Social networks are everywhere. Personally I like Facebook to keep track of old friends and add new ones. These friends are mostly of nonscientific background. Until recently I had never realized the importance of social networks in science. When you do your PhD and perhaps some postdoc projects here and there, it is hard to think about what it takes to become a successful scientist other than doing brilliant science. Although scientific skills are undoubtedly important, I believe that one of the key ingredients which can make or break a scientific career is a good network of friends.

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Last week, my wife accused me of being rude. Not so much to her – although it’s quite possible that I am, she’s probably got used to it by now – but to others. This sort of happened because our son, Guus, is going to nursery school soon and we were interviewed by the head of the nursery school. She extolled the virtues of their bulletproof entrance door, which (according to her) had become a necessity since Dunblane. In case you don’t remember, “Dunblane” refers to a town in Scotland where in 1996 a mad man entered a school and shot dead several kids. Terrible obviously. However, I couldn’t help myself and started arguing that this was silly and that surely because this happened once in Britain, this was extremely unlikely to happen again, let alone at the particular nursery school that my child was about to attend. Her answer: “Belgium”. Clearly referring to another more recent occasion where a child was hurt. At this point, I decided to give up, judging that further discussion of probabilities or, say, Bayes theorem or shot noise wouldn’t really go over very well.

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