I’m a late addition to a Sunday panel at Worldcon: Science Blogging – The New Science Journalism? Touted as a new way of reaching the public, has science blogging matched its initial promise? Has it caused more problems than it solves? Well? What do you all think?
Category: Science Writing
Academic Poll: Paper Torture
I’m sitting here finding new and inventive ways to not write the pedagogical paper I’m working on at the moment. This seems like a good excuse for a poll! The hardest part of writing a paper is:(survey) As you can tell from the list of elements, I have scientific papers in mind, here, but other […]
Journalists Unclear on the Concept
No, this isn’t another “How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic” post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong’s discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what “science journalism” actually means: Certainly, […]
Popularization Is Its Own Reward?
One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don’t align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded– with tenure, promotion, and salary increases– for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little […]
Writing Is Easy, Except When It Isn’t
Tom Levenson has another excellent piece in his series on the writing of his forthcoming book on Newton, this one on hitting a wall: The one bit of history specific to the Newton and the Counterfeiter project came when I hit a wall. I had written about a quarter of the manuscript by the autumn […]
The Physics of NASCAR by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
When this first came out, I didn’t pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn’t really think I’d be interested in reading a whole book on the subject. I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads […]
Three Quarks for Science Writing
I already mentioned this in a Links Dump, but there’s enough buzz that it’s probably worth a full post: the people at Three Quarks Daily have decided to offer prizes for blog writing: Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce […]
Women, Fast Cars, and Physics
I’m speaking, of course, about this past weekend’s Bloggingheads conversation between Jennifer Ouellette and Diandra Leslie-Pelecky. They both blog at Cocktail Party Physics, and Diandra has written The Physics of NASCAR. It’s a good Bloggingheads, covering a wide range of topics related to physics, sports, and entertainment. Jennifer talks about the work of the Science […]
The Art and Science of Naming Things
We had a talk last night by Alan Lightman of MIT, a theoretical physicist and novelist, best known as the author of Einstein’s Dreams. He spoke for about an hour about his own background, and the similarities and differences between the worlds of science and the arts. One of the differences he mentioned was the […]
I Do Not Think That Means What You Think It Means
A couple of physics stories in the last few days have caught my attention for reasons that can be lumped together under the Vizzini Effect– that is, they say things that involve unconventional uses of common words. Take, for example, the Physics World story Physicists distinguish between the indistinguishable, which starts off: Spurred on by […]