May | 2025 | Scientist Sees Squirrel
4 posts published by ScientistSeesSquirrel during May 2025| Scientist Sees Squirrel
4 posts published by ScientistSeesSquirrel during May 2025| Scientist Sees Squirrel
3 posts published by ScientistSeesSquirrel during August 2025| Scientist Sees Squirrel
Warning: self-indulgent and strange (a two-for-one) I’ve been spending a lot of time at my keyboard this summer. OK, that’s nothing new: as a scientist, I write papers and grant proposals and reports and more; and I write this blog; and I write books. Books are the theme, this summer. I’m working, bizarrely, on three […]| Scientist Sees Squirrel
As a grad student, I loved to argue, about almost anything (mostly over beer). I avoided arguing with my PhD advisor though – mostly out of my knowledge that he was pretty famous, as ecologists go,…| Scientist Sees Squirrel
Latin names of plants and animals can do a lot of things. To name just a few: they can describe species or their habitat; they can honour someone the namer admires (even, rarely, himself*) or insult someone the namer despises; they can reference folklore or classic literature; they can even make a joke. Sometimes, when […]| Scientist Sees Squirrel
I started training grad students about three decades ago. You won’t be surprised to learn that at the time, I had very little idea how the heck to do that. One particular misapprehension I had really stands out to me today. I assumed that my grad students would be aiming to follow the same kind […]| Scientist Sees Squirrel
A month or so ago, I let myself be inspired by bad papers I’ve read,* and wrote a post called “What your Methods section isn’t”. Today, following up on that and with the same inspiration: what your…| Scientist Sees Squirrel
3 posts published by ScientistSeesSquirrel during July 2025| Scientist Sees Squirrel
If you want to get a bunch of academics really, really, really worked up, there are a few easy ways to do that. You can ask a seemingly innocuous question about (or express pretty much any position on) for-profit academic publishers, or the optimal sizes of research grants, or whether or not peer reviewers should […]| Scientist Sees Squirrel
I’ve been thinking, possibly more than I really want to, about uses of LLMs (large language models, like ChatGPT and its ilk). Specifically, I’m thinking about uses for scientific writers, and for …| Scientist Sees Squirrel
I had a strange thought the other day.* I was re-reading a chapter of my forthcoming book (Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences, with Bethann Garramon Merkle), and it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t imagine writing it from scratch. Which is very strange, because it wasn’t that long ago that I did […]| Scientist Sees Squirrel
Almost a decade ago now (can you believe I’ve been writing this blog for that long?), I pointed out that there are remarkably few novels written about scientists. Not, I mean, novels about science, which have to involve scientists, but novels about anything else in which the characters happen to be scientists. The wonderful writer […]| Scientist Sees Squirrel
Being a Principal Investigator (PI) in science comes with a whole array of challenges—juggling admin, mentoring, grant deadlines, and finding time for your own research and writing. And almost none…| Scientist Sees Squirrel
3 posts published by ScientistSeesSquirrel during June 2025| Scientist Sees Squirrel
If you’re a scientist like me, you read a lot of papers – and a lot of submitted manuscripts, drafts, and other larval stages of papers.* This is extremely helpful when it’s time to write your own …| Scientist Sees Squirrel
About six weeks ago I annoyed a lot of people by pointing out an inconvenient truth about generative AI (ChatGPT and other large-language models): it is not, in fact, burning down the planet. Despi…| Scientist Sees Squirrel
At least on social media, it’s become common to see ChatGPT and other large-language model writing tools* described as “the plagiarism tool that’s burning down the planet”. This is, I have to admit…| Scientist Sees Squirrel
Here’s an interesting thing about “AI”* writing tools (ChatGPT and the like, better called LLMs for “large language models”): there’s an enormous amount written about them, and yet little of it is …| Scientist Sees Squirrel
About a year ago, I posted some basic information about my new book, coauthored with the brilliant Bethann Garramon Merkle. It’s time for an update: as books grow up, they change and presumably imp…| Scientist Sees Squirrel
Image: Cover of The Idiot, by John Kendick Bangs (Harper and Bros. 1895). Yes, I know there’s a much more famous The Idiot. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will: you submit a manuscript for pu…| Scientist Sees Squirrel
