp (not on ice) would occupy 2*10^95 cubic meters, which is 560 trillion times the volume of the observable universe.
Okay let's clarify some things. Link below
Tweeting is Thinking
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
if scientists all just wrote grants that were scored in the top 1% things would be fine
Looking forward to next week’s release of the Boston Corbett files
This is the most Bay Area tweet ever
Light rain may pose a "driving hazard," a meteorologist said. sfgate.com/weather/articl…
You can already stick glass beer bottles in the sand.
Japanese design firm Kenji Abe has designed a glass beer bottle that you can stick into the sand on the beach
Italy wasn’t a country until the 19th century
Just remember: Not a single European, much less any Italian, had eaten a tomato until the 16th century.
This is why I tell people I’m a professor.
If someone asks you “what do you do?” within seconds of meeting you — don’t be annoyed. Smile. You’ve just identified a transactional player. Instead, give them the lowest status answer. Then drop your highest IQ insights for the rest of the conversation. This breaks brains.
Great picture. Incredibly deceptive and ignorant argument. Of course cows don't "create" carbon atoms. But they do ensure that roughly 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 carbon atoms are in the atmosphere where they help heat the planet instead of in plants…
Cows can’t add a single atom of carbon to the atmosphere that a plant hasn’t previously removed. Carbon is part of a biogenic cycle and can neither be created nor destroyed. People who try to frame cows as causing climate change don’t understand how science works. 1/2
Elon Musk doesn’t add a single dollar to his bank account that someone else hasn’t spent first. Money is just part of a global economic cycle. People who try to frame @elonmusk as rich and themselves poor just don’t understand how economics works.
Cows can’t add a single atom of carbon to the atmosphere that a plant hasn’t previously removed. Carbon is part of a biogenic cycle and can neither be created nor destroyed. People who try to frame cows as causing climate change don’t understand how science works. 1/2
It does nothing well. It’s news is soft-hitting. Its arts are middle brow. And its comedy is cringe-worthily unfunny.
Can someone explain to me why they hate NPR so much?