I’m well into my Scientific Writing course now, and I’ve just given the lecture that consistently annoys my faculty colleagues the most (well, it annoys many of them). It’s the one on writing the Methods section, and it’s heterodox in two rather different ways. This lecture stands out a bit – I don’t think my...

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I’ve just returned the proofs for my latest paper. You can read about it, and access the preprint, here; or you can wait a little while and read the journal version in Proceedings B. Or, maybe you can. You see, it will be paywalled.* Now, some folks find that scandalous: information should be free (or...

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This is a guest post from occasional contributor Emma Despland. If you’re like me, you know that UN conferences like COP15 (more formally, the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity) are, but you’re a bit mystified about what goes on at one. Here Emma gives an ecologist’s...

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Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the rise of “generative AI” with both interest and trepidation. (“Generative AI” is software that creates “new” text (ChatGPT) or images (DALL-E) from a user prompt – I’ll explain the quotes on “new” later.) Now, I know only a smattering about how generative AI works, so don’t expect technical...

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Last week I had my mind blown. As I am something of a nerd, I had my mind blown by rounding numbers – or more specifically, by the fact that not everyone does it like I do. I know – that’s odd on several levels; but if you stick with me, I think there’s an...

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Warning: navel gazing If you’ve been hanging around Scientist Sees Squirrel, you’ll know that last July I moved into “phased retirement”, or “semi-retirement” if you prefer. Administratively, I’m now in 62% of a professorial job, and will be for another year before full retirement. I get asked a lot how that’s working out. About a...

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I mentioned the other week that one of the books in my “to-read” pile was Gary Grossman’s My Life in Fish – his graphic autobiography (by which I mean it’s heavily illustrated in the style of a graphic novel, not that it’s NSFW!). Now, books sometimes linger on my “to-read” pile for a long time;...

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I was talking with one of my grad students last week, and they confessed to being nervous about their upcoming thesis defence. That’s natural enough; most students are nervous about their defences.* And a lot of scientists, at all stages, are nervous about giving talks. Early in my career, I certainly was. My nervousness wasn’t...

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Semesters are winding down for most of us, which I hope means that you, like me, will get a bit of a break. So I thought I’d pull together a few book recommendations. It’s probably too late for you to use these as gifting ideas (unless you, like me, tend to procrastinate that sort of...

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Content warning: includes examples, motivated by the difficulty of changing species’ common names, that mention ethnic slurs. Other Warning: longer than usual, and somewhat technical. You’ll be most interested in this post if you’ve ever thought about using web searches to explore changes through time in linguistic usage, interest in fields or topics, and so...

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