Posts filed under “Books”
What’s wrong with community ecology?
From Karban and Huntzinger’s How to Do Ecology: A Concise Handbook: Since manipulative experiments in ecology today are almost always conducted at spatial and temporal scales smaller than our ideal, it is worth considering what effect this has on our worldview. Small-scale experiments have led us as a group to believe in local determinism, that […]
Writer’s block
From How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia: Academic writers cannot get writer’s block. Don’t confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You’re not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. The subtlety of your analysis of variance will not […]
The fun part of research
From How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia: Research is oddly fun. Talking about ideas and finding ways to test your ideas is intellectually gratifying. Data collection is enjoyable, too, especially when other people do it for you. Even data analysis is fun – it’s exciting to see if a study worked. But […]
An American romance
From The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope: ‘Miss Melmotte, you do not know the glorious west. Your past experiences have been drawn from this effete and stone-cold country in which passion is no longer allowed to sway. On those golden shores which the Pacific washes man is still true, – and woman is […]
The new conservatives
From The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope: Melmotte might become as it were a Conservative tribune of the people, – that he might be the realization of that hitherto hazy mixture of Radicalism and old-fogyism, of which we have lately heard from a political master, whose eloquence has been employed in teaching us […]
A woman who had fought a duel
From The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope: Was it not his duty, as a man, to tell everything to herself? To speak to her thus: – ‘I am told that your life with your last husband was, to say the least of it, eccentric; that you even fought a duel with him. I […]
Humiliation relived
From The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope: Who does not know that sudden thoughtfulness at waking, that first matutinal retrospection, and pro-spection, into things as they have been and are to be; and the lowness of heart, the blankness of hope which follows the first remembrance of some folly lately done, some word […]