Today I find myself in the illustrious company of the well-known bloggers over at the Guardian Science Blogs. As Richard Grant and Stephen Curry already spelled out a week ago, we happy band of OT bloggers have a new outpost over at
My own first post today sets the scene of the kind of research I do in biological physics and why I find it exciting. Written for the general public, Jenny chastised me when she read the draft for using over-technical words (in this case the offending word was ‘stoichiometrically’, as well as using the Research Council acronyms without spelling them out), so I’m going to have to try harder to explain what I get up to in appropriate language over there. Just like the rest of my colleagues here, the posts on the Guardian will only be a fraction of my output – but it is a wonderful way to reach a wider audience, and I’d like to thank Jenny, Richard (G) and Stephen for getting us to this point (did anyone mention ‘impact’ recently?). I will not attempt in the future to dissect any comment stream I get, as I did with CIF; I have no excuse of shortage of time to get my nuances as I wish this time around, so if I’m hammered I only have myself to blame.
However, my own first post on OC was, briefly, something very different, indeed something that was written in haste yesterday by me acting in a capacity rather different from my OT/OC self. Responding to a general request from the Guardian to its bloggers for a fast-turnaround piece on A level results, I agreed to do something based on my experiences as the Chair of the Education Committee at the Royal Society. This piece (now located here on the Guardian) uses bits of evidence from various recent Royal Society reports. Consequently, it wasn’t a tough job to produce quickly, since the facts were more or less at my fingertips (and the wonderful team at the Royal Society checked that I hadn’t mixed anything up). The analysis shows that despite the upbeat figures for STEM A levels, there are still underlying concerns. As usual the headline
A level figures for science subjects: could do much better
was not of my making, nor was the image of 3 female students* clutching their results my choice. As I say, briefly that appeared under the Occam’s Corner banner, but swiftly got moved to a more appropriate location on the Guardian website, thereby making room for what was intended to be my debut post.
I’m not a founder member of Occam’s Typewriter, but joined the group after the concept was well advanced, although my first post appeared on the site only a couple of days after OT was launched. Like Stephen, I too owe my ‘membership’ to Jenny, whom I’d been ‘virtually’ introduced to through other media contacts when we were both writing something for The Times science magazine Eureka. When I subsequently approached her for some advice about blogging (being at that point a mere novice blogger of only a few months standing; now I’m just a few days short of my second anniversary), the invitation to join OT was the result. I feel very privileged to be writing here – and now over there on the Guardian too. I hope you’ll continue to keep me company – on both sites.
* Interesting – now changed to 6 lads on the website. Did someone complain?
Look forward to reading your Guardian pieces. But you write “so if I’m hammered I only have myself to blame”. No!!! You are not “to blame” at all! Given your experience last time you are jolly brave to carry on doing it.
There are all kinds of people who write all kinds of strange stuff on blog comments, and you are not responsible for what they say, or for educating them or changing their point of view, and are not required to make a response to any of it **unless you want to**. And there are more people in the world you could educate or influence than you have time to spend doing it, and you might think your energy is better expended in other directions. The nuttier they are they the more likely they are to want to drag you into a pointless conversation….
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Ursula! You are right, I am not ‘to blame’ if some people have nutty ideas and disagree with what I write. But I was probably thinking of something else entirely, that would be my fault. I can give you a specific example of a recent near-miss of a howler, that almost appeared in that first Guardian article . In it I referred to Wilkins as one of the group who solved the structure of DNA. An early draft had him in as Wilkes. Now Maurice Wilkins and Maurice Wilkes were both distinguished scientists, almost contemporary – but they were not one and the same person. You will be very familiar with the latter, being famous in the field of computer science, but he really didn’t do very much for DNA. It would have been an easy mistake to make – and I would have deserved to be ‘hammered’! I think that’s the kind of disaster I had in mind – it is bound to happen in due course…..
I agree with Ursula. There are web sites and communities with a good commentariat where people respect each other’s opinions and don’t troll, and then there are web sites like the Guardian. You are very brave to jump into the snake pit again, albeit in a somewhat more civilised corner. I think it’s perfectly fine for you just to engage with the reasonable subset of the commenters you’ll get. Life is too short for the rest.