Stephen Heard

This is gorgeous. But "uncanny resemblance to a brain in a transparent skull"? Maybe with the involvement of a whole lot of psychelics...

The piece of writing that just won’t die This week, I’ve been deep into proofreading.* Checking proofs is an annoying bit of drudgery at the best of times, but it’s especially awful when the proofs go on and on and on – for 374 pages, in …

Checking proofs for the 3rd edition of 'The Scientist's Guide to Writing', and I'm thinking about the weirdness of having a piece of writing that Just Won't Die. scientistseessquirre... 🧪

It’s morning of day 1 of my shark field research skills class! Wish us luck, and let me know if you want to sign up for the fall! 🦑🧪🌎🦈

Writing Field Notes and Using Them to Prompt Scholarly Writing - Raul Pacheco-Vega, 2019

#RPVQual #RPVMethods

This is one of my most cited methods-specific articles and it's #Free2DownloadAndRead

"Writing Field Notes and Using Them to Prompt Scholarly Writing"

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

In which I argue that we may use field-notes to break free from "writer's block".

I'd take that bet. I think an LLM-written one would be much better - smoother, more grammatically polished, less tangled.

None of which undercuts your point in any way, of course!

Screenshot of weather forecast showing Tuesday high +3 C, low -5; Weds +7 and -3; Thursday +4 and -12.

Looking good!

A pair of cardinals sitting in the bare branches of a crabapple tree

Female cardinal sitting in the bare branches of a crabapple tree. Buff with an orange-red bill; feathers are fluffed against the cold.

Male cardinal sitting in the bare branches of a crabapple tree. Red plumage and bill with a black facemask and a sharply peaked crest; feathers are fluffed against the cold.

Now look, how am I supposed to get any work done with you two looking so handsome right outside my window?

Probably similar! Or like fudge. My dad used to help make it, and if you didn't stir enough, or boiled too far, you got big crystals (at best).

It's definitely harder to make - you have to stir continuously and the line between "finished" and "oops" is very thin. That's about all I know, though - I've never tried making it myself!

I'm tapping Tuesday! #BackYardSugarBush2026

How's your day going?

BNCF, Pal. 586, c. 1370.
archive.org/details/bncf...

It's almost like publishers made a list of all the things publishers are equipped to do, and decided not to do any of them, so it's all on authors who are NOT equipped to do them... anyway, sorry you're in this bind and I hope you find a path to keep doing what you want to do.

And if you've published one book that's sold in the 1000s, that's way, way worse than never having published at all. Which is utterly bizarre...

I'm running into this buzzsaw myself. Unless you can explain to a publisher exactly how they can count on your book to sell 50,000 copies, they're not interested. This isn't a way to develop authors!

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul How did we get here? And how do we get back?

"You can’t play a game where everybody is always trying to hit a home run. But that’s the only game New York publishers know how to play today." - on the bizarre state of publishing today. www.honest-broker.com/p/the-day-ny...

I was an associate editor for FACETS and had a very good experience. Nonprofit publisher, interesting papers, good management team. Consider this role!

I think there's some open water way over by the Quebec side - but I don't think I'll hike out over the ice to find out!

View across a frozen, snowcovered bay to a distant escarpment liberally dotted with wind turbines. In the foreground is a sign reading "Vagues - Chaleur - Waves".

Current view - across the Baie des Chaleurs from Charlo, NB towards the hills of Gaspesie, Quebec. Not sure I've seen it this solidly frozen.

But the sign... something about waves, but it's not specific enough. Kind of, what's the word.... vague. 🤣

Thank goodness!!

Livre des simples médecines

Florence Pal. 586, c. 1370:
archive.org/details/bncf...
teca.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/ImageViewer/...

#histmed #bookhistory

Three World Oak: 'the first memoir dedicated to a plant genus' A blog about plants and gardens (gardening, botany, algae and fungi)

Advance notice of my new oak book, due out 1 September 2026. Is it the world's first memoir of a genus? You be the judge.

Preorder now (links in my blog post) or find in your local book shop in the Australian sprinter/spring.

talkingplants.blogspot.com/2026/02/thre...

A line of maple trees in a snowy back yard, on a sunny day.

It's +5 C, and sunny, and I know that inside these maples the sap is running. I want to tap! But I can't until next week... #BackYardSugarBush2026

2(Simine is not sure that she ever said this but agrees that it sounds like something she would have said; personal communication Dec 14, 2021)

I searched my zotero library for 'personal communication', because these tend to be interesting and can illustrate how science really works. I was not disappointed, the most recent one in my library was this from @syeducation.bsky.social. More of this! doi.org/10.36850/mr11

That's definitely a downside. When I'm driving I often overrule that kind of shortcut but definitely lots of folks don't...

Google Maps. Even a small improvement in finding shortest routes has a massive carbon advantage

Common names can be amazing - especially, for some reason, in the UK!

A photo of the first page of the proofs for the book, in a three-ring binder with a pencil sitting crookedly on the page. At top is the chapter heading: "One. On Bacon, Hobbes, and Newton, and the Selfishness of Writing Well"

Proofs!

For 'The Scientist's Guide to Writing', 3rd edition, coming your way in August. Once, that is, I fix as many typos as I possibly can! scientistseessquirre...

Yes. I've reviewed for the Polish science foundation, and when on the NSERC panel I often asked for reviews from outside Canada.

Congrats and I'm so happy about your excitement. Don't let the departmental meeting squash that...

black-and-white photgraph of the hybosorid scarab Cryptogenius. Simply googling this genus name will yield a rancid pit of greed and scams, but very little actual beetle information.

yet another beetle genus whose SEO has been utterly destroyed by the whims of capitalism