Stephen Heard

@stephenbheard

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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Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 7d

There's an interesting line between "ooh, look, evidence of human history" and "crap, look, more garbage littering the land and water". This (foreground, obv, dude in the background was nice!) water turbine wheel is making me think about where the line is... (Long Beach Brook Falls, Fundy Trail, NB)

View across tumbled rocks to a small waterfall into a pool. In the background, a man sits on the rocks looking at the waterfall. In the foreground, a large and heavy piece of metal machinery sits half in the water: what looks like a turbine to drive an axle, presumably for a mill.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 7d

My brother gave me this suggestion for what the book cover SHOULD look like. It's a very good thing that authors don't get control over cover design because I would have been SO tempted to use this...

Mockup of the book cover. The book title is rendered in a childlike handwritten font, as "The Scientist's Guide to Writing: How To Write More Better and Effected". A red bar says "Special Edition", and the author is given as "By Dr. Steve" . The graphics are kindergarten writing worksheets, for example one headed "The Number Two" which has dotted outlines for tracing to make a "2".

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 8d

Another Amanita. In this species the "universal veil" tears into little pieces that end up stuck to the cap like little warts. Long Beach Brook Falls trail, Fundy Trail, NB

A single dark yellow mushroom with a flat cap, a bit darker in the centre, studded with small white "warts" that look like little bits of white felt.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 9d

Sometimes mushrooms work hard to hide their key identification features from you. Sometimes, they say "Hello, I am an Amanita, for my stalk has burst through an egg-like sac which remains, torn, and in the keys you'll see it called the universal veil. You're welcome!"

A graceful light brown mushroom with its thin stalk rising from a forest floor of dead needles and leaves and green moss. The cap is flat, about 2" diameter, and near the edges mostly transparent so you can see the gills underneath like ribs. At the base, the stalk has clearly torn through a small capsule of fabric-like tissue which remains.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 9d

Very excellent guardrail. Big Salmon River, Fundy Trail Parkway.

View taken from low angle along the wooden top rail of a guardrail/balustrade on a staircase. The wood is weathered and there is a pale grayish-green lichen growing abundantly from it.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 10d

Sound on for a moment of Zen.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 10d

Nice excursion to the coast yesterday. Fuller Brook Falls, Fundy Trail Parkway, St. Martins, New Brunswick.

A small waterfall, with water falling about 6 metres over ledges of rock. The view is framed by boughs of fir and spruce.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 13d

Up today in my scientific writing course (among other topics): abstracts and titles. This is one of the few places I get to highlight my own original research - what impact to funny titles have on readership/citation? (See www.facetsjournal.com/doi/10.1139/...)

Powerpoint slide with the heading "Abstracts and Titles"; below is an image of Piet Mondrian's "Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray" - a square canvas turned to be a diamond with narrow black rules dividing it into sectors a few of which are coloured. Below that is text "OK, not THIS kind of abstract".

Powerpoint slide headed "Are funny titles OK?"

Then 3 graph panels, showing citation rates for papers plotted against a "humour score" for their titles. First, raw total citations - line very slightly trends down. Then self citations - line trends down markedly. Then total divided by self - line trends UP noticeably.

Text below figure:

Controlling for paper importance, papers with funny titles are cited more than papers with serious ones

But readers don’t agree on what’s funny; and “funny” can also be offensive

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 15d

Day 2 of the course today! My titles slides frequently feature (inflict on students) lame visual puns. This one is up after lunch...

Powerpoint slide headed "Figures and Tables". Two illustrations: on left, a male figure skater captured mid-jump; and right, an antique trestle table. I am hilarious.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 15d

Half a day into the latest offering of my 1-week intensive scientific-writing course - this time for a group of mostly wildlife/landscape ecology grad students at Texas A&M University, Kingsville. They will learn about writing; I will learn (I hope) a bit about ocelots and Caspian terns! 1/2

Powerpoint slide. At top, "Scientific writing - a short (intensive) course. Midde, photo of me in an atrociously unfashionable plaid flannel shirt, hands in my pockets, against a backdrop of seaweed-covered rocks at the coast. Bottom, logos of the University of New Brunswick (my university) and Texas A&M Kingsville (host university)

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 26d

Barra MacNeils!

Outdoor stage with a six-member band playing: from left, accordion, keyboard, fiddle, guitar, bass guitar, guitar.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 26d

Lovely walk in the woods today, and the recent rain has brought up a lovely crop of mushrooms. A nice big batch of the chanterelles (left) are now in my fridge; the fly agaric (right) is absolutely not!

A scattering for a couple dozen small chanterelle mushrooms on a forest floor of pine needles. The chanterelles are orange and in sunflecks are startlingly bright

An expanding fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) with a hemispherical yellow cap dotted with whitish warts, seen against a mossy forest floor strewn with twigs and pine needles

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· 27d

I questioned why Word flagged my use of "rabbithole" rather than "rabbit hole", and have now learned two things from Google Ngrams: (1) I was very, very wrong; and (2) the terms is surprisingly recent! Also: I have now gone down a rabbit hole about how to spell "rabbit hole"🤣

google n-gram viewer for "rabbit hole", two words, vs "rabbithole", one word. Neither is very common before about the mid-1990s; since then, the two-word version rises very quickly while the one-word version hugs the x axis.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jul 7

I was writing about corals yesterday. So here's a portal at Pena Castle, Sintra, Portugal with a very nice coral motif! Presumably cast, not carved??

View of an arched stone portal between two hexagonal stone towers. Above the arch is a bay window decorated to be a boss, with a squatting Neptune on a clamshell

Closer view of the arched portal, showing that it's surrounded by a rough forest of carved coral branches

Closeup of the carved corals around the portal. It's a continuous forest of short (few inches) irregular coral branches protruding from the wall. In the centre is a bivalve shell.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jul 6

Author's copies came! Third edition of "The Scientist's Guide to Writing", publishing for real August 4th. One of the best things that's happened in my whole career is that this book has been helpful enough, to enough people, to merit a 3rd edition. 1/2

Picture of me holding up a copy of 'The Scientist's Guide to Writing', third edition. I'm sitting in front of a large window with a shutter, both painted green. I'm trying my best to smile like an actual human being, doing a rather mediocre job, but that's what you get on a good day.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jul 5

Scientist sees sizeable squirrel. My yard has grey squirrels, red squirrels, chipmunks, flying squirrels (rarely), and - as this photo can attest - groundhogs. Which is a terribly unbeautiful name for this rather handsome squirrel species.

A medium-sized groundhog sitting on the edge of a deck. The tail is short and dark brown; body fur is mid-brown although many hairs have yellowish hoary tips; the face is dark but nose and cheeks are hoary.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jul 4

Apparently on top of my selfie game today.

Blurred selfie, with most of the frame full of windows, clapboard wall, and the underside of the porch roof above me. My face at very bottom, or rather 3/4 of it, with glasses perched on top of my head and a very startled look.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jul 2

Crab in my back yard. Seems a bit menacing with the sharp shadow of the claws, and yet if you look closely, it must be friendly at least to its evolutionary cousins - because underneath the body is a huge anthill.

A sculpture of a crab, about 10" across, formed from welded steel rods for legs and claws formed around a stone to make the body. It's sitting on a concrete base partly covered in moss, in strong sun that make sharp shadows of the claws. Underneath the crab's body is a very large anthill.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 30

Fly agarics (Amanita muscaria, yellow form) at the Fredericton Botanic Garden this morning. The wet weather the last month or so is finally letting our mushrooms pop up in all their glory!

A group of bright yellow mushrooms under a spruce tree. There are four large mushrooms, tightly bunched (perhaps 4" across each), with a scattering of smaller younger ones around. Each cap has a darker yellow centre and abundant greyish-yellow "warts" speckling it.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 29

Link card didn't want to load I guess, so here's the image

Sign reading, in French, "Placettes Pubiques"

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 29

Cheerful decorative detail on a streetcorner in Lisbon, Portugal. I would love to live in this house (although I guess I'd have to less than 2 inches tall, or about 6 feet shorter than I actually am...)

A small tile decoration set on a white stucco wall. It shows a tall, narrow house in bright yellow, with a half-ellipse pair of doors and four staggered windows in blue. The doors open by a pair of knobs that are tiny red hearts. The roof is steeply pitched and in patterned red. The overall impression is childish, but in a good way.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 27

I see what you did there, Wikipedia. Nice work. (But: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" may be the single dumbest thing that was drummed into me as a grad student...)

Snapshot of header of a Wikipedia article "Evidence of absence", with the notation "Not be be confused with 'Absence of evidence'"

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 26

Moss on the flagstones of my back yard patio. I love the little "caps" of the sporophytes (the brown stalk-and-cap bits growing from the tips of the main "gametophyte" plants)

Closeup of moss growing against a background of light grayish-brown dead leaves. Each moss plant is dark green, a couple of inches tall, and with dense whorls of spiky "leaves" like the branchlets of a spruce tree. Each plant is topped with a "sporophyte", a thin brown stalk about the same height as the main plant tipped with a light brown "cap" that contains the spores.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 25

From my walk this morning: this completely handsome dogwood leaf beetle, Calligrapha philadephica. Cleverly, he has found himself a dogwood leaf to beetle on.

A small beetle with bold black curvy markings on a cream background, perched on a bright green leaf

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 24

My house is full of books. My office is full of books. I have no room for new books. I do not care; the parcel I got today from Princeton University Press is wonderful!

Seven books splayed out on a tabletop:

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs (3 volumes), Bryce Jones
Paleontology: an illustrated history, David Bainbridge
The First Fossil Hunters, Adrienne Mayor
Mathematical Excursions to the World's Great Buildings, Alexander Hahn
Geopedia, Marcia Bjornerud

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 24

Pena Castle, Sintra, Portugal. Usually I try for some kind of clever connection to science (because I am Very Much a Nerd) but you know what? It's just a beautiful building.

Part of a palace crowning a hill. In centre are yellow-painted walls topped with a bronze dome and with battlements. Below are ornamental stone walls with many openings. At left is part of a red wall, built into the rock. The whole thing is set against a blue sky dotted with clouds and above a lush green valley.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 22

Marine biology comes to the art gallery! Two paintings by Colleen Wolstenholme, at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Left: "Holothurian" (free-swimming larva of a sea cucumber); right "Pelagic polychate" (free-swimming larva of a bristle worm).

A bluish, mostly transparent sea cucumber larvae swimming on a field of black. The guts and mouthparts are orangey and the larva is painted on a black rectangular field.

A snort swimming worm larva, bent into a U shape, with many bristles. It's whitish with orange internal organs visible through semitransparent skin. Painted on a round field of black.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 20

Copper Age (~7000-3000 BP) limestone artifacts, Carmo Archaeological Museum, Lisbon. Labeled as "cylindrical idols", but I prefer to interpret them as strong evidence that Copper Age geologists had mastered rock drilling and were aiming for the Mohorovičić discontinuity.🧪 #VeryNiceGeologyJoke

A museum display with about two dozen stone cylinders - from a centimeter to perhaps 8 cm diameter, and 2-20 cm long. They'll all grey limestone.

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 19

Look, 17th century dudes, did you not stop to think what a PITA it would be to have to cite a "paper" that's a letter from Martin Lister to the Royal Society, that contains within it a postscript which is Lister's report of a letter he got from John Ray (I want to cite the postscript)? 1/2

Screenshot of a short section of a paper, saying "SO far this Letter, which was soon after followed by another containing the Learned Mr.Ray’s, which were these:
I received (saith Mr. Ray) your accurate Observations about St. Cuthbert's beads. A strange thing, it seems to me....

Stephen Heard@stephenbheard· Jun 18

Gee, thanks, Wikipedia. I was indeed in danger of confusing Agricola's 1556 book on mining and metals with... the metal band Metallica. Disaster averted!