To be fair

The old line goes "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can neither do nor teach become critics." Which isn't fair to some of the excellent teachers I've known, but it's the critic aspect I need to reflect on.

I've tried from time to time to to walk back some science headlines and see what the story was, and try to explain the results (I hope) more clearly or accurately. I try to add a little value by pointing out some of the bigger picture, or some of the caveats.

Sometimes this is an hour's work--with more complicated ones it can be a little more.

Easy.

Much easier than writing the paper in the first place. I'm trying to put together a simple limit on dark matter cross sections during my copious free time. Background research alone has been over 20 hours. The back of the envelope calculation that inspired it only required an hour to get the preliminary info and code an estimate, but doing it right will take a good deal longer. And then I have to run it by somebody to see if I did anything dumb. I'll be lucky to have it see the light of day by June. And I'm just piggybacking on public data, not running my own experiment.

There are several orders of magnitude of difference between the effort of doing research and the effort of blogging about it.