In 2008, I traveled to the world’s largest scientific data-centers for a Nature story. No matter whether the labs were devoted to internet archiving, the human genome, or the Higgs boson, they had two things in common: vast server farms, and XKCD.
Randall Munroe’s webcomic is so unabashedly geeky, so unafraid to be obscure or format-breaking, so affectionate and knowing about the triumphs and pitfalls of science that it is absolute catnip for scientists.
Last week, Munroe published strip #2456, “Types of scientific paper,” a 3x4 grid of thumbnails of journal articles with titles like, “We put a camera somewhere new” and “My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it.”
Even by XKCD standards, this is heavy scientist-bait. The research community has risen to the challenge, flooding the net with remixes that are, if anything, even better than the original: works of microfictional genius to rival Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Many of these have been collected on @bruces’ Tumblr blogs, and, taken as a body, they constitute an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography - self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story.
“Types of Paper in Epidemiology and Public Health”
We counted how many people have a disease, here are maps with poor countries in red
We found that if you call your research ‘genetic epidemiology,’ then people are surprisingly OK with eugenics
