My friend recently posted a story about a woman who’s high school kid asked why he had to go to school if he would never use that information in “real life”. The story goes on to describe how the woman “knowingly lied” to the kid, toting the familiar line “if you don’t do well in school you won’t go to a good college and you won’t get a good job and then you will be sad”. While that is a statistically valid statement, it’s not the reason you should learn these things. Whether you want to be an astrophysicist, mechanic, actor, or professional dog walker, if you don’t learn…

YOU WILL SPEND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE BEING SCAMMED BY PEOPLE WHO DID

If you don’t learn math someone is going to sell you a house (don’t worry that you can’t afford it, the interest rates won’t go up for years) and you will lose all of your hard earned astrophysicist/mechanic/actor/dog-walker money.

If you don’t learn history you will be convinced by people that it’s a great idea to cut taxes for the wealthiest and screw over the poor despite the piles of historical evidence that this leads to failure, and when you go to take over the world you will fall victim to the most famous of the classic blunders and get involved in a land war in Asia.

If you don’t learn Literature you’ll end up paying 15$ for some rehashed, escapist, crap in a theater when you could be finding entirely new perspectives for free at a library, and you’ll be stinging from the slap you received for telling someone that you’d like to “tap that” while some other, better, person is offering to compare them to a summer’s day.

If you don’t learn science someone is going to sell you a sugar pill for 10$ a pop and tell you it is going to magically cure all your ills. Plus, you will believe this asshat and babies will die of preventable diseases.

If none of this convinces you and you just don’t care about being scammed then don’t learn for you, learn for me.  Go calculate a better way for me to get to mars, go tell me a story about how I got here, go write me a book that changes my mind, and go invent me a pill that makes me live forever.

Grant writing: Final push.

Belief in homeopathy is a major turnoff.

Watching Iron Man 2 with my dad. We get to the montage of Tony Stark fabricating a brand new unheard of element and my dad asks “So, do you know how to do that kind of thing?”

That moment when the guest lecturer in your graduate biology class makes a joke about Aristotle and you’re the only one in class who laughs. 

Great moments in Science Journalism, brought to you by the good people at FoxNews.

I’m going to NYC this weekend to visit my family and I had learned that there is a freakin space ship there!  Which is sadly closed.  Now I am a sad panda.

Mom: i think it is still closed due to the hurricane…just called them..says temporarily closed.

me: :(

Mom: indeed!

me: But I want to see the space ship!!!!

Mom: sorry

me: spppppppppppppaaaaaaacccccccceeeeeeeeeee SHHHHHHIIIIPPPPPPP

Mom: their pavillion is “deflated” they have no power, they got flooded! even though the pier was supposed to be able to withstand this sort of onslaught!

I also may be five years old.

I’m going to start using the phrase “outcome called with 0% of the results counted” in my research.

GPOY: trying to get the new lab equipment working