Vanessa Heggie and Matthew Cobb talk about science-blogging

Jumbled up notes, but quite useful. All thoughts and ideas belong to the persons in the title, unless otherwise stated.

1. Write. 600-800 words once or twice a week to begin with. Shows commitment and consistency.
2. Worry not if there are no visitors – you are building a portfolio.
3. Get into a dialogue with the people in the field you want to work with.
4. Find science communication folk on twitter. Or better, find their communities.
5. Contacts are important, but keep an eye out for essay competitions, blog vacancies, etc.
6. Mix things up, opinion pieces and factual pieces, one is harder than the other, but it’s all practice.
7. Writing about your research can veer into simply-another-form-of-academic-writing; book reviews, or making-of blogs can include research, like a diary, but be more relaxed and allow you to showcase fun trivia that you find, that may not place in academic papers.
8. Cats are good.
9. You could take on a twitter alter-ego, e.g. write as an interesting historical character.
10. Read and comment on other peoples’ blogs, it’s just as big a part being one of the community.
11. Retweet anything you want, even if you think “all my followers follow X already”. In all likelihood, there will be at least one follower who doesn’t.
12. Find your own voice. Do not be an ersatz-sci-commer-that-you like.
13. Be brave and blog under your own name. Or at least blog under a constant pseudonym. Pick a suitable one.
14. Co-blog. Takes the pressure off overall output, but puts pressure on in the sense that you need to pull your load.
15. The sharing and readership of posts may be better an indicator of reception than the quantity or quality of comments.
16. Pop-sci and topical sciene unsurprisingly get more views. Troll-bait will get trolls. No surprises there either.
17. Bear in mind that sometimes people do not feel qualified enough to leave a comment. This links into the way you pitch your posts. Relaxed, quirky posts may fetch comments just because they invite them.
18. Blogs are allowed to change theme. Usually with the author’s circumstances. No biggie.
19. Established bloggers sometimes look for relief bloggers. If you have a thematic, well-written piece, it may just be worth emailing, and swapping the work for the exposure.
20. Vi Hart’s video-blog, recommended. Vlogs and podcasts can be good if you are interested, but you cannot skim through them, which is what most people do. (Personal note here: they can be good to insert into a blog every now and again just for a change in format and bring a bit of novelty. Perhaps your reader will like it. But they are more time consuming – you will have to script them, even an al-fresco pod will need to be “written” and edited.)
21. If you want to try the book-route, and have an idea, get an agent first! Popsci books are still a niche field, it is, so far (never say never), difficult to make money off them. Blogs will provide an audience for your book.
22. You don’t have to know about…stuff… to write a blog. You can write a blog about you finding out about something or somebody. If you’ve chosen a person though, aim for somebody who is dead. Living people will findit creepy. And frankly, you do know stuff – you’re an expert at being a student.
23. It’s perfectly acceptable to have different identities to your co-bloggers, it would be weird not to. As long as you have a common theme, it could be welcome to hear from different voices.
24. As long as your byline is constant, readers do not necessarily look out for your affiliations. At all. A relevant blog can be good for the job, if not, the employers will likely be indifferent.
25. If you are aiming for a writing job – a bad blog is better than no blog. (Where “bad” means boring or amateurish – not libellous and fictional. Well, unless you like to communicate your science through sci-fi adventures, in which case, make that clear.)
26. Learn about writing from other blogs. The structure is free to take.
27. Nerdblogs always find their readers. Always. You may have a niche audience, but they will read it all. As long as it’s well-written.

Because ignorance is not cool

I feel that I could endlessly apologise for my absence, but what good would that do? That said, I am sorry about the aforementioned absence – it is a particularly busy time at the moment. (Yes, even busier than what sadly seems to be the norm for most people these days.) Sometimes, life also happens, and I opt to go with it.

If for some unfathomable reason, one or more of you have missed my ramblings and postings of video clips, I would like to offer up the following super slow-motion clip, and ensuing discussion, of the physics of slinkies, and how they “hover” above the ground before falling when dropped. The gist is that both ends of the slinky are “attracted” to its centre of gravity, and external forces (gravity, in this case) will pull both ends of the slinky towards the centre of mass of the Earth. There are resultant momentary not-quite-cancellations of forces, which are enough for the slinky to “hover”… Oh never mind me, go watch the super slo-mo, you know you want to!

Finally, we celebrated 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing on June 23rd! Most of us have more to thank him for than that of which we are presently aware. I randomly – seems to a key adverb in my life – came across a letter to the Guardian newspaper sent by a former professor of mine from Imperial, which seems to be a much more coherent description of some of Turing’s achievements than many a big celebratory feature. Worth a read!

On that note: what would you like to read about? Perhaps I should have asked earlier. Hm.

The One About Climate Change

I was at a party the other week and found myself using the title topic as a conversation filler; admittedly, I was talking to an environmental scientist, but it was after midnight, which shows how “common” a subject it has become.

This is perhaps the reason why I was surprised to read “Climate change should be excluded from curriculum, says adviser” in the Guardian newspaper yesterday. This was discussed in the article by Tim Oates, who was responsible for reviewing the curriculum for 5 – 16 year olds earlier in the year, and Michael Gove, the education secretary. Where in the article, the situation of climate change sceptics being given the choice of whether or not to teach the topic was likened to creationist teachers not teaching evolution (or vice versa), it was much more bluntly discussed in the comments. The term “Flat-Earth Society” was mentioned multiple times.

The root of this article may be stemmed in policy yet again, about what kinds of science should appear on the curriculum, but it does seem that more policy-makers have been consulted in the process than scientists. One of the reasons mentioned for cutting down the curriculum is that it has become too cluttered since the last review, with attempts to add various elements, including public engagement, to give young pupils a rounded impression of science today. However, science, and the parts of it featured in current affairs everyday, changes continuously, it may be unreasonable to attempt to keep up with it. Thus, the proposed new curriculum aims to return to teaching a solid foundation of science, and accompanying mathematics, but the worry now lies with whether pupils will think of this as “old, boring science”.

One, main argument presented by the board for removing climate change, is that it will date, like other social scientific features. Personally, I do not think it will. Yes, I may be a climate change believer, but I do not blame anybody in particular. The weather (right now too, in fact) is behaving more erratically than ever, and we should do something about it. Truth be told, I am not certain what to make of these decisions on the curriculum: it is important to learn about fundamental science; it is also important to learn how that science works around us. What do you think? (Read: let me know in the comments.)