communicating science
pharyngula | April 14, 2010It looks like Michael De Dora is calling me out. The wishy-washy, sloppy-thinking director of the NY CFI, whose main claim to fame lately is a series of blog articles notable only for their fuzziness and willingness to accommodate any nonsense from religious BS artists, is now taking me to task for my post arguing that the Tennessee case of a creationist objecting to a textbook calling creationism "the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days" was a) an example of a true twit peddling ignorance, and b) that the textbook phrasing was accurate and…
pharyngula | April 10, 2010
For many years, the NSF has been producing a biennial report on American attitudes (and many other statistics) about science called Science and Engineering Indicators. This year, as they have every year, they got the uncomfortable news that a majority of our compatriots reject human evolution and the Big Bang (that last one might have been partly because of the dumb way the question is phrased). What's different, though, is that for the first time the NSF has decided to omit the fact.
This is very strange. It is a serious problem in our educational system that so much of the public is vocal…
laelaps | April 9, 2010
Now that the details about Australopithecus sediba have been published, I am faced with an important question - how am I going to fit the new hominin into Written in Stone?
When I started composing Written in Stone I was determined to make it as up-to-date as possible. This was not only out of a concern for accuracy, but also stemmed from a desire to present the public with some discoveries that they may not have heard about before. Given that new paleontological papers are being published every week, however, I have often been faced with the question of how to incorporate interesting new…
laelaps | April 7, 2010Want the dirt on the new species of fossil human which will be described in Science this week? Tune in to the BBC World Service "Science in Action" program this Friday to hear me discuss the discovery with host Jon Stewart. The program should be available on the web sometime after it airs, as well.
laelaps | April 6, 2010
A few weeks ago, during the last part of the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series, I briefly mentioned the idea of creating a series of mini-documentaries which would help promote my forthcoming book Written in Stone. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, but I have a bit of a problem. I have never created a short film before (well, outside of TV class in high school), and I am asking for a bit of advice from those who are more experienced with video projects.
At the moment I have two primary questions. The first is, what sort of digital video recorder should I buy? I…
laelaps | April 5, 2010According to multiple reports released yesterday, scientists will announce the discovery of a new species of two-million-year-old hominin this week. Do you know what that means? That's right; writers are breaking out the pop-sci boilerplate to tell us all about the new "missing link." To paraphrase what I have seen in the headlines alone, the find is the "missing link which will shed new light on human evolution and rewrite what we thought we knew about our history."
I don't believe the hype, but I can only speculate on the actual significance of the specimens in question. According to the…
laelaps | March 26, 2010
The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book?
Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will undoubtedly be in competition with numerous other science titles for the chance of being reviewed in the few publications which still review science books at all. Book tours, too, have become nearly extinct, and as a virtually unknown science writer I don't expect many (any?) people to show up at their…
laelaps | March 22, 2010
Last Friday I posted an open-thread in an attempt to gauge what readers might be getting from the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series (Parts 1, 2, and 3), and I was quite pleased by the response. I was glad to hear so many of you have found it useful (or intend to go back to it when you get your own book projects in order). There were also a few questions about the book-writing process, and I will answer them here.
Most of the questions were asked by Stan, and I'll go through them one at a time.
"How did you solve the balance between themes that you personally found interesting,…
laelaps | March 17, 2010
Earlier this week I discussed how to find a publisher for your book and how blogs can be useful tools in that process, but what about the effort that goes into completing a manuscript?
As Michael has pointed out in his latest blog-length contribution to our conversation, every writer is different. How Michael approached writing Sand was very different from how I went about composing Written in Stone, so rather than try to lay out a precise set of writing rules I will attempt to summarize my unique writing experience.
By the time I signed with Bellevue Literary Press in the autumn of 2009…
laelaps | March 16, 2010
Blogs, as Carl Zimmer astutely noted at this year's ScienceOnline conference, are software. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether science bloggers can or should replace science journalists the fact of the matter is that science blogs are the independent expressions of a variety of writers about subjects which they feel passionate about. There is no single science blog archetype that all blogs must fit, and this flexibility allows science writers the freedom to compose and promote their work in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
Hindsight being what it is, of course, I can look…
laelaps | March 15, 2010
Writing a popular science book has simultaneously been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my writing career so far. It was not so much something that I wanted to do as a task that I needed to do, and without that sense of resolve Written in Stone would probably be a half-finished manuscript left to rot on my hard drive. While hard-headed persistence has been essential to writing my book, though, it was not the only thing I required, and through this blog conversation with David Williams (author of Stories in Stone; blog) and Michael Welland (author of Sand; blog) I hope to…
pharyngula | March 9, 2010Well. There's another paper out discussing science blogs, which is a good thing, I suppose. I just find the conclusion a bit disappointing. Bora has an exhaustive dissection, and both The Panda's Thumb and Cosmic Variance have briefer (they'd have to be! Bora got loquacious) discussions of the topic.
Where the author loses me is with this summary.
To become a tool for non-scientist participation, science blogs need to stabilize as a genre or as a set of subgenres where smaller conversations may facilitate more meaningful participation from members of the public. Science bloggers need to…
laelaps | March 8, 2010
Long-time readers of this blog know that "Laelaps" is not so much a stand-alone repository of my thoughts and opinions as an active writing lab; from the very beginning I have had bigger things in mind. One of those projects, my book Written in Stone, will be published later this year, and every now and then I have thrown together a few thoughts on what it is like to write a pop-sci book. I am hardly the only science blogger to have gone through this process, though, and starting next week I will be teaming up with two other geoscience writers in an effort to help potential book authors…
pharyngula | March 8, 2010I got so sick of dreary beancounting communications 'experts' telling me that we need to avoid fighting creationists … because the magical drone of framing was going to make everyone happy and persuade the jebus-loving ignoramuses that evolution was good. There are signs that these parasites are moving on now — to climate science.
Oh, great. Here's a potentially greater material problem for us than even the sad state of science education, and now the good-haired knob-polishers are moving in to dispense their advice of indolence and tone. Dot Earth has an exchange between Matt Nisbet and Randy…
pharyngula | March 4, 2010The other day, I got a request for an interview: a reporter was writing a story about Ken Miller. I was happy to do so — this was clearly going to be a friendly piece about Miller, and I thought it was good that he get some more press. I talked on the phone with this fellow for 20 minutes or so, and I told him what I thought: Miller is a smart guy, a great speaker, a hardworking asset to the people opposing creationism, and I also said that his efforts to squeeze religion into science were ill-founded and badly argued. I said, "It's an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline with…
pharyngula | March 2, 2010Have you heard about this strange new web service, Chatroulette? It makes webcam connections between random pairs of people with the idea that it'll spark interesting conversations. I like the idea, but I haven't tried it yet myself because a) I've heard that mainly what you get is pathetic exhibitionist men who aim the camera at their crotch, or b) people who want to chat about sex and flick past anyone who isn't pretty enough (I think I'd be subject to rather rapid dismissals), and c) I DON'T HAVE TIME TO CHAT RIGHT NOW. MUST WRITE.
However, here's an interesting use of the service: this…
pharyngula | February 23, 2010It's a little disturbing to see an entire vast field of science reduced to a one-page cartoon, but it did win an award for science visualization, and we've got to get people hooked on the cool stuff somehow.
laelaps | February 14, 2010
If I were teaching a course on evolution, this would probably be the first thing I would show the class.
laelaps | February 4, 2010I got a pretty nice surprise yesterday morning; Laelaps was listed as one of the "Top 30 Science Blogs" by the Times science magazine Eureka! I was proud to see this blog featured alongside those of Scicurious, Ed, Carl, David, Sheril, Bora, and many of the others who made the list. Even better, Eureka wants to expand the list to include the top 100 science blogs, so be sure to send in your nominations for the best of the best to eureka@thetimes.co.uk, with "Best blogs" in the subject line.
And, as Ed already said, Times science editor Mark Henderson deserves three cheers (and a bit more) for…
laelaps | February 1, 2010The due date for Written in Stone is still nine months away, but I have already started to compose a list of potential op-eds, essays, and articles that will help promote its release. They range from summaries of the book's premise to stories that were hacked out during the editing process, but the question is where I should pitch these ideas. There are only a limited number of popular science publications now in operation, and even among this small pool there are some that cannot pay writers and others that do not accept unsolicited proposals. As you can guess, trying to be a freelance…