Breadcrumbs

Left panel: A paper saying, "The reason we chose this quantity is because there are many connections to the work of others. The choice of our expression comes from the study of ... For more information on this choice, see Section 2 of Ref.(23)." (What I wish papers did.) Right panel: "But *why* won't they explain their choices?!" (What they usually do.)

I’m sure it’s just common-knowledge, or something else so banal that it’s not worth wasting pixels over…

23 Jul 2021

Barrier to Entry

Left panel: Art Club (All Are Welcome). Right panel: Science and Mathematics Club. "Woah, you can't enter here without multiple years of study!"

Personally, I feel a huge barrier to entry when staring at a painting, but at least I can enjoy it in some form. The unfortunate nature of a lot of scientific and mathematical ideas (combined with how we present them), doesn’t allow us to do this.

21 Jul 2021

Banned

Phrases that should be banned from papers: "It's well-known that...", "After a trivial calculation...", "It's obvious...", "This is interesting...", "Recently, ...", "The present authors ...", "Blah, blah, blah (1-75) ..." (Way too many indices).

Am I the only one who finds it difficult to parse this weird language of Academese?

19 Jul 2021

Dense

*Sigh*. What's wrong? You know, I study black holes, the densest objects in the universe, yet *this* figure is denser.

My favourites are when you get figures that are labeled a) through z), with a mountain-sized caption. Really makes it feel like the figure is doing a good job!

16 Jul 2021

Padding

Executive: We have the largest quantum computers in the industry. Scientist: Then why do all the papers I see use only half of the qubits? Executive: We're padding our stats.

Except for a few outliers, this seems to be the norm in the industry. There’s the “advertised” number, and the “useful” number.

14 Jul 2021

Unknowns

A one-dimensional line with unknown unknowns on the left, and known unknowns on the right. The usual coding errors are on the right, but the real sneaky ones are on the left.

The best part is when the unknown unknown is masquerading as a known unknown, as can happen when inspecting error messages in code.

12 Jul 2021

Rereads

A plot of the number of rereads indexed by paper. A few gobble up most of the reread count.

By the time I’m done with those papers on the left, I know more about the work than the authors!

09 Jul 2021

Wandering

A person walking around in the dark with a flashlight, thinking they would be making more frequent breakthroughs. Caption: Science: Mostly just wandering in the dark.

Well, I just got my daily session of wandering in!

07 Jul 2021

Classic

A plot of new things left to be said versus the age of the best textbook. As the best textbook gets older, there are fewer and fewer things left to say.

Note that this doesn’t mean the release of new textbooks on the subject will decrease. Exhibit A: calculus textbooks.

05 Jul 2021

Signs of Laziness

A teacher at the board: "Hmm, I may have messed up that sign at the end... And maybe somewhere in the middle. Well, I know *some* of it's right!"

“You’ve got the main idea anyway, right? Right.”

02 Jul 2021

To the past To the present