Warning: I’m a bit cranky today. Late last month, I dashed off a quick email to someone I work with – and was a bit chastened to get an autoreply “I’m out of the office for Thanksgiving”.  It was just another Thursday afternoon for me, but I’d forgotten that it was Thanksgiving in the U.S. […]

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Image: “A Close Call for Six Citizens of Calais”.* Public Domain. Spoiler alert: “Outlander” plot spoilers.  Except they aren’t really, which as you’ll see is the whole point of the post. I occasionally offer advice here on Scientist Sees Squirrel.  I’m here today to give you some meta-advice: be wary of my advice (but not […]

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I’m teaching Entomology this semester, and having a blast as usual.  Our 80 minute lecture slots are way too long, though, so one thing I do is interrupt the flow about half-way through for “Bug Of The Day”.  That’s just a slide or sometimes two about some cool bug, often with a real specimen to […]

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I read a fascinating paper about Darwin the other day – and perhaps you’ll be surprised to learn it was by a Shakespearian.  My colleague and friend Randall Martin has just published “Evolutionary Naturalism and Embodied Ecology in Shakespearian Performance (with a Scene from King John)” (Shakespeare Survey 71 [2018]: 147-63). I know, Darwin doesn’t […]

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Well, OK, I answered a lot more questions this week, but what I mean is that I’m the week’s featured interview on 46 Questions.  46 Questions is a great idea.  Every week they feature a scientist giving quick, short answers to 46 questions – questions that emphasize the scientist as a person with hobbies and […]

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Image: Books 5 – 9 in Louise Penny’s Three Pines series, featuring Armand Gamache. “I don’t know. I was wrong. I’m sorry”.  Lacoste recited them slowly, lifting a finger to count them off. “I need help”, the Chief said, completing the statements.  The ones he’d taught young Agent Lacoste many years ago.  The ones he […]

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Image: “It was a dark and stormy night…”, from Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford (1830).  Check out similarly wretched prose at the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I’ve been prepping recently for two different writing workshops: one on my home campus, and another half-way across the continent at the University of Wyoming.  A funny thing happens […]

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Images: The bottles in question (© S Heard CC BY 4.0); and the video screen that sparked the question (© Alex Smith).  Warning: might be considered navel-gazing. If you’ve ever seen my office, you’ll know that it’s a disaster zone.  Piles of books, unruly sheaves of paper, empty binders and full ones, cases and boxes […]

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Image: Writing, CC 0 I teach a scientific writing course, and I think I’m doing it wrong. I don’t mean that I’m teaching my course wrong.  It might not be the course you’d teach, but I’m happy enough with it, and my students seem to be too.  What I mean, I guess, is that we’re […]

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Image: Marionette, © Thomas Quine CC BY 2.0 via flickr.com When we do science, we presumably want that science to have both impact and reach.  By “impact”, I mean more than citation counts: I mean that what we’ve done adds to human knowledge and changes how we think about, and interact with, our world.  By […]

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