You're being downvoted, but I tend to agree that communication is not the part of science you want to "innovate" on. The purpose of (scientific) communication is to be understood, not to be novel.
The science you're writing about is hopefully extremely novel of course.
In general I've found "innovating on the wrong thing" is surprisingly common, especially from people who are bored and/or hungry for promotions, etc.
They're not putting emojis in peer review papers in Science and Nature or poster presentations at ASCO; they're putting them in emails, teams chats and meeting minutes.
Believe it or not researchers enjoy humor around sometimes. There's a global shortage of a specific DAKO antibody we need for biopsy analysis right now and on a call with 50 people one of our chief scientists deadpans, "it's because I stopped making it in my basement."
I do believe it, and am glad for it. The paper indicates clinical notes and patient communications, though, not internal messages. Which means I've been talking past you the whole time anyway, my bad.
He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.
Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.
I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day. We have so much inhospitable land that would be perfect for solar and wind farms. Suncable is trying to do this on a small(er than China) scale. We are just too politically confused and too deep in the belief that mining is the only thing we can do here.
> I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day.
You may never see them. Not because we aren't adding renewables, but because South Australia was at about 80% renewable last year (average, not peak) so if you were going to get those sort of pictures anywhere in Australia, you would be getting them from SA now.
You probably don't see them because while the countries are about the same size in land area, but China has 50 times the population so it needs about 50 times more power.
This is true, and I'm a big fan of SA leading the charge, having grown up there.
However, we could also build out more green energy technology to become a large energy exporter. (You could argue we are kind of that now, with the amount of coal we export.)
Especially given we have strong but complicated geopolitical ties to both China and the USA, it feels like guaranteeing our own energy sovereignty, plus gaining the ability to export power directly, would be a strong political as well as environmental move.
I only just learned about SunCable. I think using our vast swathes of empty, sun-drenched land to provide power to our Southeast Asian allies is a great idea.
I was just saying this to my colleagues after seeing these. Decades of political sabotage has done significant damage to our transition to renewables. I'm hopeful (perhaps a bit too wishful) that we'll see more of a push for renewables in the coming election cycles, but I'm staying realistic as the last 20 years of climate debate has been frankly shameful. At least rooftop solar is so ubiquitous.
I'm hopeful that the advent of the Teals might generate some momentum here. I believe there are some very large wind farms in progress across NSW too, which is good news. Home solar / battery installations also seem to be on the rise in low density areas (I don't have hard data to back that up though).
I'd also love to see solar panels on top of every Bunnings, Westfield, and other warehouses/complexes, as well as above every outdoor carpark, which would have the added bonus of preventing hand roasting in summer.
I don't really think about this much, but your comment made me wonder:
If we do find another earth-like planet within travel distance (impossible afaik but let's suspend disbelief for a moment), how do we determine whether it's worth colonising? And how to we measure it?
"The resources on this planet will last 15.6B person-years which means if we send 5 million people there over time, we will have to prepare for their evacuation in ??? years"?
Obviously totally moot if Earth's resources aren't going to last that long, but just had that thought bubble up.
The "bigger problem" is that it is insufficient to observe the life carrying capacity of a planet for a few decades and conclude that it is stable long term.
For example, the host star could have variability measured in thousands or millions of years that would render the planet inhospitable to humans but not the indigenous life, which would have been adapted to these cycles.
Similarly, the planet could experience regular asteroid impacts due to passing through a recently broken up rock that intersects its orbital path.
Some of these risks can be eliminated through careful study, but this would require something like a century of painstaking geology, thorough astronomic surveys of its neighbourhood, a full fossil record, etc...
> However after a while I realized that people just post into the void. Everyone has something to say or promote, yet no one wants to listen. It's like we're all having our booth on a crowded public space, but there are no actual receivers...
> Thus I concluded that people overall are tired of socializing.
I don't think people are tired of socialising. People are tired of the self-centered, propagandized publication that social media companies have addicted us to, both as consumers and providers. This makes people want to socialise less because:
a) They get more immediate satisfaction from consuming or providing content than actually socialising
b) Satisfying this (any) addiction takes a lot of time and emotional effort that might otherwise be used for socialising
Ironically, I think the author discovered exactly what social media ACTUALLY looks like without the addictive algorithms: lots of people yelling and nobody listening.
Just in case anyone is put off by this comment, I want to second the recommendation of Debt: The First 5000 Years. It's excellent, and it has as a free, chapter-by-chapter audiobook on YouTube.
As for Graeber being controversial: yes, though I vaguely recall "The Dawn of Everything" being (moreso) the trove of interesting historical anthropological hypotheses, rather than "Debt"?
Anyway, it's been a while, but my main point is that I wouldn't let Graeber's controversial-ness stop anyone from reading Debt. If anything, going in with that information makes you think harder about the topics he covers.
I totally agree. He writes well. I think the dawn of everything is a good read, and I will read debt, but without wanting to give in totally to 'appeal to authority' I think you have to recognise Graeber didn't win friends.
I think you'll enjoy it. My impression is he'd have won more friends with Debt than he did with the Dawn of Everything. Perhaps not literally, but I do remember thinking Debt made stronger cases on average, and was more philosophical than creatively-antagonistic in its weaker evidence parts.
> 13. The work that makes other work possible is priceless - and invisible.
> Glue work - documentation, onboarding, cross-team coordination, process improvement - is vital. ... The trap is doing it as “helpfulness” rather than treating it as deliberate, bounded, visible impact. Timebox it. Rotate it. Turn it into artifacts ... make it legible as impact, not as personality trait.
I see my own experience in this, but I don't think he's identified the problem correctly. Timeboxing, rotating, etc, is easy. Convincing management that it is as important as non-glue work and therefore worth allocating your time for it is the hard part. And if you can't do that, you end up stuck in the situation described.
The other option is to just let things fail of course, but then you have to convince both management AND the rest of your team to do this, otherwise someone else will just pick it up between the cracks too.
Why not buy lottery tickets? The only thing smaller than the ridiculously small chance of winning is absolute zero, from never playing. Bad odds are still odds :)
The science you're writing about is hopefully extremely novel of course.
In general I've found "innovating on the wrong thing" is surprisingly common, especially from people who are bored and/or hungry for promotions, etc.
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