Science Blogs & Writing

I also can't say anything original about Star Trek's science, but I've been having a lot of fun educating myself about it and other popular science topics at Bad Astronomy Blog and Cocktail Party Physics.

Astronomer Phil Plait writes Bad Astronomy.
Cocktail Party is science writer Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse. (There's a bit of popular culture I missed being TV-free: I never watched Buffy. These days it's easy to catch up on TV, though, on DVD.)

Of course, I owe everything I know about the weather to Matt's Long Burn. To show you how little I knew, I asked him a couple years ago what the main determinant of Earth's weather was. He answered, the Sun. Oh, right. Seems I should have known that...

Cocktail Party has a fabulous post about becoming a science writer, with great advice for any developing writer: The Write Stuff.
One of her bits of advice is, "Don't do it like I did," which is to stumble into it. But I've noticed that a lot of successful people arrive where they never thought they were going, and that is one way of doing it.

What she says about writing could be said of life:
It "is first and foremost a craft; you get better by doing it, not by studying it ad infinitum."

My favorite advice:
"if you're going to dress unconventionally on the job, do so around PhD physicists, who are more tolerant of eccentricity."