Several months ago, I wrote about how to write, and read, a job rejection letter. I know a lot about those. I also know quite a bit about manuscript rejections (as most of us do). I’ve received so many I’ve lost track, and I’ve written as many or more as an editor. Just as with job rejections, there are better manuscript rejections and worse ones. Continue reading
Some time ago now, I raved about Caribou Run: a book of poetry about – no, not about, but heavily referencing – science*. Ever since I’ve meant to write about another book of poetry that crossed my path around the same time: Madhur Anand’s A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes. The books are totally unalike, except for two things: the way they explore connections between poetry and science (including scientific writing, a pet interest of mine), and the fact that I enjoyed each very much.
Caribou Run is the work of a poet fascinated by science. A New Index is the work of a scientist who is also a poet. The fact that I can’t decide whether this contrast makes a difference seems like good evidence that the boundary between the arts and science is porous from both sides. Continue reading
Image: Letterbox © Tim Green CC BY 2.0, via wikimedia.org. Don’t mail a live animal here.
Early in the summer, the legal humour blog Lowering the Bar had a good time with the fact that in the U.S. you can mail live scorpions – under certain amusing but also completely understandable conditions. (One of which is that they aren’t this kind. Another is that they’re being mailed for use in medical research or the manufacture of antivenins. So maybe I should have said that live scorpions can be mailed, because most likely you can’t mail them. This is probably just as well.)
This appealed to my admittedly peculiar sense of humour, so I promptly read the entirety of the U.S. Postal Service regulations on mailing live animals. Then the equivalent Canada Post regulations. Then the U.K. Royal Mail’s*. I’m happy, today, to be able to share the results of my research with you.
Cultural anthropology and biology have an interesting point of contact in what are called “folk taxonomies”. Continue reading
Image: This is what 1300 g (2.8 lb) of basil looks like.
Yesterday (as I write) I bought some basil at my local farmer’s market. Quite a lot of basil, actually – almost 3 pounds of it – because it was my annual pesto-making day*. My favourite vendor sells basil by the stem (at 50¢ each), and I started pulling stems from a large tub. Some stems were quite small, and some were huge, with at least a five-fold difference in size between smallest and largest (and no, I didn’t get to just pick out the huge ones). So how many stems did I need? Or to put it the other way around, given that I bought 49 stems, how many batches of pesto would I be making, and how many cups of walnuts would I need?
My undergrad students – like a lot of biology students – don’t like statistics. Continue reading
Image: Feedback © Alan Levine CC BY 2.0
This post is jointly written by Steve Heard and Jacquelyn Gill, and appears in addition on Jacquelyn’s blog The Contemplative Mammoth
Early this summer, we asked for your experience and your attitudes about the practice of candidates’ asking for feedback on their (unsuccessful) job applications (with respect to university/college academic jobs). We polled both job candidates and search committee members, and here we’ll report the results and give you some of our thoughts. We also hope you’ll leave your own thoughts and share your experiences in the Replies.
(1) It’s hard to write a poll Continue reading
My father, Douglas Heard, died last month at the age of 77. I don’t think he ever read Scientist Sees Squirrel, and he won’t be reading this post. But he’s a presence in everything I do.
I have a friend, far outside of science, who once told me that my blog posts are like sermons. Continue reading
Scientist Sees Squirrel 