curlicuecal:

prologi:

roachpatrol:

amuseoffyre:

shelomit-bat-dvorah:

themarchrabbit:

onsheka:

thepioden:

gessorly:

tyrror:

ruingaraf:

themarchrabbit:

Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.

Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.

This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.

SCIENCE

thank you

this is one of the best comments this post has recieved

I have witnessed:

Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”

Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”

A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”

Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.

Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”

Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.

A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.

I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…

Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.

– I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”

– Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night. 

– A whole swarm of older women – and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs – all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.

– At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road. 

– “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”

– Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it. 

a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work

“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”

The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”

I then let her into her office.

“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.

Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.

One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.

every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds

At one of the leading conferences for a certain branch of mathematics, there is an annual tradition of “walrus wrestling,” where the participants kneel on the floor with their hands behind their back and try to knock each other the fuck over. This takes place at the formal dinner.

Definitely a big reason I went into ecology was on my first undergraduate research outing watching my elderly herpetology professor get drunk, jump over a picnic table, and discuss wrestling alligators.

lesbianshepard:

lesbianshepard:

lesbianshepard:

lesbianshepard:

my favorite out of context quotes from my archeology professor so far in no particular order

  • and floridians are just as human as you and me!
  • and the moral of the story is that there are no deadly snakes native to alaska
  • you might know this guy as one of the only archaeologists cool enough to be mentioned by indiana jones
  • it’s my dream to have my name said by harrison ford
  • i’m not going to apologize for having this class at 6am because you paid for it and it’s your fault. 
  • we don’t all dress like lara croft. i tried to get it to be a thing on a dig and my colleagues yelled at me. 
  • they were pretty good archaeologists except they were too racist to realize anything they found. 
  • i take back what i said about us not dressing like lara croft because lewis binford here is wearing nothing but short shorts and a cowboy hat. take notes for an academic halloween costume!
  • archaeologists can be good artists! not me, though. or anyone i know. but if you can draw just know you have options.
  • sometimes you find dead bodies when you dont really expect it and you just have to deal with it
  • archaeologists are the only people allowed to get exited when they find corpses. 
  • once i ruined thanksgiving dinner when i told my family i had gotten my degree in archaeology and my uncle commented he liked dinosaurs too
  • the closest i’ve ever been to a grizzly bear is when i left my glasses in my tent on a dig in alaska,  saw a big rock in the distance, and almost screamed

additional quotes

  • ah yes. archaeologists. or, as i love to call us,  pottery analysts
  • i mean he was kind of a good guy for helping us beat britain but he owned slaves so that really cancelled it out.
  • archaeology is like cultural anthropology, except after you interview the person you turn around and shoot them in the head.
  • do not use trees! trees are bad! don’t do it!
  • usually you find shards, but it’s super exciting when you find a really big shard
  • it’s basically like a waterpark, except you’re fully clothed and walking through a dark tunnel knee deep in muddy water. so, basically splish splash.
  •  i dont believe in curses but my colleagues and i like to encourage the idea of them so people stop touching our stuff
  • usually, you would find a knife in a kitchen. or underneath your pillow to really freak out your roommate who is a history nerd and has no idea why you would sleep with a knife under your pillow and he’ll get really scared and freaked out and okay i’m getting off topic
  • no matter what the other scientists say, archaeology is a real science.
  • don’t worry, i promise you, and whatever government agency that’s spying on me right now,  that i’m not a crazy communist trying to overthrow the government
  • by now you’ve noticed the big “POP QUIZ” written on the board. there isn’t one, but i wanted to see the looks on your face when you saw it. but you’re all dead inside so it’s not really funny.
  • everything was fine except the citizens of pompeii just woke up dead the next day
  • the number one question you should ask when you read old archaeology papers is “how the hell do you know?”
  • nothing pisses off old men more than young people asking “why” and “prove it” so do that as often as possible
  • this is incredible! all it takes is a computer the size of this room!

even more from the margins of my notebook!

  • when in doubt, it’s ritualistic
  • coprolites are the only shit archaeologists get excited over
  • i know the only reason you’re not laughing at my hilarious jokes is because it’s early 
  • they called it the garbage project. which is also what people call the projects i work on when we apply for funding.
  • what you have to realize is that people are fundamentally weird. they do weird stuff now and they have done it thousands of years ago.
  • things come and go but pottery is forever
  • i dont know if you all know this but moose are terrifying abominations. 
  • and today’s lesson is about the difference between dirt and soil!
  • please, please, please do not eat old butter you found buried in a bog.
  • normally i would say this blackboard is a feature because it isn’t portable and can’t be moved but this is a community college so who knows

one of my biggest fears is that this will get so many notes that someone in the class will see it and show it to the professor and he’ll realize half the notes ive been taking in class are jotting down the weird shit he says