Wit & Wisdom

Why there should (not) be more women in geodynamics

Iris van Zelst September 20, 2017

More women in geodynamics? I don't think so.
Credit: Pixabay

Nowadays, equality is cool. Everyone is always going on about how women and men should get the same opportunities. In science, and hence, geodynamics, women are still a bit behind men for both historical (women only recently started graduating more in exact sciences) and unconscious-bias reasons. Therefore, there are lots of programs in order to stimulate women to go into science and, more importa ...[Read More]

The Rainbow Colour Map (repeatedly) considered harmful

Editorial Team 2 August 23, 2017

A rough guide to the use of colours - rainbows best left to unicorns with their sparkly data. By Matthew Partridge of ErrantScience.com

This week’s “Wit and Wisdom” post is a guest entry by researcher Fabio Crameri from the Centre for Earth Evolution of Dynamics (CEED), University of Oslo. Many of us are guilty of creating figures using the colours of the rainbow in their full glory – it’s bold, exciting, and justifies the golden data contained within, right? Wrong! As Fabio explains, the rainbow scheme is misleading and should be ...[Read More]

Karaoke, geodynamics, and a bit of history

Iris van Zelst July 26, 2017

Anybody up for singing the Fossil Rock Anthem? Credit: Nikolay Frolochkin (source)

Let me just talk to you about what I have been doing with my free time recently: I discovered a feature from Google Books named Ngram viewer which allows you to make graphs that show how words or phrases have occurred in a selection of books (e.g., English) over the selected years. I have of course been playing with this thing! You can imagine how exciting my weekends are. In all seriousness, thou ...[Read More]