Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

Some of you may have noticed that there is another award on my left sideboard, the Intellectual Blogger Award. Part of the requirements for receiving this award is that the award recipient (me, in this case) must choose five blogs that make her think. I decided that I would choose blogs that deserve more exposure to the public in my opinion, instead of choosing those blogs that have been noticed and awarded the Intellectual Blogger Award several times already. Interestingly, all of the blogs that fulfilled these criteria are written by women. So I am proud to list these blog writers as my five choices;

Young Female Scientist; the author and I are friends from waaaay back in our early days on Blogger, when I was happily employed as a postdoc (and she, not so happily employed as a postdoc) and when we both had first started writing our blogs. She writes extensively about what it is like to be a postdoc searching for a tenure-track position in a biomedical research field.

Dharma Bums; another blog from my very early days on Blogger, this blog is team-written by a lovely couple from California who retired to my other home; Seattle (well, they live near Seattle, but I know the area very well so their essays and images are wonderfully evocative). Not surprisingly, the Dharma Bums primarily write about life in the Pacific Northwest, although they often write about politics as well.

The Library Diva; written by a wonderful woman who is a dedicated bookworm (as her blog name implies) and curator at a NYstate museum who is a friend of mine from craigslist. Library Diva mostly writes about her adventures with literature (mostly fiction), and her thoughts about the many books she's read.

Burning Silo; this is a gorgeous nature photoessay blog written by Bev, who has generously shared her amazing images with the readers of this blog as the "image of the day" from time to time. Bev has a fascination with invertebrates, with spiders in particular. You might recall that I have a wee bit of a spider phobia, so I like to read her thoughtful essays about spiders in particular. (I am thinking I need to ask her for permission to use a few more of her images in the near future).

She Blinded Me With Science!; written by a science writer who is a former student of mine ... well, if you can consider my own brief stint as a guest lecturer at the journalism grad school at NYU in January 2006 as qualifying for a teacher-student relationship. ... ... ... Melinda, the author, writes frequently about the essays she's sold to various magazines. It's interesting to see what information does and does not make it into each piece that she sells.