Since FDotM mentioned how social media can cut into your book-reading time, I thought I’d say that for me, it isn’t true. I can read a book any time I want, and I do. It is my custom to read for an hour before bed, or sometimes over lunch, and I chew through books pretty fast.

Sometimes I pick up trash reads. The latest was one called Pistols: A Deep Sea Thriller (hint: you know it’s going to be a throw-away when they need to include the genre in the title; sometimes you can just look at the cover). It’s totally ridiculous. It’s about stomatopods that are exposed to toxic waste and swim around, snipping people in half and cooking them with high intensity sonic bursts. My favorite part was when the scientist character has to explain why they also have toxic slime, and starts babbling about ubiquitination, before he has done any kind of analysis of tissue, or even seen one of the monsters. Cheesy, but sometimes you need something silly.

I’ve also been on a Madeline Miller kick lately, and that’s definitely not cheesy trash. I recently re-read The Song of Achilles, which was magnificent and nearly made me cry. Circe is also really, really good and well worth your while. I’m going on a collecting trip in the old Lake Agassiz lands up north this weekend, and picked up her short story, Galatea for those moments when I’m not chasing spiders.

See? Being an internet nerd is not incompatible with actively reading for entertainment.

Go ahead. Prove your bookworm cred by telling me all the stuff you read for fun. Don’t be shy, and admit to your popcorn reading as well as your high-brow stuff.

Trudy and Doug (of Oglaf fame) post amusing sketches on their Patreon sometimes. This one is high art, it made me laugh and cry at the same time.

Every year, I start teaching genetics by having the students do lots of math, and statistics, and probability calculations. It’s the most difficult part of the class for many of the students. But look! SMBC has a new pedagogical method!

If this works, it’ll revolutionize my classes. Hire a stripper to walk around lamenting that she doesn’t understand Poisson distributions or how to get a p value from that set of data, and presto, we’re done!

Except for one catch. I just checked my class list, and 71% of my students are young women, maybe some are lesbians, but that isn’t recorded in the class data.

Would it work if I traipsed around the classroom in a unitard?

Get used to it.

I must object to the methodology and the conclusions of this comic.

The choice of prefixes to sample is arbitrary and shows a bias towards common physics terms. Why not use “evolutionary” or “genome” or “analytic” or “necro-” or “chrono-“, to name just a few more. The sample space has hardly been touched.

The idea that low Google scholar counts is an opportunity is ludicrous and confuses cause and effect. “Clown” is a prefix that doesn’t show up for either physics or biology or engineering (curiously, there are 3 entries for “clown chemistry”, 5 for “clown psychology”, 1 for “clown dentistry”, and 13 for “clown theology”). I don’t think this implies there is a hot market for clown physicists.

Although, I do think that high-energy clown physics might be a fun field.