The resurrection of Evolutionary Novelties

I've decided to resurrect the Evolutionary Novelties blog. While I wrote fairly regularly from late 2007 until 2009, I stopped writing any blog posts after that. Although I didn't specifically plan the regular writing sessions or the hiatus, I've felt lately that I would like again to use this forum to share some ideas.

Why the hiatus? Blogging changed my brain

Late in 2009, I began to feel that blogging changed my brain in ways that I did not like at the time. Namely I felt like I was thinking too much about blog posts. Blog posts - at least good ones - are short, punchy and catchy - like a quick sprint. Yet conducting research and writing scientific papers takes dedication and persistence - like a marathon. When writing Evolutionary Novelties posts regularly, I began thinking about posts a lot; so much I felt like it was taking 'thinking time' and writing time away from my research. Professional research takes a huge amount of thinking time, from brainstorming to problem solving to deciding how to pitch grant proposals and publications.

There are also two more mechanistic reasons I took a hiatus from writing blog posts. First, I got my first smart phone around that time. Instead of doing a lot of reading (email, news, papers, other blogs) on a computer with a keyboard at the ready - I began reading on a mobile device. Without a keyboard under-finger, the possibility of a response became less immediate, and my habits changed. The second mechanistic reason is personal. My son grew to genuinely love playing sports and following professional sports. This rekindled my childhood love of sports, and I've come to spend much more time coaching, playing, and following sports. Following and participating in sports also competes for my online time, and my 'thinking time', so writing blog posts fell away.

Why the resurrection? I have things to say

Writing blog posts can be a great outlet for certain topics, and some such topics have become priorities for me.

1. I feel I am becoming a good mentor, and I would like to share more broadly mentoring advice. Well, actually, I think I've always been pretty good at mentoring because I genuinely care about the people I mentor, I care about their careers, and I generally have good instincts about career decisions (it's something I think a lot about). I also sometimes worry that with more students and postdocs in my lab, that there is not enough time for me to be effective at mentoring everyone all the time. Pointing to a blog post with career advice might sometimes be effective, and might help people outside my lab. In this regard, I've been inspired by Sociobiology.
2. I've lately focused my research efforts and ideas more squarely on my 'home group' ostracods, and I'd like to share more about their amazing biology. During the golden era of Evolutionary Novelties, I wrote about these animals in a series I called 'ostra-blogs'. I'd like to continue this part-travellogue, part nature writing series because we've had some fun adventures lately. My students have also expressed interest in writing ostra-blogs, and they make a good vehicle for possibly telling the public about ostracods (or is it ostracodes?).
3. I want to document ideas about parallels between Evolutionary Novelties and the linguistic novelties. I have a long-term goal to write a book that teaches concepts of how new things evolve, using examples from linguistics. I need to learn and remember a lot about linguistics before that can happen.

So, I am going to try to find the time to contribute to Evolutionary Novelties more regularly. At least until I want my brain back again for other things...