Yes – I’ve finally set up a blog here at NN as a kind of experiment for the New Year.
I’m probably known to some of the people reading here as a long-winded, if not always regular, commenter on various NN blogs.
But why start up yet another blog?
Well, as when I first started blogging a few years ago, one motivation is to provide a permanent home for over-extended comments I find myself writing on other peoples’ blogs.
Anyone who’s met me will attest that I find it hard to shut up once I get going.
The same problem afflicts me in commenting, as you can perhaps see here and here. And rest assured, there are far worse examples.
So one reason for starting blogging here is to be able to spin off those over-expanding digressions onto posts, where appropriate.
A second motive is to have somewhere to air my take on stuff that doesn’t fall easily within the purview of my other Bad Science type blog.
Although single author blogs are (IMHO), above all, personal – and thus have a mix of stuff reflecting a person’s idiosyncracies – they nonetheless tend to have recurring themes, and therefore often to fit well in particular blogging communities. But then sometimes one has something to say that is not really of interest to the people there… so it makes sense to take it to the place where the audience are. The politics of science and research assessment, for instance, or the annoyances of finding parts for ageing microscopes on eBay, or why I loathe talks about kinases with > 10 obscure abbreviations in them, are likely of little interest to people in the Bad Science blogging community, but might find a better audience at NN.
A third idea is that I may post science-related stuff here that I have written for publications that don’t have an internet presence, or that don’t have comments threads after articles (or the ability to embed links).
Like many a blogger, I enjoy pontificating on a comments thread (and reading one) at least as much as reading the main post – and a hell of a lot more than writing a main post. So I may re-jig and re-post some of the things I have written for Physiology News, for instance – notably historical articles. In fact I have one on Charles Darwin and the early British physiologists kicking around that I will try and edit a bit and post here as the first “proper post”, hopefully before the Christmas break.
