One of the enormous ironies of the Covid-19 pandemic is that what should be an unquestioned triumph for science seem to have actually reduced trust in science for many. In less than a year science provided the tools to end a global pandemic, including an understanding of transmission, sophisticated models of epidemiology, and multiple safe […]

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It’s Music Monday again. Today: statistics! Yes, really. The late folksinger Stan Rogers had a little tiny revival last year when that bizarre and brief sea-shanty fad took hold, and Barrett’s Privateers got an extra 15 minutes of fame. But Rogers also sang land shanties, or at least, he sang one: The White Collar Holler*. […]

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I’m excited: the second edition of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing is now available for pre-order! I’ve been working on this second edition for a year and a half now. While you can’t have it on your shelf just yet (it’s slated for publication January 11, 2022), you could in principle order a copy today.* […]

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It’s Music Monday again. Today: some entomology.  Yes, you knew I’d get there eventually. Here’s Canadian folksinger Murray McLaughlan, with Out Past the Timberline (from his terrific 1983 album Timberline). It’s a reflection on Canada’s North, and beautifully atmospheric;it’s a real shame there isn’t a video for this song. I’ll admit the science content is […]

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This week I got to do one of my favourite things: shorten a manuscript.* This one we’re targeting for a journal that has a 30 page limit on manuscript length. We started at 37 pages, and I was immensely pleased to hit about 29.7 (giving my coauthors just a little wiggle room to reject one […]

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It’s Music Monday again. Today: evolutionary biology! Here’s the Finnish heavy-metal band Nightwish, with Endless Forms – quite likely the only heavy-metal song ever to quote Darwin and mention Tiktaalik: Beyond aeons we take a ride Welcoming the shrew that survived To see the Tiktaalik take her first walk Witness the birth of flight My […]

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I’ve just read Graham Moore’s The Last Days of Night, a novel based on the battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over AC vs DC electrification in the 1880s. This was a fascinating story*, but I’m taking off from it on a tangent today. The epigraph for Chapter 23 is a quote attributed to […]

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It’s Music Monday again. Today: math! Here’s Jonathan Coulton, with “Mandelbrot Set” – a song about the fractal set of complex numbers we call, eponymously, the Mandelbrot Set. Coulton sings about Mandelbrot (the song was written before Mandelbrot’s death in 2010, in case the lyrics puzzle you) and about the math behind the fractal imagery […]

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I was tidying up old paper files in my office last week (don’t ask) when I came across the records from my tenure review, 20 years ago. You’d think 20 years of perspective would make me less angry – but you’d be wrong. What 20 years of perspective has done, though, is let me diagnose […]

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Welcome to Music Mondays – something a little different I’m trying this summer. If you’ve been hanging around Scientist Sees Squirrel, you’ll know that one of the (way too many) things that interests me is points of contact between science and the arts. I’ve asked, for example, why there seem to be relatively few novels […]

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