I was recently invited to give a short presentation on my approach to grant writing; below is a short synopsis. First things first, I am by no means a hugely successful grant writer; the bulk of the grants I’ve applied for have been peanuts compared to some of the biggies out there. But I have …
Continue reading Recap: The grant application process, a short story
I am forever grateful that I’m old enough to have not had social media as a teen. I had a LiveJournal, forums and MMORPGs. Due to the slowness of internet in the early 2000’s though, most everything was text based. I was exceptionally late to both MySpace and Facebook, being much more interested in online …
I was posed a question over a week ago: can we count actual virus particles in the soil? The premise for this question is simple enough. The relative number of virus DNA reads (yes, I realise I’m excluding RNA viruses) varies with soil environmental variables. But we can’t actually comment on the absolute abundances of …
I’m fairly comfortable with chemistry. Molecules randomly get together and if there’s enough energy, they might do something. Even in ‘dirty’ situations like soils and soil solutions, you can trust that chemistry is, at its heart, just applied physics. Biology though. Goodness. I’ve been watching Prof. Racaniello’s lecture series on virology and the more I …
I will happily tell anyone that my favourite environment is the desert. Dry air, knee-high shrubbery, rocks. Though to be fair, remarkably little soil. My second favourite environment are wetlands (from one extreme to the other I guess). Though again, I prefer meadows, bogs and seeps to swamp forests and heavily treed places. Wetlands are …
I often straddle the divide between us (scientist; me) and the various professional persons concerned about workplace injuries (administration; sometimes me). The two sides have perfectly valid feelings of annoyance with the other. From the scientists: excessive administrative burden stymies productivity; and from the administration: employees get up to some seriously dumb things if you …
[creating the] rest of the fucking owl is a meme that was born of a photograph showing the process for carving an owl statue wherein the process was impossibly under explained. Of three steps there was step one: a block of wood with a basic owl stencilled; step 2: the owl roughly cut out; step …
Continue reading Process documentation or ‘rest of the fucking owl’
One hobby that I enjoy doing is knitting and I recently made my second ever jumper (and first jumper that wasn’t hilariously hideous). A change in technique (from English style to Continental style) means I finally knit fast enough to finish a project before I start hating it. I feel that I’ve learned two important …
I work on soil biogeochemical cycling in wet soils, which I understand is basically French to an English only speaker. Biogeochemical cycling and nutrient cycling are basically the same thing – biogeochemistry simple means any natural chemical reaction in the environment that has something to do with ‘life’ while nutrient cycling is a suite of …
I have officially started my Postdoctoral Fellowship at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China and let me say, it’s been a long winded and multi-stepped process. Here I offer some sage advice as a Western citizen with Western degrees on the processes involved in working as a postdoc in a Chinese Scientific Institution. Firstly, you will …
Continue reading Starting a new international job in Academic Soil Science – part one
