Warning: navel gazing This week, my campus is bustling, school buses are lumbering down the streets, and there’s that new-school-year-buzz around almost everything. People are going back to school! But, for the first time since 1969, not me, and that’s a bit weird. Yes: in September of 1970 I headed off to kindergarten, and for...

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Warning: long, rather strange post; but stick around; there’s art. If you’ve been reading Scientist Sees Squirrel for a while, you’ll know that I enjoy finding interesting connections between seemingly unrelated things. I may have jumped the shark, because today I want to tell you about how I connected my research on the evolution of...

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For the last decade or so, one of my side gigs has been as a member of the volunteer Board of our local Botanic Garden. It needed fixing, a few friends and I managed to fix it, and the way we managed to fix it connects in some interesting ways to how we seem to...

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You probably aren’t reading this post. Well, OK, you are (whoever you are, and thanks); but nobody else is. That sounds like authorial indignation, but in fact what’s behind it is simple: readership of this blog drops in the summer.* Always has; and from this I infer that folks read Scientist Sees Squirrel when they’re...

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Last month, my coauthors and I got peer reviews back on a manuscript, and we were pleased to see the editor recommend “minor revisions”. There were quite a few comments, mostly quite helpful – the revision will be better than the draft we submitted, and thus the more important of the two functions of peer...

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As I write this, I’m about to take off for two weeks in Vienna and Turin (when you read it, I’ll be recovering from jet lag on my return home). When I travel, I love to visit art galleries (among other things). I’m excited about the galleries in store for me on this trip, and...

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I used to be extremely diligent about returning shopping carts to cart-return corrals. But recently, at the supermarket where I usually shop, I’ve found myself being sloppier, and I’m having trouble being bothered by that. Why? A few months ago, the supermarket started installing fences and plexiglass barriers everywhere, tightly controlling entry and exit, and...

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If you read a lot of books (like I do), and especially if what you read is a bit all over the map (as it is for me), then you’ll likely be interested in my latest experiment in recommending, and finding, books to read. It started with an email that I came thiiiiiis close to...

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I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the early days of (European) science – roughly, the time from the 16th to early 19th centuries when we were essentially inventing science as a process. Sure, we’d been trying to figure out the natural world before that (and other world cultures were trying too); but through...

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I’ve just cashed last year’s (meagre) royalty cheque for Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider, and so now I have four years’ worth of sales data with which to consider what one might expect for the life of a book. How many copies might you expect a book like Charles Darwin’s Barnacle to sell?...

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