My main impetus for starting a blog was to improve my writing. While I think I’ve accomplished that in the 5 years since I started, I’d like to increase the speed at which I write, and establish a regular writing routine (something I’m definitely lacking/procrastinating about currently). To hopefully fix this, I’m considering assigning myself an outreach writing challenge project to write 250 articles highlighting newly described species in 2015. That’s pretty much an article every weekday for the entire year (with a few days buffer built in for holidays, travel, etc). I’d keep each article to no more than 300 words, and I’d distribute them taxonomically to reflect global biodiversity (i.e. 1 extant mammal all year, but a beetle pretty well every week; take that vertebrate bias).
Not only will this hopefully establish better writing habits, and allow me to learn about organisms that I’m currently pretty clueless about, but it should also draw some attention to a lot of new species which may otherwise go unrecognized. YAY Taxonomy!
I’m not going to call it a New Year’s Resolution, because resolutions are meant to be broken, but rather a goal, something to strive towards. Am I crazy to try it? Maybe, but I think it’s worth a shot.
Filed under Taxonomy Writing What am I even doing Like I need another project
This is by far one of the greatest pieces of science communication I’ve read/heard/seen all year, possibly ever. Derek Muller of Veritasium breaks down the most radioactive places on earth, and finishes with an absolutely killer ending. This is a must watch, and should be broken down piece by pice by anyone interested in science communication to see how he made it work.
Filed under science communication outreach video holyFthisisgood physics
amnhnyc:
It’s here! Watch episode 2 of Shelf Life right now and then dive deep into this episode on the series website.
This is really great. Except for misspelling Willi Hennig’s name in the history of classification. That’s not so great.
(via amnhnyc)
Random thing I just stumbled across: a paper describing a new genus & species of soil mite (Osperalycus tenerphagus) is the most viewed paper in the Journal of Natural History. In fact, it has more views than the rest of the top 10 most viewed papers for the journal combined (which includes a touching memorial to Charles Darwin, and an important paper by Alfred Russell Wallace).
But, why? Why would a taxonomic paper on an obscure soil mite from Ohio be the most viewed article in a journal with 176 years of history*? From what I can tell, it’s largely because Quentin Wheeler wrote about it in his blog at The Guardian. While probably less than a dozen people will ever see or collect this mite themselves, at least 10,000 people now know it exists thanks to social media and blogging.
I don’t want to read too much into this, I just think it’s an interesting example of social media’s potential to breathe new life and interest into disciplines like Natural History & Taxonomy.
*Obviously this is only counting views since the papers have been put online & is skewed, but still.
Filed under taxonomy natural history social media blogging nomenclature mite navel gazing
markscherz:
Zoologists, botanists, mycologists, and all organismal scientists, share a common practice that receives quite a lot of negative attention: specimen collection. I receive questions every now and then on the reason why specimens have to be collected in the field, along with comments on how ‘cruel’ and ‘cold-blooded’ it is to kill and preserve specimens ‘just for the sake of science’. I want to discuss this issue in the context of some recent debate on this topic. This article is long, so I hide the rest beneath the Read More.
Read More
Excellent take down by Mark of a terrible paper!
