Correct use of the Kelvin temperature scale

Prof. Terence Day at Okanagan College, British Columbia, recently wrote an article describing the errors in textbooks. He argues that, “If the discipline of physical geography is a genuine natural science then the internationally recognized scientific units must be correctly used.” The issue is the Kelvin temperature scale. At the General Conference on Weights and […]

Appropriate way to label axes of graphs

Prof. Brian Fiedler of the University of Oklahoma recently published an article in Physics Education calling for a change in direction in teaching dimensionless ratios in physics. As he advocates, The tick marks [on an axis of a graph] are pure numbers. Labels with a solidus such as R/µm are orthodox notation for what the […]

When to use north arrows on maps

This topic came up in an e-mail discussion with Jon Zeitler, Science and Operations Officer at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Austin, Texas. He advocated that maps should have horizontal length scales and north arrows on them. I agreed with him about the length scale, but felt that north arrows might be unnecessary […]

Bob the Angry Flower speaks out against improper apostrophe use

Or, in color: Buy the poster here!

Arial is a cheap imitation of Helvetica

While researching the book, I discovered this Web site proclaiming the glories of the sans serif font Helvetica and bemoaning the rise of Microsoft’s rip-off font Arial. As the Web page says about Arial replacing Helvetica, “To an experienced designer, it was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little.” I have to admit […]

Be creative in constructing your figures

With Adobe Illustrator and other similar graphics packages, scientists are more in control of their figures than ever before. You don’t have to rely on the default values and font types in your graphics software. One thing that you can do is create composite figures where two types of figures are combined to create a […]

Did you know?

That “Web” as in “Web page” is capitalized? That “chapter 5” and “section 3.2” are generally not capitalized, but “Figure 9” and “Table 1” are? That Microsoft Word flags “a climatology” and “a cloud” as grammatically incorrect? [I don’t know why. Does anyone out there?] That “native English–speaking colleague” uses an en dash, but “English-speaking […]

Me and Archimedes

Last month, Russ Schumacher, John Knox, and I submitted to Monthly Weather Review a paper on a case of banded precipitation in Colorado. Yesterday, we got the reviews back. Two things impressed me about the reviews. 1) Reviewer C was very knowledgeable on the topics we were writing about: banded precipitation, symmetric instability, and inertial […]

Recommended Reading

Previously, I provided three items of essential reading. Here are other books that I highly recommend for improving your scientific communication skills. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING ON WRITING Cook (1986): Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing delivers a thorough accounting of the editing process. The book deals mainly with sentence-level revisions and contains […]

Quotes from Don’t Be Such a Scientist

On the recommendation of Prof. David Karoly, I bought Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. I highly recommend this book for those who want to make their science more accessible to others (both scientists and nonscientists). Olson breaks down his observations of how best to communicate to […]

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