Viewing profile — gtmitchell

Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric…

Hopefully I can move back into the laboratory. I'm a scientist who moved into lab software admin a few years ago, and there are days I miss it a lot.

Any advice for PhD dropouts? I spent years and years pushing against that boundary in an obscure corner of my field and it never moved. What little funding I had dried up and I lef…

In the US at least, it is entirely possible to teach at a university without a PhD. Community colleges are full of instructors with masters's degrees, and tons of classes offered b…

I think this result is obvious to anyone who has spent any time in the academic world, although it is nice to see some solid numbers behind it. The harsh truth is that key to acade…

A generation ago or two ago, it was common for chemists to use taste and smell as a tools for qualitative evaluation of chemical compounds. So older scientific literature is full o…

I immediately Ctrl-F'd for 'funding'. There's your problem right there. If there's no money to support graduate students, you're never going to get enough researchers to replace th…

That brings back memories. One of my first research projects in school was doing sketchy things with a Quanta-Ray Nd:YAG laser. I remember the distinct 'tack-tack-tack' sound of th…

As someone whose early scientific career was destroyed by null results, no. No one will publish your negative results. Unless you win the lottery and stumble across a once-in-a-gen…

"Just be yourself". Such terrible, useless advice to give to someone who is struggling with dating.

I also wish there were ways to publicly acknowledge (and hopefully support) those who spend years of their lives working towards PhDs they never finish. For many it is a deeply pri…

As a chemist who has actually done micro fabrication work, this reads to me like a classic case of a non-chemistry company trying to do chemistry R&D and finding out it’s a lot mor…

Rome had the advantage of access to essentially unlimited forced labor in order to build and maintain their infrastructure. Modern engineering is absolutely superior to Roman engin…

And according to recent investigations, we know approximately 70% of those ‘active’ users are actually bots.

I’m reading this more like “New York Times reporter discovers used electric vehicles exist, cost less than new ones.” Used EVs have been affordable for years. In fact, cars like th…

It should be obvious at this point that Valve simply does not care about TF2. There is no one at the organization that does more than the absolute bare minimum to keep the servers …

This is far more common that you would think. Just a generation ago, science degrees required students to learn foreign languages (Russian, German, French, etc.) so they could read…

Me, more or less. I knew in 4th grade wanted to be a scientist. And I went on to get a few chemistry degrees. Currently work in the pharmaceutical industry.

As a counter example, I will offer my own experience in graduate school. I was one of the few married students and observed that nearly all the successful graduates students had th…

That’s only really true for bicycle with modern rubber wheels. Attempting to ride through the mud or on rough surfaces with wooden wheels would have been much more challenging (not…

This is a systemic social problem, not a technology problem. If researchers wanted to double check every single one of their citations for subsequent retractions, they would simply…

I’ve always been profoundly jealous of countries with right to roam laws and dream of a day when we might have some thing similar in the US. Here in the west we have so much public…

The maps are hidden gems. Don’t want to spoil it, but be sure to click the link on a few of them. It’s top notch British humor.

A very thorough preliminary report. I've worked for a long time in quality systems, and this is a perfect example of a systemic failure. They've got work being handed off between B…

Honestly, I think anything that brings more attention to the stupendously wasteful travel habits of wealthy individuals such as celebrities and politicians is a public good and sho…