19 till I die

I don't know why I'm blogging this I gave a work presentation recently. It was well received and applauded. I was happy. A lot of work was shown investigating a stunning new finding. The finding is beautiful, the results I showed were consistent and the experiments were tight. But, a certain sadness and annoyance persists past the sprinkle of glory. The annoyance comes from having been told exclude data that does not fit in the picture that is currently taking shape, because it is not fully interpretable. Significant, high resolution data that at the moment was put in the backup slides, because the error bars were too large. In addition, I was asked to remove details to show a simple trend: take away data points to make a graph look linear, almost like adding a trendline. Further, I was told to remove data in which no obvious pattern emerges... because there was too much detail. It has to be made crystal clear that no unethical manipulation of data occurred. It was ...