In case you haven’t seen Wordle, which totals up the words in a piece of text…here’s a picture of my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. A pretty good likeness, I think. I like the way humans are overshadowed by the microbes–as in life. (Hat tip: Oliver Morton.)
Originally published July 13, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Writing about the brain is one of the Black-Diamond challenges of science writing. We all think we know what’s going in our heads, and yet the cells and neurotransmitters and signal patterns don’t fit comfortably into our everyday metaphors. Linguist Mark Liberman at Language Log regularly writes devastating posts about how lousy a job journalists sometimes do writing about neuroscience news–especially when the research touches on our pat assumptions and stereotypes. (See, women really do think differently.)
That’s what I told Moira Gunn, host of the radio show Tech Nation, in a recent conversation about my book Microcosm. Listen here. I hope you find it infectious.
Originally published July 11, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Like a parasite addressing its host, I gave a symposium talk a couple weeks ago at the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists. When I arrived at the meeting, I listened to a number of parasitologists bemoan the lack of interest in parasites among the public. In my talk, I explained why they were wrong.
People are fascinated and obsessed with parasites, and once you’ve captivated their imagination with tales of zombifying wasps and such, you can plunge into some big concepts that apply across biology–concepts that might be hard to get people interested in if you were talking about spliceosomes or metapopulations.
Chris writes, “I teach science at a public school in eastern Mass. This tattoo was taken from a New Yorker cartoon that my wife and I both have hanging in our classroom’s (she teaches science, too). Most people think it’s her Dad…there is a resemblance. When told it’s Charles Darwin, too many people reply, “Who’s Charles Darwin?”. It’s kind of sad. I call this Darwin Kong, the establishment trying to destroy Darwin for the same reason it destroyed Kong, it just didn’t understand him.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published July 11, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.