How Does One Get to Be a Scientist?
So what does one have to do to be technically classified as a scientist? Because I want to be one, because then I can release my blog posts to the press and the press will be like, “Scientists say that the best solution for world peace is nuking the moon. Also, scientists warn of the need for dinosaurs armed with rocket launchers to meet future needs of the military.”
So how does one get called a scientist? I like to think and stuff, and I have a bachelors in science. And I’m very, very smart. I want a scientist badge to wear so everyone knows to believe everything I say. So how do I get one?
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(24 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
January 29th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
I don’t think you actually want one of those scientist badges. 30 years ago it would have been cool, but now; it involves putting your lips someplace close to Al Gore’s a$$
January 29th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
All you need to be a scientist is a white lab coat and some test tubes. A radiation badge is good too, but a word of warning, radiation badges don’t actually protect you from radiation, they just tell you it’s too late.
January 29th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
I’m a scientist and I know this because when we have meetings, the management says “as scientists, you should…”
I’m not sure what we should do as scientists, because I don’t listen to anything else they say once my title is reaffirmed.
You should get someone in power to call you a scientist. I think that will do the trick.
January 29th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Just write another “The Earth, the Earth, the Earth is on fire…” global warming rant. Be sure to mention the problem of penguins spontaneously combusting. That always helps. You’ll get grant money AND recognition as a legitimate scientist.
January 29th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
1. You announce on IMAO with a big banner heading that says Scientist! Lives Here
2. You start to fudge the data for any research you’re doing so that it matches what you’ve already decided to be the outcome.
3. You delete a bunch of your emails.
4. You go to Copenhagen and waste a lot of money and ride around in limos and stay at $2200 per night hotels. (Dang, that’s not the scientists! That’s the politicians who CONTROL the scientists!)
5. You befriend other Scientists! and you sit around drinking beer and laughing about how gullible the peons are.
January 29th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Say Globull Warmings good and automatically you get to be a scientist these days.
January 29th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Basically you need to publish research in some sort of a research journal. That’s not as hard as it seems, because there are thousands of journals and most of them just get crappy submissions that all the other journals rejected. There are even some silly journals like the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Also, you could make up your own journal and publish it. Online even.
The other nice thing to have is an annual conference. At this point you will have gone way beyond becoming a scientist, and have actually founded your own scientific discipline.
January 29th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
WHAT??? Are you saying that you aren’t already a scientist? Now that’s depressing when I think of the long hours I have wasted, studying your wisdom. All this time I have believed that you were working to impart the truth to me. I guess now I have to start over from go. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
January 29th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Badges? You don’t need no stinkin’ badges!
January 29th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
To be in the scientist club and enjoy all the creamy benefits you must creat one functional doomsday weapon. This weapon must be unique and totally eviiiiilllll in its scope. Can’t invent global warming, that has been done.
January 29th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
We always knew your were interested in Science!, Frank.
See, you have to defend a really hypothetical thesis (make stuff up) in front of your future peers (fellow BS’ers). And a BS degree won’t do it. You need to pile it higher and deeper to reach their level.
No, actually, all you need to do is wear a pocket protector and walk around in wing tips. And smoke a pipe.
January 29th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Wizard of Oz: They have one thing you haven’t got: a [doctoral] diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD.
Scarecrow: ThD?
Wizard of Oz: That’s… Doctor of Thinkology.
January 29th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
I would like a large grant to research my theory that Star Wars IV-VI was a documentary. That the millennium falcon crashed landed somewhere on earth and that Chewbacca is the lone survivor living in the northwest woods and occasionally caught on camera.
January 29th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
PS: As an official Scientist (I am the proud third author of a new article soon to be published in an obscure journal) I would be happy to peer review your dinosaurs-with-rocket-launchers thesis. My primary recommendation will be that you cite my work several times.
January 29th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
RE#13:
Frank, as another official scientist (MS Biophysical Organic Chemistry) I can provide the all important second independent review of your work.
But realize that to become a real scientist you will have to turn in your Engineering power ring as no true scientist would dirty their hands with anything of practical significance.
January 29th, 2010 at 5:48 pm
To heck with Scientist!s.
I want to be a poet.
One warm spring soon.
Stupid dang groundhog’s back again.
Someone get me my .22 please.
January 29th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
It’ll be tough with your ADD.
First, you’ll have to release press releases, just fax them randomly to newspapers all over the country. You can be FrnakJ of the IMAO Institute of Scientifical Science.
The first 6 months or so it’ll have to be press releases about how global worming is GONNA KILL US ALL!!!!
This gives you credibility (note: This doesn’t mean that any of your predictions actually come true, just that they’re all about suitably catastrophic events like melting polar caps, dead arctic foxes and rectal/cranial inversions).
After that, you can branch out. Maybe some “studies” about how the Founding Fathers hated guns but the rednecks from the Texas delegation held an AK-47 to their heads so they put the 2nd Amendment into the Declaration of Independence.
All that will take probably a year and a few months and then,POOF!, you’ll be a scientist and able to opine on all kinds of topics. Don’t forget to wear a white lab coat in your publicity photo. Make sure it covers your holster.
You’ll have to couch your moon nuking in some kind of global warmmongering or “It’s the Joooooooos fault” sort of science though. Heck, you could probably get on Shep Smith’s show as a Global Worming expert and bring up nuking the moon so it’ll deflect cosmic rays and uhhhhh… could formation and interplanetary EMP or something to slow down global worming.
Remember, it’s not science these days unless WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!
January 29th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
you’re gonna need an unkempt beard and glasses – also never comb your hair and get a scientific thesaurus (that’s not a dinosaur) and throw a lot of big words around and never admit to being wrong about anything. That’s how Pachauri does it.
January 29th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
You must forego women as no scientist worth his salt is lucky with the ladies.
January 29th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Well, if the Director of the UN Environmental Program can be considered a top environmental scientist, and only has a Masters Degree in Economics (link), then I think you can safely call yourself a scientist too as apparently it doesn’t matter to the UN.
Colonel Bill
(actually only a Lieutenant Colonel)
January 29th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
#17: — that’s it!! Frank, what you need is a thesis that we can reverse the effects of climate change by reducing the intensity of the tides (hence giving more slack to coastal and low-lying areas as the oceans rise) and by slowing the earth’s rotation (giving the side away from the sun longer to cool, in the dark). You can achieve both goals at once by moving the moon from its current orbit to one further from the Earth. I know that this is dangerously sullying one’s hands with something that seems like engineering — but there’s really only currently one practical way to deliver to the moon the type of impulse force it would take to accomplish that. . .
January 29th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
Invent a New science, then you can be the father of it.
January 29th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
The easiest field to become a Scientist! in is Global Warming/Cooling/Changing, whatever. However, your Bachelors in Science degree would be a drawback, unless of course it was a plain BS degree.
January 29th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
“How Does One Get to Be a Scientist?”
1)Get a fax machine.
2) Send scary stories about scary hazards in surprising places
to newsrooms across America.( For example:’Radiation from remote controls causes painful rectal itch’, ‘Shoveling snow from driveways and sidewalks is speeding up global warming’)
3)Publish or perish: send fundraising letters to gullible suckers, you know,
Obama voters.
4) Pipck out a nice white lab coat at the salvage store to wear for your Katie Couric interview.
January 29th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
How to become a scientist:
1) Learn to hate all things good about America.
2) At all times, act as if your every thought is on a higher plain of intelligence than everyone else in the room.
3) Go to college, then never leave. As long as you funnel your hatred of America into pet projects that keep bringing grants, they let you stay as long as you want and they pay you instead of you paying them.
4) When approaching your research, always remember that results of your findings that are at odds with democrat talking points will affect your grant status, so adjust your conclusions accordingly.
5) When caught, lie.
6) Repeat as necessary.
January 29th, 2010 at 11:57 pm
Invent a new field of Science! like Thinkology, then you can claim to be the father of it.
As long as it doesn’t involve math, no one can check your work.
January 30th, 2010 at 12:54 am
Collect boxtops off of wheat bran flakes. After all if you eat things that are good for you but taste like cardboard that shows you are willing to either make the best decisions or are too dumb to choose a different better tasting breakfast. Either way you aren’t smart enough to have a different opinion from those in charge.
Viola you are a scientist
January 30th, 2010 at 7:06 am
Wear Hush Puppies, smoke a pipe and drive a Volvo!
January 30th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Sorry Frank, I think you already shot yourself in foot with that undergrad degree in an applied science. PhD candidates make the coffee, where does that leave you? Get a lab coat and go to Office Max for a badge, mumble a lot and nobody will know the difference!
January 30th, 2010 at 8:58 am
ussjimmycarter must be a scientist.
He k n o w s !
January 30th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Same way Himself got to be president: get yourself a wealthy sponsor and make stuff up.
January 30th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
You are all wrong. Well mostly.
1. You must have a scam, er, a theory.
2. ????? (I think there is some lawyerly stuff here)
3. Apply for a money grant.
When you receive grant money, you are a science! ist.
You already have the scams, er, uh theories, you just need the money from the gov. and you are in.
January 30th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Also keep in mind…
“Science is a lot like sex. Sometimes something useful comes of it, but that’s not the reason we’re doing it.” (Richard Feynman)
January 31st, 2010 at 12:07 pm
I agree with 31 (& others)
In order to be a scientist
1. Go to college with the intention of never leaving the campus again in your life
2. Start wearing a lab coat immediatly, everywhere
2. Come up with some crapola about the need to study something. Like marijuana plants impact on global warming….
3. successfully con the govt into giving you money… (this is the key, without this fuggehaboutit)
4. Occasionaly release a “report” laden with lots Latin, and big words like “thermogenic”
5. Get the govt to send you MORE money (this is the difference between a “real” scientist & a wannabe)
February 1st, 2010 at 4:38 am
Yet another way to get to be a scientist: Get a job with the title “scientist.”
That’s the route I nearly went. While I was finishing up my BS a few years ago and talking to recruiters, one of my prospects was with SPAWAR (uh, they don’t make spas) with the title “scientist.” I was tempted to take the job for the title alone. (Me, a scientist. Who knew?)
I took another, better paying job; alas, I’m merely an analyst by title….
February 4th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Francis Bacon was a scientist, one of the very first. Leonardo da Vinci is generally considered more of an engineer, although he studied a lot of interesting phenomena.
Which gets me to what scientists are: either phenomenological investigators, or those who like Bacon. One can do both if one is a food scientist.
Remember to negate the hypothesis, and abjure all false arguments.