this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Science Memes
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Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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Science isn't a filing cabinet of facts, it's a conversation. For example, a photo of an eel or other localized wildlife counts because most people never see one, and wonder is the first step of inquiry. A car meme counts if it makes you curious about what's under the bonnet. If you want to talk about something you noticed in the world, chances are someone else wants to talk about it too.
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See the pinned paper on Shitposting as Public Pedagogy if you want the academic case for why this works.
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R with the tidyverse package is amazing once you get over the learning curve. It's so much easier to simply type a few lines of code then to fiddle with the Excel GUI, plus the ability to customize the plot is much, much better in R.
Yes making a simple plot in Excel is relatively easy, but try making something evening remotely complex and it's terrible. A box plot is a great example of this, 2 lines of plotting code in R for a basic plot but an absolute nightmare to create in Excel.
Afaik, you can't even make a box plot on excel without 3rd party plugins. You can maybe hack together one with a bar chart, and hiding/narrowing parts of it so that it sort of resembles a box plot if you never ever open the data.