Science Writing
drorzel | April 13, 2010I am currently on a committee looking to set some standards for technical writing in the introductory engineering sequence (which means the first two terms of physics, as they constitute 50-67% of the classes common to all first-year engineers). One of our jobs is to come up with a list of skills that we want to particularly emphasize in student writing in the first year.
I've already sent this query to my colleagues, who are the votes that really matter, but this seems like a worthy subject for a blog poll. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see if my wise and worldly readers prefer…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Via Twitter, Michael Barton is looking for some good books about physics. I was Twitter-less for a few days around the period of his request, and this is a more-than-140-characters topic if ever there was one, so I'm turning it into a blog post.
The reason for the request is that he's going to be working as an intern at the Einstein exhibit when it visits Portland, which makes this a little tricky, as relativity is not an area I've read a lot of popular books in (yet-- that's changing). That will make this a little more sparse than it might be in some other fields.
There's also an essential…
grrlscientist | April 7, 2010tags: Seed Media Group, online media, science news, science writing, public outreach, education, announcement, press release
Yesterday, The Mothership (Scienceblogs.com), released their traffic figures from the launch of the site in January 2006 through the first quarter of 2010. These numbers are quite impressive, regardless of which universe you inhabit [free PDF]:
Visits for the quarter ending March 31 grew by 41% year-over-year to approximately 13 million, and page views topped 25 million. Monthly unique visitors grew to 2.4 million worldwide and in the US surpassed 2 million for the…
rskloot | April 6, 2010I'm posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog. In my last FAQ post, I told the story of how I first learned about HeLa cells at sixteen. A related question I often get has to do with this one sentence in the book's prologue:
"I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high
school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative
school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking
Defler's class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting
in a college lecture hall…
rskloot | April 4, 2010I mentioned a while ago that I'll be posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog.
I thought I'd start the FAQs with one of the most commonly asked questions: How did you learn about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, and why did they grab you the way they did? Here is the answer, which I also posted about over on Powells.com's book blog this last week as part of a little guest blogging stint:
I first learned about Henrietta Lacks in the late 80s, when I was 16 and sitting in a basic biology class at Portland Community College
(…
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…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) blog carnival was just published! The 23rd edition of Scientia Pro Publica is hosted by Bjørn at Pleiotropy. Bjørn writes about this edition;
It has been a pleasure reading all the submitted posts. It always is. I have increased both my factual knowledge about nature - and thus my horizon - in ways that I think would not be nearly as easy if it wasn't for the science bloggers. Thank you all.
This time there was a…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2010tags: embargoed science, embargoes, publishing, MSM, journalism, science writing
Image: Orphaned?
Embargoes: you either love them or hate them, and I hate them. No, let me rephrase: I despise embargoes. In fact, science story embargoes have been my daily rant for literally years. No, really. Every f*cking day. Well, except maybe for Sundays, which is devoted to ranting about all those religious wackaloons who have been trying to recruit visiting the previous week and preaching at me when I was absent-minded enough to open the door. But until a few months ago when I finally managed to…
grrlscientist | March 1, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) blog carnival was just published! The 22nd edition of Scientia Pro Publica is hosted by Stephen at Reciprocal Space. Stephen writes about this edition;
Like a barnacle's penis, this edition of Scientia Pro Publica is long and strange and packed with seeds--for thought. There was a veritable plethora of submissions, ranging from flit-stops that sought only to highlight single point of interest to deeply rewarding essays…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein).
Lindsey's article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
The panelists made a point of stepping away from the scientists vs. bloggers frame (as well as the question of whether bloggers are or are not properly considered journalists). They said some interesting things about what defines a journalist -- perhaps a set of distinctive values (like a commitment to truth and accuracy, possibly also to the importance of telling an engaging story). This, rather than having a particular paying gig as a…
rskloot | January 31, 2010A quick post as I run out the door for the teeveey studio: Set your TiVos and your DVRs, mark your calendars: Tonight I'll be on ABC World News talking about my new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The segment will also feature members of Henrietta's family, and Vincent Racaniello with lots, and lots of HeLa cells.
ALSO: The first reviews of The Immortal Life are starting to hit newspapers. There's a terrific review on the front page of the Washington Post Outlook section today, and another great one in the St. Petersburg Times. Update: This great review just in from the…
drorzel | January 28, 2010Last week's Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics post sparked a fair bit of discussion, though most of it was at the expert level, well above the level of the intended audience. such is life in the physics blogosphere.
I think it's worth a little time to unpack some of the disagreement, though, as it sheds a little light on the process of writing this sort of thing for a general audience, and the eternal conflict between broad explanation and "dumbing down." And, if nothing else, it lets me put off grading the exams from last night for a little while longer.
So, what's the issue? The…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Via SFSignal's daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors:
YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY.
I don't lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what's best. It's my job to tell the damn story and produce enough raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right.
Read it. It's good, and very true.
"Yeah, but that's…
rskloot | January 26, 2010After ten long years, the serious countdown has begun for the publication of my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which will be on sale nationwide exactly SEVEN DAYS from today. I've been posting about my impending book tour, and all the great coverage the book has been getting, on Twitter and Facebook, but thought I'd also post a bit of a press round up here, and an update, for those who (gasp) don't spend all of their time in those places.
If you don't know what my book is about: it tells the story of a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells -- taken without her knowledge…
rskloot | January 23, 2010Are you in New York? Anywhere near New York? If so ... mark your calendars and come join us for the PUBLIC BOOK LAUNCH EVENT we've all been waiting for (well, at least we here at Culture Dish have been waiting for it ... plus a few other folks): In an evening emceed by Jad Abumrad of RADIOLAB, I'll be talking about my new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ... and rumor has it, some of Henrietta's family members will be there with me to answer your questions and SIGN YOUR BOOKS! Also, we will have live HeLa cells for people to see. So much excitement, we can hardly stand it. And…
grrlscientist | January 18, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
YAY!! Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) "The Blogodiversity Edition" was published today at Deep Thoughts and Silliness.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
Your host for the upcoming 1 February edition is John, author of Kind of Curious. To send…
drorzel | December 22, 2009I'm typing this from the local Barnes and Noble, waiting for the dealership next door to finish changing my oil and inspecting my car. Sadly, they don't have How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on the shelves in their (rather small) science section. Grump, grump, grump.
The disappointment at not immediately finding it on the shelves is tempered a bit by seeing it featured in The Big Idea at Scalzi's blog:
Want a Big Idea that's about a really big idea? Well, this week's book is about quantum physics, and it doesn't get much bigger than that (well, given the scale quantum physics works on, it…
drorzel | December 8, 2009There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the SF blogosphere about what writers should be paid for short fiction, which has led to a lot of people posting lists of their short fiction and what they were paid for it (Scalzi has links to most of them). This naturally leads me to wonder what the analogous situation for non-fiction is (being that I am vastly more likely to be paid money for non-fiction pieces than fiction).
Of course, I can't claim a long list of sales that I can list as my contribution to the discussion. I've only had a handful of pieces printed in commercial outlets: two pieces (so…
gregladen | December 7, 2009I have yet to meet anyone who has read this book, myself included. But apparently some sciency blogger picked up a copy the other day and noticed a near absence of female scientists represented in the anthology. Why? Y, apparently.
As you probably know, Richard Dawkins is presently being raked over blogospheric coals for having edited a volume of science writing that includes only about 3.6% of its works written by females. The observation was first made here at hgg, and has been discussed here at The Intersection, here at Aetiology, here at Questionable Authority, at Blue Lab Coats, here…