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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I’ve never considered myself a particularly good writer. I’m not a particularly bad writer either; but it takes me lots of work and drafting to turn out serviceable prose.* It takes me less work than it used to, to be sure; but it still takes work. There are three kinds of good news in this....

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Earlier this year, a newly described fossil amphibian* made a (small) media splash: Kermitops gratus, from the Early Permian of Texas. The name Kermitops is a combination of (obviously) Kermit and (less obviously) “-ops”, a Greek form meaning “face”. And sure enough, the authors’ reconstruction suggests a definite facial resemblance to the frog they call...

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Some writing advice from Ursula Le Guin* is making the rounds, and it’s pithy and fun and sort of helpful. It’s an older piece just reprinted by LitHub, and its spread was surely helped when it was enthusiastically endorsed by Neil Gaiman. The whole piece is worth reading, but here’s the key bit: You want...

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Early in my career, I was something of a purist about applying for grants. I was convinced that I was only interested in discovery/basic science (as opposed to applied science), and I didn’t apply to anything that wasn’t 100% discovery-oriented. This, of course, meant that I passed up a lot of opportunities to fund my...

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When I teach scientific writing, I of course teach my students the canonical IMRaD  structure of a scientific paper (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). They really like this, and I understand why: writing a scientific paper is a terrifying proposition, when you haven’t done it before, and having a very clear road map, a core...

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The Cambrian shallow-ocean fauna of the Burgess Shale (~510 million years old) included lots of fabulous creatures, and some of them have been given fabulous names. A week ago, my favourites would (perhaps predictably) have been Hallucigenia and Wiwaxia*. They’ve been dethroned, though, because I’ve learned about Yawunik kootenayi. We know the Burgess fauna better...

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