On Toys in Science

The big social media blow-up of the weekend was, at least on the science-y side of things, the whole "boys with toys" thing, stemming from this NPR interview, which prompted the #GirlsWithToys hashtag in response. I'm not sorry to have missed most of the original arguments while doing stuff with the kids, but the hashtag has some good stuff.

The really unfortunate thing about this is that the point the guy was trying to make in the interview was a good one: there's an essentially playful component to science, even at the professional level. I took a stab at making this same point over at Forbes, only without the needlessly gendered language to make people angry.

(Which, of course, will cut into its readership, but I'm not so far gone that I'll resort to deliberately offensive clickbait...)

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So, you had a choice between spending the weekend doing positive things with your kids, or spending the weekend on Twitter yelling at somebody who didn't send the right message to kids, and you chose to spend the weekend with your kids instead of Twitter?

You have chosen....wisely!
/LastCrusade