That sounds like a much more plausible reason for spaceships crashing than "PowerPoint did it."

People look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them not to put words on their slides. Then, after I give a talk they can't believe there were no words on my slides.

Interrupt them with a question. It's even more hilarious to see their deer in a headlights look as they lose their place.

I have. They're invariably conducted standing up between two to four people though. Or perhaps between the same size group, sitting, drinking something alcoholic.

I have to disagree with the Challenger commission and the Army on their allocation of blame. If you're the kind of person who sits through a PowerPoint presentation and thinks you've understood something, you really shouldn't be building spaceships or waging war. You should be quietly led off to some marketing department somewhere, or a nice quiet retail job.

General McMaster seems like he has a good grasp of complexity though.

Simple solution: juse get rid of the text tool. That projector thing is supposed to be for visual aids, not conveying a bunch of language, either over simplified or unreadably complex. The latter is why you're standing up there sweating and unconsciously blinding people in the audience with the laser pointer. Also, if your slides have no words on them, if you send out notes they're actually notes!

We have a "human construct" called "green" that most of the human construct "us" pretty much agree upon. The human construct "grass" sometimes meets this criteria, and sometimes doesn't. If you truly believe that, in an absolute sense, there's no difference between water, air and dirt, I can suggest some experiments you might wish to conduct that are likely to convince you of the folly of that statement. You're right, they are made up of the same stuff, but arrangement of that stuff is rather important.

PS - you do realize we can actually turn lead into gold, right?

OMG, I can't leave my basement! Everything MUST come to me in a form I consider most convenient!

If you go to an appropriate library they have computers on which you download academic journals (funded by your tax dollars even!). If you go to the wrong library, they might have to order a paper copy for you, but paper does have a long and glorious history. Embrace it!

Or you can read the open access journals. Just don't, uh, believe everything you read. Or you can wait the six months until the authors have the right to release their paper freely. Or you can vote to actually fund scientists, so they can afford the $5200 to publish their paper in Nature as an open access article.

The OP seemed to be expressing a genuine interest in reading the paper. The option I suggested first (library) is by far the easiest, but I'd certainly recommend the last one (vote for proper funding).

They appear as soon as you scroll. Unless you've discovered completely hidden ones, in which case I'm glad I haven't stumbled upon those.

Pharmacists are trained to know about medications: that's the major reason why physicians can't usually dispense drugs directly.

Physicians are (or should be) well trained to practice medicine. They're good at diagnosing individual patients, choosing treatments, and monitoring progress. They're invaluable collaborators in medical research because they have direct contact with the patients, and they're the ones who you hope are ultimately going to be applying any advances. But an MD doesn't involve the necessary training to do science. Unfortunately society has confused the two.

I'm a medical scientist. It would be ridiculous, not to mention illegal, for me to diagnose and treat patients. I simply don't have the training. But it's equally ridiculous, though unfortunately not illegal, for an MD (absent specific scientific training like an earned PhD) to design, conduct and analyze a proper experiment. Yet major research grants today tend to go to MDs and it's getting extremely difficult to get a faculty job in medical research without an MD.

Interesting I like the hidden scroll bars. They free up some extra screen space and it's been years since I actually wanted to click on one. Using a trackpad or a mouse that has any sort of two axis scrolling interface makes them superfluous.

In medical research, the problem is that most of it is run by amateurs. Medical doctors receive somewhere between no and very little scientific education, and conduct research in their spare time while not treating patients, yet in North America an MD is considered not only sufficient, but actually desirable for a "clinician scientist." There are some excellent scientists who also hold MDs, but it's secondary to their scientific training. Clinicians have very creative ideas about how to do science.

Half? In many fields (like medical research) it's essentially all, and there's no "at some point." Many places offer one or two year starting faculty appointments, at the end of which you're expected to have a major grant (success rate is somewhere around 10% on those). So you better get busy writing applications. Once you're established, you better keep writing them, because now you've got a lab full of people depending on you for their livelihood.

https://scholar.google.ca/scho...

I agree though, the world would be a better place if journalists writing pieces on science were expected to provide references.

Sure. Except that extracting them and tossing them in a fluidic vortex to untangle them will kill you.