When victrolas and other music players were first introduced, they weren’t very good. As the technology improved, they slowly replaced live performances in many but not all situations. We still have live orchestras and live bands even though most of the music we listen to on a daily basis is Read more…
I’m in the 19-range of my beginning-to-end read of the AMA Manual of Style, and I find my throughhiking metaphor still holds up. Not only am I walking through places that a section hiker might not find worth the time (charts, vocabulary lists), but my pace and milage are heavily Read more…
I like my metaphor of through-hiking the AMA Manual of Style. The point of reading Big Blue beginning to end isn’t to memorize everything I see along the way. It’s that the act of doing it is inherently different from reading one section as needed or looking up individual issues Read more…
This year, I decided to earn some of my BELS maintenance points by brute force: An epic reread of the AMA Manual of Style. For my hiking readers, this is like doing an AT Northbound but with copyright law and specialized punctuation rules instead of Springer, Washington, and Katahdin. Like Read more…
Live editors can find the gold test stone. Right now, LLM AI can’t. Much of my time as a scientific editor and proofreader has focused on authors who speak English as a subsequent language.* Given that the people who hire proofreaders are usually the ones who need them, I often Read more…
It’s not exactly science news, but this is a fascinating case of biology-meets-art-meets-business. The human eye has millions of years of selection for subtle differences in color—animators can tell you how hard it is to get green vegetables to look right—specifically to identify food and non-food plants. These people are Read more…
One part of my professional story that tends to surprise people is that I give due credit to those villains of late-century brain rot: videogames. Usually, I talk about the number of SAT words I picked up in RPG and adventure titles: unparallelled, tumultuous, iridescent, opalescent, saffron, malefactor, implements, peruse… Read more…
When I was teaching American history, I used to describe the depression by spinning a yarn about a fictional farmer who’d already been through loads. Fluctuating prices meant never knowing what to plant. Although cars gave you enough mobility to have a social life, you were still limited to Read more…
I just saw a posting for scientific editing that offered US$18/hour. It called for a PhD. It’s no longer accepting applications, and I dearly hope it’s because they’ve figured out what was wrong with their request. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this. I once went through Read more…
Many of the small pleasures we cultivate as young people come back to bite us later. Fans of loud music end up with hearing loss of tinnitus. Drinking and smoking can damage the liver and lungs. But it seems one vice may offer more help than harm. In findings Read more…