A few months back I took the train to New Haven to learn about feathers. I sought out an ornithologist at Yale named Richard Prum in his office. As soon as I walked in, he promptly picked up a manila envelope from his desk. Out of it he drew what looked like the black wooden handle of a long paint brush.
Continue reading “My fine feathered feature for National Geographic”
At ScienceOnline today, I moderated a spirited session on the future of books. I kicked things off by talking about where we stand at the moment. Ebooks may still constitute a small fraction of book sales, but that fraction is swelling fast. While many ebooks are simply digitized text-dumps of the books you can find in physical bookstores, new kinds of ebooks are emerging. With new services like Smashwords and Createspace at Amazon, the real possibility has emerged of blogifying books–that is, writers publishing books for themselves without a spot of ink touching a single piece of paper. I described my own experiences with Brain Cuttings, which made clear to me that even in this new world, it still helps to work with people who know how to make books.
At his website, Edge, John Brockman asks a big question each year and fields responses from scientists and writers (and scientist-writers).
This year’s question is “What scientific concept would improve everyone’s toolkit?”
My answer is, “Life as a side effect.”
As of this writing, Brockman has 155 other answers, too, so peruse and muse to your heart’s delight.
Originally published January 15, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The latest blizzard socked us pretty hard here in New England. If the streets and runways are clear enough tomorrow, I will be attending a conference called ScienceOnline in North Carolina for the next few days. One of the sessions I’m supposed to moderate is called “Death to Obfuscation.” Ed Yong and I concocted it as a workshop in which we would share our thoughts on good science writing. I’m going to lay out some of my thoughts here in advance, partly to clarify what I’m going to say–Ed and I are a bit nervous that what we thought would be a pretty basic session has exploded into a 60+-person crush, infiltrated by seasoned journalists. And if, on Friday, I’m still stranded here, the whole undertaking won’t have been a complete waste…
Here’s my quick visit to TV land this afternoon. I do wonder why my face is in a permanent scowl. On the inside, I can be very cheerful, honest!
Originally published January 11, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.