{"id":7981,"date":"2013-05-31T11:17:22","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T15:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=7981"},"modified":"2013-05-31T11:17:22","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T15:17:22","slug":"how-to-think-like-a-scientist-taking-stock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/05\/31\/how-to-think-like-a-scientist-taking-stock\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Think Like a Scientist: Taking Stock"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last several months, I’ve been poking along on the book-in-progress<\/a> in a very constrained manner– basically, I get to work on it in three-hour chunks on Tuesdays when I don’t have class (and this term, Thursdays as well). This is, as you might imagine, incredibly frustrating, though I do get some book-related stuff done in the evenings, mostly reading history of science books and the occasional textbook after the kids go to bed.<\/p>\n

Other stuff ate up a lot of this week’s meager writing time, and next week’s going to be a dead loss, as I’ll be at DAMOP in Quebec City<\/a>, then my 20th college reunion. The week after that, though, is our finals week, and after that<\/em>, I have the summer, when I’ll have much more time to devote to writing. So this is a reasonably good time to take stock of what I’ve got to this point.<\/p>\n

This has been a bit different than the other two books I’ve written, because it’s more compartmentalized. The structure calls for four sections, one for each of the four steps of the scientific process, and 3-4 short chapters in each section about everyday activities that demonstrate that aspect of scientific thinking. I’ve been writing these in more or less random order, because they should be mostly independent, not building on each other the way the dog books did (as they explained a single area of science in detail). My mental target for the chapter length was around 3,000 words, though I haven’t been all that good at stick to that, as you’ll see.<\/p>\n

Here’s the current state of things, with word counts from MS Word (yeah, yeah, yeah. It sucks, but it’s a publishing industry standard…). Numbers are for the latest complete draft, asterisks indicate chapters that are still actively being revised:<\/p>\n