white-cards.txt

A supermassive black hole.

Reconciling quantum theory with general relativity.

Insufficient serotonin.

Evolving a labyrinthine vagina.

Getting really worried about global warming for a few seconds.

Infinity.

Oxytocin release via manual stimulation of the nipples.

Uranus.

Being knowledgeable in a narrow domain that nobody understands or cares about.

Achieving reproductive success.

Slowly evaporating.

The quiet majesty of the sea turtle.

A 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio.

Fun and interesting facts about rocks.

Photosynthesis.

Developing secondary sex characteristics.

Failing the Turing test.

Explosive decompression.

Driving into a tornado to learn about tornadoes.

David Attenborough watching us mate.

3.7 billion years of evolution.

The Sun engulfing the Earth.

Fabricating data.

Reducing my confidence in scientific results.

Oxytocin.

Academic freedom.

Methodological terrorism.

Publish open access.

Actually sharing data.

Winning the Nobel prize.

Bayesian statistics.

Frequentist statistics.

P-Hacking.

Surviving on coffee and coffee alone. 

Impact Factor.

Open science.

The independent variable.

The dependent variable.

A type I error.

A type II error.

Clinical trials.

Scientific fraud. 

Qualitative research.

Quantitative research.

Non-normality.

Laughing to hide your sadness. 

A PhD student who hasn't slept in 3 weeks.

Terrible reviews. 

Pseudo-science.

Reviewer #2.

Copy-pasting everything from Stack Overflow.

Lamarckian evolution.

The luminiferous aether.

Overfitting.

An open bar at the academic conference.

Animal husbandry.

Nature, Science, Cell.

Biology.

Using CRISPR to drive mosquitoes to extinction.

SPSS.

Getting a grant approved by saying it's about HIV. 

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher.

Psychology

Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. 

George Church

Elon Musk.

Segmentation faults. 

Research parasites.

Wearing my nicest Hawaiian shirt. 

Pretending to read a paper.

Forking a repository. 

Academic censure.

Only dating someone without a PhD. 

Lying about your qualifications.

Only dating someone with a PhD. 

Never making eye contact.

The inescapable allure of seminars with free pizza. 

Getting inappropriately drunk at professional events.

Doing it at the whiteboard. 

Industry sell-outs. 

The Python programming language

Satisfaction at a job well done.

Intellectual superiority. 

Zoology.

The central dogma. 

Ecology.

Harvard. 

Vim keybindings.

A 10 year postdoc. 

Socially sanctioned servitude.

An overarching sense of guilt. 

The swollen rump of a female baboon in heat.

Not being able to perform basic arithmetic. 

Jane Goodall.

Proofreading emails only after they're sent. 

Being able to name hundreds of bacteria species but none of the Kardashians. 

Asking questions to hear the sound of my own voice.

Curing cancer.

Code that can be used by literally anyone else. 

Chemistry.

Computer science.

Physics.

Begging for governmental funding. 

Genetics.

An inability to relate to the female sex. 

Fortran.

Performing PCR until I die. 

The amateur use of radioactivity.

Quitting while I'm ahead.

The origin of life.

A Taylor series expansion. 

Perl. 

A life filled with regret. 

Dry heaving because there are no more tears left.

Finding the love of my life in lab. 

Unnecessary use of machine learning.

Protein biosynthesis. 

General incompetence. 

My supervisor calling me at 2AM on a Friday. 

Being the only woman in the room.

My shitty impact score. 

Passive aggressive sticky notes.

Unhealthy sleep habits. 

N=10.

Potatoes having more genes than humans. 

The reproducibility crisis.

Bringing up the principle of assortative mating and Tinder dates. 

Imposter syndrome.

A sweeping sense of superiority. 

Stool samples.

Waiting 20 days for a simulation to run. 

Wearing the same tee-shirt since undergrad.

Saying the future is code while simultaneously making no effort to learn how to code. 

A retracted Nature paper.

Over eager undergraduate research assistants. 

Climate change denial.

Not having an appreciable salary until the age of 40.

Working on weekends.

Software engineers. 

Performing fruit fly dissections.

All my experiments failing. 

Uncomfortable small talk.

Proving something painfully obvious to the general public. 

An all expenses paid trip to Hawaii but never leaving the conference.

Pre-meds whining about their grades. 

Reliving my advisor's glory days.

Remedial grasp of the English language. 

My supervisor's impressive alcohol tolerance.

A master's student. 

Overly optimistic goals followed by crushing failure.

A white man's ego. 

Beer hour.

Losing 3 years' worth of data in a server crash.

Multiple hypothesis testing.

Getting funding from the military and not even feeling bad about it. 

Genuine happiness.

NP hard problems. 

Wondering if it was all worth it.

Engineers. 

An actual convincing argument.

Science with no benefit to mankind. 

A singular guilt-free vacation day. 

A high school level understanding of statistics. 

My family wishing that I was a real doctor.

Lies about interdisciplinary science. 

Mansplaining.

That old professor from the former Soviet Union. 

Blood, sweat, and tears.

Phoning in my teaching requirements. 

Marie Curie.

Antidepressants. 

Richard Feynman.

Adderall.

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

Weed brownies at an otherwise terrible conference. 

A question that is really a comment.

Ignoring most of the feedback I get from my advisor. 

Grumpy old professors.

Soylent.

Grace Hopper.

Stunning lack of a social life. 

Receiving a livable wage.

A persistent alcohol problem. 

IRB approval.

Polite laughter. 

A department chair who has lost all sense of reality. 

Protein pulldown experiments.

The inaccurate media portrayal of scientists.

Making a LinkedIn connection with your ex. 

Wet lab.

The missing heritability crisis. 

Computational sexology.

David Duke. 

Using the phrase "outside the scope of this talk".

Cheap wine. 

Spending one goddamn minute not checking slack. 

H-index

Being completely unqualified to teach. 

Reaching the peak of my career only to spend my days filling out endless paperwork. 

Needless bureaucracy.

Department mandated sexual harassment training. 

The existential fear of mixing up test and training data.

Secretly liking the humanities. 

Unfounded confidence in my experimental results. 

A salty op-ed in the New York Times. 

A proof left as an exercise to the reader.

Tricking the general public into giving up their personal information. 

Code monkeys. 

Taking the principal components just because you heard that's something people do. 

Dark Matter.

Free snacks.

Professors who date students.

The R programming language.

Impenetrable code.

Midday binge drinking.

Tech worker boyfriends.

Women are better than men.

Watching reality TV as a way to numb the pain. 

Kooky socks. 

Cultural irrelevance. 

Donald Trump. 

Writing grants. 

Really needing human organs for a study. 

Taking corporate funding to prove cigarettes aren't that bad. 

Wishing I had competing financial interests to declare. 

Writing in LaTEX. 

Prostitution.

Foreigners. 

Getting a minor in computer science just in case. 

Buying used lab equipment off eBay. 

Learning everything off YouTube videos. 

Scheduling office hours at an inconvenient time and hoping no one shows up. 

Centrifugal force. 

Uncommented code from 1982. 

Scientology.

Not having a good enough GPA to get into med school. 

The microbiome. 

Splurging on the nice kind of ramen noodles. 

Getting compared to a character from the Big Bang Theory. 

Not owning a suit. 

The inevitable extinction of the human population.

Physicists thinking that all science is "just physics." 

Major Depressive Disorder. 

Sneezing into a petri dish of e coli. 

Learning about the intricacies of penile adaptations 

Crying yourself to sleep. 

My PhD. 

Field work in a remote corner of the world. 

A midlife crisis. 

Living off of a graduate student stipend.

Performing basic adult tasks. 

Aliens. 

An honorary degree. 

An obscure protein.

The entropic death of the universe.

Contaminating the incubator.

GWAS.

Really really deep learning. 

Brain surgery, but on mice. 

Cleaning up rat droppings

Arguments for eugenics.

Performing tests on my children

Losing my virginity at a very late age. 

A really big p-value.

A really small p-value.

Overcompensating for your p-value.

Rejecting the null hypothesis. 

The "social" sciences.

Stealing office supplies.

Hiding beer in the cold room.

Drinking the 100% EtOH.

Name-dropping my PI

Co-first author.

BIG data.

Explaining my research to my family. 

Feeling like you got hit by a bus.

Gesticulation. 

Working in Excel.

Being an above average percent Neanderthal.

Only using the word sexy to describe science. 

Lasers.

Spending hours on a poster that no one is going to read. 

Getting scooped. 

Naming inanimate objects. 

The amazing, wonderous, electron microscope.

"Bench to bedside."

Writing a textbook and then making my undergraduates buy it.

Orthogonal assays.

A terrible backronym.

Cockroaches.

Having a real job.

Escaped lab animals.

"Working remotely."

A scientific justification for being a terrible person. 

Multi-omics. 

Science twitter scandals.

Desperation. 

Pushing your own agenda.

Cushy science. 

Experiencing inordinate attraction to a graph. 

A series of tiny shell scripts.

Streaking through the wetlab.

The command-line. 

Slave labor. 

Making up a discipline. 

Paradigm shift. 

Gratuitous single-cell RNA-seq.

Confusing astronomy with astrology. 

Millennials. 

Putting it all in the supplementary.

Killing the cluster.

Crippling debt. 

Economics. 

The irrepressible need to always be correct. 

Homo sapiens. 

Independent wealth. 

A flawed moral compass. 

An unexpected result that I will choose to ignore.

Meetings before 10AM. 

Hubris. 

A lack of knowledge about current events. 

Sex in the missionary position. 

Meetings wasted on figuring out how the AV equipment work. 

Burning it all down and starting over. 

An HHMI investigator. 

An early career scientist. 

Pitifully low standards. 

Unadulterated genius. 

Nature versus nurture. 

Liking porn on my professional twitter account. 

Slacktavism. 

Internet arguments about science. 

The alt-right co-opting your research. 

A healthy work life balance. 

The I Fucking Love Science facebook page. 

The income to afford a house. 

When all my friends are having babies and I only have my dissertation. .

Living in denial. 

Intra-department intrigue. 

Swear words used in professional settings. 

Exaggerating my research to make it sound more interesting. 

Hate fucking. 

Reminiscing about the one time I did LSD. 

Disappointment. 

Constant disapproval from my advisor. 

More than 100 tabs open at once. 

Being kind of an asshole. 

Geology. 

Peaking at age 22.