Skip to main content

Scientists can be funny. No, really.

It shouldn't really be a surprise that scientists can be funny. A fair number of comedians come from a scientific or medical background, after all. Yet, on the whole, scientists have the image of being po-faced and incapable of getting a joke, perhaps because of a tendency to over-analyze. (Oops, I've started to analyze this. Stop me.)

One group in particular has tried to counter this image. It's a company called Biocompare which offers a comparison website that's not for insurance or electrical goods but for the kind of goodies life scientists (biologists to you and me) need. They have compiled a top ten of funny videos produced by the life sciences industry as a form of viral advertising (let's face it, if life scientists can't do viral ads, who can?) You can see all 10 here, but to get a flavour, here's one of my personal favourites.

Comments

  1. Sue Guiney21 January 2010 at 09:50

    Yes!! Where has he been all my life????

    ReplyDelete
  2. xtofersdad21 January 2010 at 20:05

    Personally I prefer GTCA, but as with so much of your blog if you hadn't pointed out this site I wouldn't have found it. Now that I have, I can chalk up another hour to "Internet Research".

    More seriously though it's given me an idea for fund raising for the rugby club so it wasn't for nothing.

    Keep up with your pointers to new ideas please.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more