Notes from a pandemic: You go into lockdown with the data you have, not the data you want

The Better Posters book is still in press. I am getting periodic updates from the publisher, which is exciting.

I am waiting on reviews for one project.

I am writing another big project, and I have many thousands of words down for it already.

So these are good. But I have no idea when I will be able to collect data again, and it’s kind of getting to me sometimes.

I was preparing for a journal club presentation about snapping shrimp. Which are awesome beasts. They make sound louder than a gunshot, louder than a rocket launch, with their claws. The journal club talk isn’t even about claws, but I wanted to mention how they worked because it’s tangentially relevant to the main part of the talk.

I came across this paper about the evolution of the snap. It’s comparative, got behaviour, 3-D modelling of the claws, biomechanics, a lot of the kind of stuff I was doing more back in grad school. It’s amazing work.

And I feel sad. I want to do stuff like it. I want to do good, original science.