{"id":1958,"date":"2012-01-16T20:26:46","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T20:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=1958"},"modified":"2013-01-05T08:38:47","modified_gmt":"2013-01-05T08:38:47","slug":"on-versatility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2012\/01\/16\/on-versatility\/","title":{"rendered":"On Versatility"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should start off by thanking CherishtheScientist<\/a>\u00a0 for kindly nominating me for a Versatile Blogger award (see the emblem).<\/p>\n

\"\"

The Veraatile Blooger Award<\/p><\/div>\n

I hadn\u2019t heard of these before, but I\u2019m honoured \u2013 so many thanks. I find myself still thinking I’m the new kid on the block, so it feels very flattering to be accepted as a \u2018professional\u2019 blogger by such a nomination. However, I realise it is 18 months now since I entered the fray, so it is probably my lurking Impostor Syndrome self that means I still feel surprised when anyone takes my blogging seriously.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, having been informed of the honour, I turned to the website<\/a> to find out what this meant. The rules are given below:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nominate 15 fellow bloggers<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Inform the Bloggers of their nomination<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Share 7 random things about yourself<\/p>\n

4)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thank the blogger who nominated you<\/p>\n

5)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Post the award badge.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve already completed rules 4 and 5, but before I complete the other 3, let me just put in a caveat about this process. When I was a child there was a postcard-writing chainmail that occasionally came my way. If I remember its rules correctly, you were meant to write out (and I mean write, in longhand, indeed in painfully childish longhand, since this was long before computers were in every child\u2019s bedroom and typewriters still belonged in the office) the form letter and send to 7 friends. In the form letter you yourself received was a list of 7 names: you entered your own name at the bottom of this list and removed the top name and sent this first child a postcard, ideally I think of your own home town. The story\/letter went that if you participated in due course you would receive some massive number of postcards. If you didn\u2019t maintain the chain you were promised lots of bad luck, a modern day gypsy\u2019s curse I suppose. As a young and gullible child, I of course did my bit \u2013 and never received a single postcard back. I have no idea if similar email versions exist now, though I have no recollection of being aware of my children receiving anything similar by snailmail or email. It isn\u2019t quite equivalent to the typical email scams of today, where money rather than postcards are the primary aim; indeed it seems to me rather sweet, but it certainly didn\u2019t result in a deluge of postcards for me and probably not for most participants.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think the Versatile Blogger award fits into a\u00a0 similar category, although it is of course entirely possible that those bloggers I myself nominate will not thank me if they feel obliged to write anything themselves, but as my own nominator said to me, it is of course optional. It seems to me it is a nice way to disseminate those blogs one likes to read, particularly as I don\u2019t myself exhibit a blogroll of blogs I read on my site. So here goes with my nominations (and brief reasons). I will state at the outset that I don\u2019t read a huge number of blogs, due to time more than anything else, so (short of nominating all my fellow Occam\u2019s Typewriters bloggers to boost the numbers) the list is a little short and in no particular order.\u00a0 But I will start with a couple of my colleagues on the OT site, because I really enjoy their posts, albeit I may offend the others!<\/p>\n

1No Comment<\/a> by Steve Caplan.\u00a0 An interesting look at academic life and nature on the other side of the Atlantic, plus an interesting and male take on misogynism, sexism etc.<\/p>\n

2 Mind the Gap<\/a> by Jenny Rohn.\u00a0 A thoughtful and very personal account of life as an early career researcher, with the horrors and joys of lab life very much to the fore, as well as a more political and gendered dimension.<\/p>\n

3 Bishopblog<\/a> by Dorothy Bishop. Full-on writing about many of the ills of academia and its characters, as well as more technical stuff on autism, dyslexia, bad science etc.<\/p>\n

4 Soft Machines<\/a> by Richard Jones. This was the first (and for a long time the only) blog I ever read \u2013 and later the first on which I ever commented. Written by a long time collaborator and friend, it has been primarily a blog on nanotechnology, albeit increasingly it has become an erudite deconstruction of our government\u2019s policies, or rather lack thereof.<\/p>\n

5 Some Beans<\/a> by Ian Hopkinson. Another blog written by a previous Cambridge collaborator, although this one went over to the dark side and now works for industry. His blog is a random collection of political outpourings, book reviews, history of science and many other things beside.<\/p>\n

6 A Don\u2019s Life<\/a> by Mary Beard . Mary is a near contemporary of mine as an undergraduate (but she was at Newnham College and I was at Girton). If you compare her interview<\/a>\u00a0 on Desert Island Discs with mine<\/a>, it will become apparent there are some similarities in our upbringing too; we even sit on a committee together now in Cambridge, but as a classicist her take on things is different from most of the science writers I read. She is, as her strapline says, a \u2018wickedly subversive commentator\u2019 and has many forthright things to say on academia, her colleagues and much else.<\/p>\n

7 Whewell\u2019s Ghost<\/a> is written by a collective covering the history and philosophy of science. Reading this tends to make me feel I had a neglected education in this field and have a lot of ground to make up.<\/p>\n

8 FSP<\/a> by Female Science Professor. A wonderful \u2013 and amazingly frequent \u2013 blog on academic life by an anonymous female professor in the US. It is very much with a US twist, so not all her blogs readily translate to the UK, but she seems to have seen it all and still retained her sense of humour.<\/p>\n

To complete the final \u2018rule\u2019 I need to tell you 7 random things about myself, but I don\u2019t intend to give away too many of my darkest secrets. My blog probably reveals enough. So, here are 7 things that probably you won\u2019t find very interesting to round this post off.<\/p>\n

1 I was born in London<\/p>\n

2 I am allergic to seafood and salmon (a useful fact if you ever plan on inviting me to dinner).<\/p>\n

3I once trained as a volunteer suicide counsellor.<\/p>\n

4 I used to play the viola.<\/p>\n

5 I went to an all girls\u2019 grammar school.<\/p>\n

6 I climbed my first Munro in my 40\u2019s.<\/p>\n

7 When a child I hated the fact my first name was so odd.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure that my blog is particularly versatile, although I try not to focus too strongly on one theme in successive posts, but I will reiterate how much I have enjoyed the freedom to write in a different voice<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 from my standard scientist\u2019s one. If you like, I hope I write like a human being on my blog which, I\u2019m sure, many of the public would undoubtedly agree, is not the same thing as a scientist!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I should start off by thanking CherishtheScientist\u00a0 for kindly nominating me for a Versatile Blogger award (see the emblem). I hadn\u2019t heard of these before, but I\u2019m honoured \u2013 so many thanks. I find myself still thinking I’m the new … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[434,974,433],"class_list":["post-1958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communicating-science","tag-awards","tag-blogging","tag-celebration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}