friday fun
jdupuis | August 18, 2017After a bit of an unexpected summer hiatus, I'm back to regular blogging, at least as regular as it's been the last year or two.
Of course, I'm a committed Game of Thrones fan. I read the first book in paperback soon after it was reprinted, some twenty years ago. And I've also been a fan of the HBO series, which though a bit inconsistent and wobbly at times, has been quite worth watching.
And speaking of winter, has anyone else noticed that winter doesn't seem to be coming? Has anyone noticed the person most worried about climate-related issues, Jon Snow, is having trouble being believed? In…
jdupuis | April 28, 2017Like with La La Land a few months back, here we have a jazz-themed documentary that I haven't seen yet but have read an awful lot about.
Unlike La La Land, I actually intend to see Chasing Trane and actually have tickets to see an upcoming showing at a Toronto theatre.
The reviews seem fantastic, with more or less unanimous opinion that the film does justice to Coltrane both as a person and as a musician.
Some of what I've been reading...
Q&A with “Chasing Trane” Filmmaker John Scheinfeld / Down Beat
'Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary' serves the jazz legend well by Noel Murray…
jdupuis | April 1, 2017You know, I'm the best librarian. Just the best. My collection is huge. The very very best collection. Such a great collection. I love collecting. I'm very good at bibliographic instruction. Nobody does bibliographic instruction like me. Students love it. I can talk for hours. I have long, beautiful book stacks. Look at those book stacks, are they small book stacks? I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee you.
And since I'm the best librarian, my pal The Donald, the President of the United States, has hired me to be the Chief Executive Officer for the National Parks Service Library…
jdupuis | March 24, 2017The world is going to hell in a hand basket. But at least we can laugh as we're sucked relentlessly into the Hellmouth.
Maybe if we all collectively understood science and evidence better, the path to Hell wouldn't be quite so straight and narrow. So maybe that's what's making me think of these particular funny bits today. And by funny I mean so funny in hurts.
First up, we have retired basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal, who apparently really and truly believes the world is flat. He has a doctorate in Education, by the way, which I just can't even.
Shaquille O'Neal agrees with Kyrie…
jdupuis | March 14, 2017OK, I admit, Friday Fun a few days late...
In any case, last Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, March 10, 1997 marked the very first episode of one of the greatest TV shows of all time, and certainly my personal favourite. Although I didn't start watching until the mid-2000s (I had two young kids in 1997 and was not watching much TV. We heard a lot about how great it was, but weren't in any space to be adding new shows to what little we were watching), once I did start with the DVDs, I was hooked. I've watched the whole thing through twice and…
jdupuis | February 24, 2017My library's Hackfest was yesterday so I'm feeling kind of burnt out today. Today's linked post cheers me immensely, in a side-eye, gallows humour kind of way.
This recent Retraction Watch post is funny and you should read the whole thing: Got “significosis?” Here are the five diseases of academic publishing.
Significosis
Neophilia
Theorrhea
Arigorium
Disjunctivitis is a disease that is about a collective proclivity to produce large quantities of redundant, trivial, and incoherent works. This happens because of several reasons, but primarily because quantity of publications is usually…
jdupuis | January 26, 2017This one from Samantha Bee is so funny, I don't know whether to laugh to cry.
On second thought, mostly cry. Lots and lots of crying. The only thing that will save me is singing a rousing chorus of Bruce Springsteen's Badlands in honour of the crazy wonderful park rangers at Badlands National Park. It's not hard to imagine a recent meeting going down like that famous scene from Casablanca -- "Play La Marseillaise. Play it!"
Anyways, back to Samantha Bee and National Park Service Temporarily Ordered To Stop Tweeting: Reactions From Wildlife.
Rock Squirrel, Zion National Park
“This may just…
jdupuis | January 13, 2017Or "LOve!" Or "Scooped!"
One word peer review! A game you can play at home!
Sad!
Love!
Changes!
Scooped!
Redo!
Copied!
Not!
Even!
Wrong!
Cite!
Me!
One word peer review is going to be Huuuuugggggggeeeeee!
Trump To Require Reviewers To End All Reviews With the Word “Sad!”
Washington DC – President-Elect Mr. Donald Trump has tweeted that he will require all reviewers for all journals and grant agencies to end all reviews with the word “Sad!”
Trump tweeted that all reviewers should be required to select the wording for their reviews from an approved list of words.
The approved list of words…
jdupuis | December 18, 2016Another annual obsession to add to the list, along with the listings of best science books? Look like it, if last year and this year are anything to judge by.
This particular post collects lists of "best of the year" jazz albums I've found across various websites. For the purposes of this project, I'm not giving each list its own post and showcasing the albums that are part of the list. That's an awful lot of work, which I'm reserving for the science books project which is more core to the mission of this blog.
Note: I've included a few not-exclusively-jazz lists if they've happened to…
jdupuis | December 2, 2016Somehow this post from News Biscuit seems even more relevant now than when it was intially published back in August. Of course, we all shudder to think who will be under that ghostly costume, orange hair, Alaska plaid, Brietbart ball cap and all.
Scooby Doo Team Expose Climate Change Tricksters
A two-man, two-woman, one-Great Dane team of young Americans has exposed the belief that the Earth is heading towards widespread famine and ecological disaster, as the work of a scheming fraudster. Team leader Fred explained that they were passing through Central London in their VW camper van when a…
jdupuis | September 12, 2016I wish I knew how many times per week I get pitched opportunities to "interview" brave, unconventional, innovative "scientists" on my blog. Too many to count, most weeks. The pseudoscience PR whirlpool is vast and slippery. But there's also the legitimate "Hey, somebody at my university just published this thing, maybe you want to talk to them" pitch. While often interesting, that's not really what I do on this blog. I don't really do science explainers.
But once in a while, a pitch resonates. And such is the case with the pitch I got from Guerilla Science a few weeks ago. I'd heard of them…
jdupuis | September 9, 2016Yep, Facebook, love it or hate it, it's hard to ignore that life just hasn't been the same these past 10 years or so.
Horrible Facebook Algorithm Accident Results In Exposure To New Ideas
“To those who were forced to read a headline they did not agree with when they visited Facebook yesterday, we are deeply sorry. It’s an inexcusable failing on our part if your viewpoints were not reinforced by what you saw onscreen. I want all Facebook users to know that you’ll never again encounter any ideas on our site that are in any way novel or ideologically challenging to you—that’s my personal promise…
jdupuis | April 15, 2016Magma, the strangest rock band of all time, needs you to help finance a documentary film about their life and work.
So here goes. Up until a year or so ago I'd never heard of the French prog rock band Magma, or at least their music had never penetrated my consciousness. But last year while spending the month of May in Paris, I visited a bunch or record stores (and book stores and comic stores...) and noticed records and CDs by this band Magma prominently displayed, like I should know who they are or something. It took me a while to notice enough that I forced myself to dig a bit deeper and…
jdupuis | April 1, 2016Reader Beware: Please note the date of publication of this post.
It's been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it's small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the discount APC publishing community.
And I really appreciate how the scholarly communications community has encouraged my career progression from publisher of a journal at Elsevier to Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada to last year's huge launch of DSCaM.
And the DSCaM empire…
jdupuis | February 26, 2016Yeah, you have to figure good old Indy wasn't much of an academic colleague. Too flashy, never around to sit on a search committee, never willing to take his turn as chair, always blowing up the wrong building or disrupting the wrong classroom. And then there's the ghosts and arcs and demons and what not. And not even a book chapter or high-impact-factor publication to show for it! What, Science or Nature should have been beating down his door!
Well, let's see what his colleagues had to say about all this!
Why Professor Indiana Jones Was Hated By His Colleagues
Aug. 27, 1936
Dr. Henry Walton…
jdupuis | February 5, 2016Oh, The Onion. You are so wonderful and your take on the world of patents is so spot on that it hurts.
What are patents for, anyways?
Here's a bit of an excerpt from their 11 Step Program. Drop by the site to see the rest. Brilliant.
Step 1: First, come up with something really cool, like a cheese grater that works in both directions. Oh shit, don’t steal that one! That’s mine!
Step 2: Research the marketplace to find out if your idea is original or if some asshole has already stolen it from you.
.
.
Step 11: Spend remainder of bitter, unnaturally truncated life filing lawsuits to protect…
jdupuis | November 20, 2015From the "so funny it hurts" file....
‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method
PARIS—In an effort to modernize the principles and empirical procedures of examining phenomena and advancing humanity’s collective knowledge, the International Council for Science announced Thursday the addition of a “Seek Funding” step to the scientific method. .... “Next, scientists simply modify their study’s goals to align with the vision of potential funders and wait for several months to hear back. At this point—should this step be successful, of course—they can move on to the experimental stage, and…
jdupuis | October 23, 2015As you can all imagine, I'm quite pleased to see the backside of the Harper government on their way out the door. Of course, the Liberals have promised a lot but only time will tell how serious they are about fixing the science-related stuff that they've promised to fix. I'll definitely be watching that and keeping track here on the blog somehow somewhere.
That being said, I was quite gratified that my various pro-science advocacy efforts in general and my war on science chronology post in particular were quite popular and widely used during the election campaign.
Obviously all the things…
jdupuis | July 17, 2015In the Late Harper period of Canadian politics it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between satire and legitimate news stories.
Here's a couple of examples of satire followed by one that's even scarier and more disturbing because it's an actual news story. We live in interesting times. Fortunately there's a election coming up...
Honestly, few of the serious critiques of the Harper government's war on science, evidence and civil society ring as true as these two satirical takes. This is definitely in the Stewart/Colbert mode of so funny it hurts.
Government of Canada pledges…
jdupuis | July 10, 2015The Onion is the font of all great science reporting. Only the truthiest, most newsworthy items get published there.
And it seems as if there's been a breathtaking breakthrough in paleontology! One of our finer institutions of learning and research, the Creationist Museum of Natural History, has rocked the scientfic world with a startling find.
Creationist Museum Acquires 5,000-Year-Old T. Rex Skeleton
TULSA, OK—In a major coup for the growing field of creation science, the perfectly preserved remains of a 5,000-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex were delivered Monday to Tulsa's Creationist Museum of…