Scientist Sees Squirrel

Scientific naming has a strong cultural component. I don’t mean Latin names that reference Hamlet or Der Ring des Nibelungenas or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (although those exist). Instead, I mean that the kinds of names scientists give to newly described species vary, among scientists. And the best explanation for this is that different […]

I was making some bread the other day, and I looked around my kitchen and thought “gosh, what kind of cyclone hit here?” Because I’d been over to a friend’s place a few days before and their kitchen was tidy; and a different friend’s the week before, and their kitchen was tidy; and… well, you […]

I’m a few months behind, but I finally got around to reading 318 pages of species descriptions for new species of Singaporean fungus gnats. It was fascinating – and that’s not sarcasm. Let me explain. Dalton de Souza Amorim and his colleagues published, last December, a monograph reporting their work with fungus gnats (technically, flies […]

One thing that sometimes comes as a surprise to folks as they learn to write, and even more as they learn to mentor writers, is that the technical part of writing is only one piece of the challenge – and for many writers, not the largest one. There are also behavioural, emotional, and social aspects […]

I’ve been using the term “developing writers” a lot lately. It’s all through our new book, Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences, and since we settled on that term for the book I’ve been using it here, too. Most recently, I think, it cropped up a few weeks ago when I began a post […]

I’ve been doing my taxes (you’ve probably been doing yours too), and it’s making me irritated. But not in the way that seems to permeate our world: I’m not irritated that my taxes are so high; I’m not irritated that governments mis-spend my taxes; I’m not irritated that I’m paying taxes at all. Instead, I’m […]

“Write up your results in the style of a scientific paper.” Untold thousands of undergraduate science students have received that instruction, and it’s done a lot of damage to our professional literature. These days, AI writing tools may be making the problem even worse—although with good instruction, they could offer solutions instead. Puzzled? Let me […]

OK, I swear, I’m not really doing this on the regular. But for the second Friday in a row, I’m posting a Friday Link. I can’t not – this LitHub piece from Marlene Zuk, on Tackling Writer’s Block (as a Scientist), is just too much right up my alley.* I need to share it with […]

Last Friday I pointed you to Jeff Houlahan’s new manuscript on How To Do Good Science. Then I was interested in what’s in the manuscript. Today I’m interested in where it lives – because it isn’t, and will never be, a conventional scientific paper. For centuries, the standard venue for scientific work has been the  […]

I don’t do Friday Links here on Scientist Sees Squirrel – that’s really more Dynamic Ecology’s jam. But I’m going to make an exception, because I suspect a lot of readers will be interested in a manuscript that Jeff Houlahan has just posted. (He’s posted it in a rather unusual way – as, essentially, a […]