Fuck apple.

Nice! Let me know when You can ship again :)

Can I have a reprint please???

Thank you for posting this. Very intriguing

A few nights ago I had one of these dreams where you wake up and remember everything. Every single detail. And you can't shake it off.

I am supposed to swim in the olympics. I arrive late to the qualifiers. I enter the swimming pool and head to the obvious person in charge. She is an older lady, reminded me of McGonagall from Harry Potter in her looks, but not her vibe. I ask her whether I could still swim the qualifiers. She says I missed them but there is one last round happening for the womens qualifiers, I could just join that. So I take off my clothes and jump into the water and swim right next to the lane with the only swimmer, a 14 year old girl. We swim our round, the time is noted. We get out of the swimming pool. I head to the same older lady, asking "what next?". She tells me that I will be swimming later this evening, all the information needed are in this book. And she hands me a 300 page heavy brochure. "All you need is inside there, go find your dorms".

I make my way to the "dorms". It took me a while to get that, but using the brochure and asking around, I make it to the olympic village. I walk straight to what looked like "the dorms" only to notice that there is a huge party happening there. Not just there, everywhere around me. People were dancing to a weird tone of a flute I couldn't recognize. A girl named "Huda" (an arabic name btw) was playing the weird flute. And everytime she blew into it, everyone went mad. She seemed to be surprised about its effects but liked the attention, so she kept blowing into it and the people around continued dancing and drinking.

I tried to ask myself through the crown of people with the hopes that someone could tell me where my room is. But no one was interested in answering. They were too engaged with what was happening around them to even notice me. After trying a few more times I give up. I sit down, in the middle of the crowd, on some bench. Left and right are people dancing. On the bench, behind the bench, everyone. It feels crowded, even though we are outside.

I try to concentrate on the brochure. The info is supposed to be there. So I go through it. Once, twice, three times. Over and over I try to find the pages that tell me where I find my dorm and when I am going to swim again. I keep repeating the procedure. Keep getting distracted by what is happening around me. At some point, after what feels like the 1000s iteration, the brochure starts to lose its binding. First single pages and then complete parts of chapters start to fall out. I try to collect the falling sheets and put them in order, all of that while still sitting on the bench with the party going around me...

I keep on trying. Until at some point the whole thing just falls into single sheets and from my hands onto the ground.

I gave up. And without much options left. I dive into the madness around me.

P.S: I started growing a weird patchy beard.

I have a similar expetience. On one hand I am happy that I don't get bombarded with questions the whole day at work so I can focus when I want to focus.

However, I am also getting distracted here and not getting the same amount of things done at home. A routine at home helps!

Thank your for giving me a reason to procrastinate and tidy up my desk!

Because you won't be able to make a point. It just goes against the whole point of scientific peer review and the way we do science.

You would basically increase the irreproducibility from its current 50-60% to 90% because everyone was playing wishful thinking just to not be able to get the results they wanted at the end. And then you would have to retract everything. Except, no one would do that. So the thing they will do is twist that story until it shows what they want to show.

Leading to very bad quality data. This starts a chain that could fuck science for another decade because people will build hypothesis on them, apply to grants etc. and since everything takes so long nowadays, you will lose 5-10 years of "for nothing" data.

A recent example from my field of research. We got a paper to review from Science. We check the paper, the quality is garbage, the analysis is horrible. Why that fuck does Science send us the paper for review? Turns out it is from a famous lab in the states (ivy league). We write a very long review giving suggestions for improvement and data analysis.

Paper is rejected in Science and turns up 5 months later in Neuron. A respectable journal in my field. Unaltered. None of the suggestions implemented. Zero.

The results and conclusions of the paper are worth nothing. However, we just got a grant proposal to review from another lab basing their whole hypothesis on the results from that one paper.

Luckily, we were able to tell the poor guy that the paper is problematic. But many others won't have our experience or would just believe the paper. A few millions in research investments later, all of it was a fluke. OR they would also twist the data to the point that they agreed with the paper from Neuron. Because it is Neuron and so on and so forth.

Usually, trends like that die out because there will be enough reports going against them.

However, the game changes if you have much much more of those cases with data that has "gaps" or "filled gaps" where squares are pushed into circles just to get the same conclusion because the authors fear retractions. The damage would be insane.

I can only speak about the situation in my field. I think everyone is fine for the next 1-2 months as there is enough data to analyze, stuff to read, articles/reviews/chapters/grant applications to write.

After the two months things will start hitting the fan.

I am officially in home office starting from today. Our lab is down to 15%. So some people are "chosen ones" that are allowed to continue working on a 50% shift because those are the closest to a publication.

PhD candidates stay at home and postdocs continue working, in out case.

You cannot publish papers with gaps. I actually expect much more articles to be sent in during this phase because people have to stop running and start to think about what they are actually doing.

This all changes if this continues for more then a few months.

Number total total cases in the US just passed Germany with a higher mortality rate...

Stay safe!

I am glad that I am still allowed to work a little and otherwise try to focus during this weird time...

Do you have any tips for sourdough? A recipe?

My roommate tried 3 times and ended up with a complete sour mess...

The US currently has the highest rate of case increase as well as one of the lowest amount of testing.

Both combined suggests you are up for a loooong ride.

A complete closure of the lab is probably coming next Monday. My experiments (last year PhD) are on ice. My animals getting old... I guess that's how it is.

They told us that the tests take so long because they don't have enough people to do them. I wonder why they don't ask the army of PhD students, post docs, technicians that are here. We surely can manage a few hundred PCRs a day... Or am I missing something?

Call in sick. Because you are.