Scientists don’t agree on all that much, but we agree that it simply isn’t possible to “keep up with the literature”. Our scientific literature is such a torrential firehose that there’s just no way. And if we’re aware of that as readers, you’d think that as writers we’d be taking special pains to be concise. […]

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Once upon a time, the Latin names of species were always descriptive (and always in Latin, for that matter, which they needn’t be now.). That system didn’t work very well*, and in the mid-18th century Linnaeus invented our modern system of binomial nomenclature. It’s surprising how many folks don’t realize that, arguably, the most important […]

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Yesterday, the wonderful bloggers at Dynamic Ecology announced that they were hanging up their collective hat. Well, mostly; Dynamic Ecology will no longer have regular posts, but all its content will remain available and new posts may appear from time to time. (I hope!) I want to take a moment to acknowledge just how good […]

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Warning: a little ranty. I’m fascinated by the weird things some scientists believe, in the face of what seems to me common sense and obvious constraints. There are many examples (like the common disdain for “nearly significant”), but the one I’ve chosen to offend people with today is a surprisingly common belief: that we could […]

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Once more, it’s Music Monday! Today: the somewhat weird relationship between exploration, daredevilry, and science. This is By Endurance We Conquer, the opening track from Science From an Easy Chair (the 2015 album from Have Gun, Will Travel). The album tells the story of the 1914-17 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition,led by Ernest Shackleton (I’ve actually linked […]

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My university, like dozens of others, has egg on its face this month. It’s unnecessary egg; and the egg (of course) isn’t the worst problem. All this has to do with the Covid-19 vaccination mandate we recently announced for our faculty, staff, and students – far too late, and after an embarrassing amount of foot-dragging […]

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Once more, it’s Music Monday! Today: particle physics, from Florence and the Machine. Strangeness and Charm is a bonus track from the band’s first album, Lungs. Strangeness and charm are also two of the six flavours of quarks in the standard model of particle physics; quarks occur tightly bound together to make up the subatomic […]

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This post was sparked by an interesting e-mail exchange with Jeremy Fox, over at Dynamic Ecology. We’d both come across the same announcement of a (very likely) case of research fraud, and had some similar reactions to it. We both knew there was a blog post in it! We agreed to post at the same […]

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Once more, it’s Music Monday! Today: astronomy, but also wildlife biology, and a little different perspective on science from John Prine. John Prine was an absolutely wonderful singer-songwriter. He wrote so many fantastic songs over a long career, and his last album, Tree of Forgiveness, was among his best. But I don’t quite know what […]

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Some parts of a writing project are exhilarating; some parts (at least for me) are grueling; and some are stubbornly perplexing.  One part is important but very, very tedious, and I’m deep in that part now:* checking proofs. Fortunately, there are some tricks to make dealing with proofs easier. In case you haven’t yet had […]

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