Seldom original. Often wrong. Occasionally interesting.
It’s entirely possible that the world has heard just about enough from me. After all, I’ve written three books, I’ve been inflicting Scientist Sees Squirrel on you for over a decade, and the data would suggest that I’ll give a lecture, talk, or webinar at the drop of a hat. But somewhere out there, there’s […]
Some things don’t ever get old, and I can tell you that publication day for one of your books is one of those things. Today is that day: the new 3rd edition of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing is out! I got my own copies a couple of weeks ago, and you might well have too […]
I got a little bit riled up the other day, and I realized that it might be worth sharing because the thing that riled me is a longstanding pattern in academia (at least in Canada, anyway). It’s a way I think we sabotage ourselves, and we really ought to stop. It’s our instinct to react […]
I’ve been neglecting one of my favourite hobbyhorses lately. That’s right: it’s been nearly six months since I’ve bothered you about a really wonderful Latin name. That ends today, because I’ve recently managed to acquire the new, and utterly gorgeous, 3-volume Princeton Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. (The three volumes are for therapods, for sauropods, and for […]
A few months ago I got to read one of the most entertaining scientific papers I’ve seen in a while.* It’s a study by Stefano Mammola and colleagues that documents patterns in the use of jokes in scientific talks – in particular, talks at conferences (you can read the paper here: “Statistically significant chuckles: who […]
Note: This is a jointly-written post with Bethann Garramon Merkle. But it shifts a bunch from “I” to “we” and back again, and I think you’ll see why. Apologies for the viewpoint tangling. I had an interesting chat with a colleague a while back in which he described a common complaint among faculty members in […]
There are many things I was wrong about, early in my career. When I posted just recently about my discomfort with “done is better than perfect” advice, it reminded me of one of those things. For at least the first half of my career, I thought about papers as simply needing to join the scientific […]
For some reason, people are buying my book – and I wish they’d stop, at least for a while. This one, I mean: The Scientist’s Guide to Writing. I’ve written two others, and if you’d like to buy one of those, go right ahead! Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider is “more fun than […]
Warning: slightly treacly. There’s a children’s picture book I love: Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. I wrote about it some years ago at more length, but for today’s post all you need to know is that Miss Rumphius begins as the story of a little girl hearing her grandfather’s stories, and telling him that one day […]
There’s a piece of writing advice that I run across a lot (I’ve even given it). It’s excellent advice, except that it isn’t. Which doesn’t make much sense even to me, so I’m going to try to unpack it a little. The advice? It comes in various forms, usually along the lines of “Done is […]