I have been trying out twitter, because I am really over facebook. I find facebook's privacy concerns problematic and I don't like the fact that people seem to treat the natural progression of friendship (including sometimes drifting apart) as a static concept within the bounds of that website. There are articles on CNN about whether it is okay to unfriend someone on facebook, or choose not to friend them in the first place. It all has so silly. There is a girl in my lab who unfriended me. She didn't like me anyway. It was well known. I'm not losing sleep over it. However, another girl in our department friended me and then never spoke to me again, so I unfriended her and she threw a hissy over it.
For all these reasons and more, I decided to try twitter. It has so far turned into a remarkable resource (both positive and negative) for me. On the plus side, I found an editorial posted today about Garage Biotech. Essentially people are setting up labs in their garages and doing molecular bioscience. It strikes me that this would not be particularly hard to do for geobiology. Although we tend to use a broader range of techniques to characterize systems and answer questions, a lot of them are pretty low tech. A few aren't, but for the most part we could run labs out of the backs of vans (which field geologists have been doing for years). This makes science more portable than ever before (assuming that wherever you set up your lab didn't have a rule about setting up such a lab). In the short-term it seems infeasible, but in the long term it could be a way of developing my career in a much different direction. I always said if I had a pot of money, I would want to be a gentleman scientist like Sir Issac Newton. Well, maybe a gentlewoman scientist.
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