Stephen Heard

@stephenbheard.bsky.social

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Evolutionary ecologist & Boggle aficionado. Author: The Scientist's Guide to Writing; Charles Darwin's Barnacle and David Bowie's Spider. He/him.

Blog and book links: scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

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The phrases "it is simple, you just do..." or "it is just common sense" are 100% indicators that the speaker or writer lacks any knowledge of the subject matter. Everything is easy if you don't know anything.

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Thought I finally got a tarantula wasp shot today, but the abdomen was wrong. A biology PhD student friend showed it to some colleagues, who pointed me to the Alcathoe genus on iNaturalist. #Invertebrates

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Let's get Steve over the 2000 sales mark. The barnacle is a lovely book, and I read it with great pleasure. I am even considering buying a physical copy to complement my Kindle copy. Kindle kind of sucks (except when traveling).

Ever wonder what the life history of a book is like? Burn fast, fade quickly, vs. long quiet persistence? Consider 4 years' data for 'Charles Darwin's Barnacle and David Bowie's Spider' here: scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/t...

The life of a bookscientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com I’ve just cashed last year’s (meagre) royalty cheque for Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider, and so now I have four years’ worth of sales data with which to consider what one might exp...

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It never gets old. #paleosky #paleontology #dinosaurs #scicomm #museums

All these years I've been doing it wrong. I use flagging tape and tweezers, and apparently Fisher Scientific sells field-installable Whirling-Blade People Crushers!

Your moment of Zen. Hastie Brook, Goose River Trail, Fundy National Park, New Brunswick. Nice hike the other day. vimeo.com/974294336

20240629_093759vimeo.com This is "20240629_093759" by Stephen Heard on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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My footnote is bigger than yours. Greetings from Christian Philipp Leutwein's 1691 pamphlet featuring a very space-consuming footnote on page 18. In fact, the footnote started on page 17... #bookhistory #academia #academicchatter

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Peekaboo! A Tarantula hawk wasp is nectaring on milkweed blooms at the local Park. #inverts Southern California 1 of 2

If you're teaching Scientific Writing this fall, and especially if it's a new course for you - this your periodic reminder that all my course materials are available for you to borrow/modify/whatever! scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/s...

Steal this (updated) syllabus for Scientific Writingscientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com I’ve just finished the 3rd go-around of my Scientific Writing course. When I first signed up to teach it, I was very scared, but now that I’ve been through it a few times, I’m quite pleased with how ...

I would rephrase to "AI used by those who don't know or care what it does is bad for science". But otherwise: yes, this is happening; yes, it's bad. I've taken to randomly verifying a few citations in any MS I read...

Recently, I was peer reviewing a paper, and it cited one of my papers. Except... it wasn't anything I had written. The title sounds like something I'd write. It included coauthors I work with, and was in a journal I've published in. But it wasn't real. AI is not good for science.

Although @hildur.bsky.social is a fiction writer, these tips completely resonate with me as a scientific writer. Endorse!

My number one writing tip is: DON'T keep going back to the beginning and fiddling with stuff and starting over. You are allowed to rewrite what you wrote the day before but touch NOTHING you wrote before that. I have met people who never finish anything because they keep starting over and over.

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Over a career in science, you write a LOT - so it's worth celebrating the bits you think you did well. Here are a couple of mine; and I invite you to share yours too! scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/06/25/m...

My favourite bits, of everything I’ve ever writtenscientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com I’ve never considered myself a particularly good writer. I’m not a particularly bad writer either; but it takes me lots of work and drafting to turn out serviceable prose.* It takes me less work than ...

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Today is the day! My debut book, Becoming Earth, is officially published and out in the world!

There's actually some (mixed) evidence that critter names affect public interest in their conservation! There's definitely evidence that critter names affect media coverage (and thus public awareness).

scientists should forget all that stuff about taxonomy and population genetics and just focus on new species critter names as the primary pathway to conservation action

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Need to reset? Trace the diffuse brown pillars in Hubble’s image of star-forming region Westerlund 2. Each pillar is a few light-years tall. For context, one light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion kilometers). Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI. 🔭 🧪

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I am reviewing the most BEAUTIFULLY written manuscript holy cow. Whoever you are, I want to write science like you, please and thank you. (Earlier today I was reviewing a different manuscript, which I'm like 80% sure was written by AI. Swings and roundabouts.)

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The ebook of THE BOOK PROPOSAL BOOK is 30% off right now when you use code PUP30 on the Princeton UP website. press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/... Combine it with my free worksheets (get them at bookproposalbook.com) and knock out that proposal draft this summer

The Book Proposal Bookpress.princeton.edu A step-by-step guide to crafting a compelling scholarly book proposal—and seeing your book through to successful publication

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Happy birthday to #botanist Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010), renown algae expert, celebrated seaweed cook, devoted teacher & mentor, expert on Hawaiian ethnobotany, 1st Indigenous Hawaiian woman to earn a doctorate in science & 1st woman or person of colour to become a full prof 🐡🧪👩🏻‍🔬#histsci 🧵1/n

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Muppets in biological nomenclature! Species named after Kermit, Oscar, Statler & Waldorf... there's no reason naming can't be fun. scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/06/18/w...

Wonderful Latin Names: (Not enough) Muppets in nomenclaturescientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com Earlier this year, a newly described fossil amphibian* made a (small) media splash: Kermitops gratus, from the Early Permian of Texas. The name Kermitops is a combination of (obviously) Kermit and (le...

Agradable sorpresa ahora saber que ya está disponible la traducción al español de "The Scientist's Guide to Writing" ="La guía científica para la escritura", de la Prensa de La Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia fondoeditorial.cayetano.edu.pe/tienda/la-guia -de-escritura-cientifica/ 🧪

Lovely surprise just now to find our that the Spanish translation of "The Scientist's Guide to Writing" is finished and available, from the Press of La Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia fondoeditorial.cayetano.edu.pe/tienda/la-guia -de-escritura-cientifica/ 🧪

This one's for you and the jewel box, @mothyblackburn.bsky.social! Pink-shaded fern moth, Callopistria mollissima, visiting our screen porch. Our yard has abundant ostrich fern and several other ferns, so this is likely a local. Sure, some birds are pretty, but LOOK AT THIS GUY.

This is MurderBird. I have a big (by city standards) back yard. This robin could hunt worms anywhere in it. But that is not what she does. Instead, she hops closer and closer to me. After each hop she straightens up, makes sure I'm watching, and glares fiercely at me. Then hops again. 1/n

Muppets in biological nomenclature! Species named after Kermit, Oscar, Statler & Waldorf... there's no reason naming can't be fun. scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/06/18/w...

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Once my mother went to a bakery and tried to buy a cake, but the woman working there said no, because it was the last one and if she sold it she wouldn't have any cake left to sell later. I think about this a lot, it is a metaphor for something but I haven't quite figured out for what yet.

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Last night I was sat with an old friend on a hill outside Bangor, overlooking the Menai straits, when a couple of lads walked past. One double-backed and introduced himself. Turns out I taught him 15 years ago. These moments are very rare but they always make my day.

This is fascinating: the friendship, with writing advice, of Cormac McCarthy and Roger Payne (the whale biologist). But I wonder: McCarthy's writing was quite distinctive, and not to everyone's taste. Would McCarthy's advice improve all biologists' writing?? www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/b...

Cormac McCarthy Did Not Talk Craft, With One Surprising Exceptionwww.nytimes.com Notoriously reluctant to give advice, the author offered his views, and meticulous edits, to a lifelong friend: Roger Payne, the marine biologist who introduced the world to whale song.