Author: Brianna
AKA, tabs I have open on my phone because I read them but thought they were too interesting to close right away. So share the love, right?
Next time I’ll try to keep better track of where I found the links. In no particular order…
Many of my thoughts on enjoying my life while still doing awesome science have been shaped by conversations with Edward Davis, who writes over at 4D Bio. He has a post about keeping three hobbies as a scientist that you should read.
For the record, mine generally are: exercise (includes rock climbing, weight lifting, and running mostly), riding horses, and a rotating third spot that tends to include metalwork, writing fiction or this blog, and reading for pleasure.
The Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments combines concise explanations of some common logical fallacies with beautiful, whimsical illustrations. I especially love the turtle in the “Slippery Slope” section murmuring, “That escalated quickly…” There’s also an email list for signup to be notified when the book becomes available in print.
I’ve now written two papers that required plain-language summaries in addition to the standard abstract. I went through, more or less sentence by sentence, and translated technical phrasing into something approximating the written explanation I’d give my parents or a researcher from another field. This discussion of plain language summaries from Arthropod Ecology (yes, I linked to something with a spider in the header) has some useful thoughts that I may incorporate next time – particularly on the “why” behind your research.
Scientific paper easter eggs: amusing little jokes hidden inside papers. I’ve seen the Physics one before (the abstract of a paper titled, “Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?” was “Probably not.”) but several of the others were new to me.
A July post from Dynamic Ecology on “shopkeeper science.” The analogy makes sense and there are some interesting thoughts on research impact per funding dollar. Don’t miss the comments section.
A blog post on what to keep in a research journal and why it’s important. This post focuses on the importance of using it as a reflective space for yourself, which we totally agree with – and you can check out our post on research journals/lab notes for concrete suggestions for ways to capture information.
Finally, I’m just going to link to the whole Tenure, She Wrote blog. It’s newish and I have been really enjoying the posts.
fossilosophy 