Stephen Heard

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

I'll have to do some math... this still sounds hazardous🤣

And of course, if the book does what I hope, its readers will learn to write more efficiently. And that frees up time for something else. Like parasailing, base jumping, or wing-suit proximity flying. Gosh, maybe my book IS dangerous!

It suggests you reward self-discipline by allowing yourself "a piece of good chocolate" for writing 1,000 new words. It does not, however, dictate how big a "piece" is. You can see the (dietary) safety problem.

The #1 translatable science superpower: knowing what you don’t know Sometimes you hear a science PhD (or a science career) described as a process of learning more and more about less and less, until eventually you absolutely everything about nothing at all. This is…

An underrated part of critical thinking is knowing what you, yourself, don't know. And science can help us with that (if we let it). scientistseessquirre... 🧪

It's flammable. You could read it by candlelight, get too close to the candle, then when it catches fire* be surprised and drop it in your lap.

*It's surprisingly hard to ignite a book. In 'Fahrenheit 451', they soaked them with kerosene first. So don't do that.