There’s something sad about that Trudeau-video we’re all liking now. I mean it’s a cool retort to a slightly snarky joke, but while his quantum-computer explanation was …kinda correct… it wasn’t really anything to gush over. It was more or less like “Hamlet is about a prince in a castle… oh, […]
If you’re going to write a book from a collection of anecdotes it helps having a hook to anchor the stories to. And what better hook than the periodic table of elements? I just finished Lars Öhrström’s “The Last Alchemist in Paris: And other curious tales from chemistry” the latest in a […]
The bicycle saves my life every day Today it was time to lift the bike out of the cellar, oil the chain, tighten the bolts and get on for the first ride of the season. Ok, I do ride my bike to work everyday, but today it was the racer […]
I was recently visiting a workshop on surface modification (SMCBS) that is organised every other year by people from our institute. Looking around the room I realised that the audience was about half men and half women.* However, despite the almost equal representation of genders among the conference participants most of the speakers […]
So, we finally have a new director… or, at least we think we do. There was some uncertainty about the colour of the smoke at the conclave at the Polish Academy of Sciences Friday two weeks ago, and still there is no official information. Like the laws and sausages that Bismarck never […]
Recently Poland grudgingly accepted to receive 2000 refugees over two years. Two thousand! And still people here are complaining that Poland is a poor country and we can’t afford to accept more immigrants. Rubbish! Notwithstanding the fact that the fertility rare is a paltry 1.3 children per woman and young people […]
There has been a lot of talk the last week or so about a study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology showing that despite an increasing number of women most of us still picture a scientist as a man. As one of the authors of the study writes in a very thoughtful article for […]
So here we go again… Another post about the state of pay for Polish scientists. This time it’s not as personal a rant as last time, at least not yet. When it comes to paying scientists there are basically two competing models; either you have a fixed pay from your […]
In the latest issue of Nature a group of researchers published what they call “The Leiden Manifesto” for how to evaluate research using a mixture of bibliometric and qualitative data. They don’t say that bibliometric evaluation should be abolished completely, when used properly such data can reveal very interesting information […]
So, I’m officially a chemist… that’s a scary thought. Today the scientific council of our institute voted unanimously to award me the title doktor habilitowany, which is a sign of being an independent researcher. In Poland it is also a prerequisite for being allowed to supervise PhD students. But since […]
