alt Hacker News> brings some novelty to our scientific work
Is this satire? I hope it is. Otherwise it seems like a sorry state that science currently is if it needs emojis to bring some novelty into it.
Replies
NO FUN IN MY SCIENCE ONLY SERIOUS BUSINESS LIKE GOD INTENDED
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.
Jesus, my dude, lighten up a bit.
Consider this: You're a grad student who's been reading page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page after page of lack and white text.
How is marking a particularly explosive comment with a graphic representation of an explosion any different from highlighting it? Or from Davinci's marginal scribbles? or from Feynman's wave diagrams?
Or, for that matter, simply bolding, italicizing, or underlining it?
Shit, why even format it at all? Who needs page breaks and indented paragraphs in something as serious as a scientific paper?
God forbid we ever go so far as to implement more than one font.
Changes to the methods by which we communicate are made on a regular basis. If people find them useful enough to put them in their own communications, and they do not harm the clarity of the transmission, who are we (or you in particular) to cry about it on the sidelines?
You remind me of the person in the back of the room trying to invalidate a proof based on a misspelling that in no way impacts the validity of the proof.
As if adding an emoji somehow invalidates the months or years of work that went in to producing the content that you are consuming at no cost and will likely benefit from without having contributed to the project in any meaningful way.
I mean, seriously. Imagine someone's finally created a genuine cure for all cancers. They've spent the entire lives of hundreds of people and billions of dollars, and oh no! What's this? Aww, damn there's an emoji in one of the graphs. Damn. Too bad, I guess it's not going to be good enough for freehorse. Better go ahead and send it back for revisions. Can't publish it like that. Not now, not ever. Curing cancer's going to have to wait until we can force the author of this paper to conform to our arbitrary preferences.
Heh, I didn't intend it to be satire. When you spend 7 hours a day cleaning data, sending queries to research sites and doing patient profile review emojis spice it up and can be eye-catching and fun. Why not?
I generally don't use them in routine practice but when I see some of my straight-laced coworkers strategically deploy them I don't hate it!