Today I found out we did very well on a grant application despite there being a glaring & very embarrassing typo in the first line of the grant (which i missed despite reading it like 70 times). So yeah, there's still hope for humanity. Also,❤️to my awesome & forgiving reviewers.

In science, unless you're a lucky superstar, you won't get a lot of +ve feedback. Or to be precise the ratio of -ve feedback to +ve feedback is like 10 to 1. This is especially true as you advance in your career. Bottom line: you have to truly believe in yourself & in what you do

10 years ago we purchased CLC software for 99$ to help us w/ (pretty basic) cloning/sequence analysis stuff. QIAGEN Life Sciences just quoted us a 3000$ fee for the renewal. Please tell me everyone's salaries at Qiagen increased 3000% during this time because our grant funding didn't.

Over the last 16 years the number of times our lab has ended up buying an item advertised through a spam email from a company: 0

% of the new emails in my inbox that are spam advertisements from companies: 98%

I think about this slide from Peter Lawrence often (H/T Matthew Freeman)

Hey folks! I found the original photo!

Today someone told me a big difference between male & female fruit flies is that male flies need to have siesta in the afternoon & I think proving this is also true in humans is going to save many many human marriages.

The most terrifying stage of turning into an old grumpy professor is becoming a real pedant about grammar. This involves writing long notes to your paper writing collaborators about the nuanced differences between past perfect & present perfect or why they should use semicolons.

Word limits are the enemy of clarity and clarity is maybe the most important attribute of a paper. It’s ridiculous that in the age of unlimited space of paper free publications we still see strict word limits enforced.

Marking today by watching the classic superbowl film Ace Ventura Pet Detective

This discussion is 🔥 🔥 🔥

A fundamental law of science is that the last 5% of the paper take 80% of the effort.

The problem w/ serious debates on social media is that those who know the most about a topic have intellectual humility & will be reluctant to express strong opinions while those who know the least show no intellectual humility, have strong opinions, & get lots of attention.

A main take home msg is that a journal that wants to be a major player in stem Cell research has no interest in publishing findings from non-mammalian systems. Considering how many breakthroughs in stem cell research came from non-mammalian systems this seems like a bad choice.