News

Neurodivergence and purpose in The Sheep Detectives

I don’t usually talk about popular culture on this website, but The Sheep Detectives just did one of the most original takes on neurodivergence I’ve seen in fiction. For background, the movie is about a group of sheep who take it upon themselves to solve the murder of their beloved shepherd (Hugh Jackman). In the world of this movie, sheep have the ability to deliberately forget any information or experience. We see the characters do Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

AMA updates and why we love them

One of the things I like about English is that, although any given context has right and wrong, what is considered right and wrong changes across situations and over time. I’ve compared it to wearing a bathing suit to the beach but not to address the U.N. …or UN. Responsible style guide teams keep things updated. This year, the American Medical Association’s Manual of Style released new guidance for discussing people of different ages and Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

Ten thousand voices for science

Stand Up for Science has provided a portal where members of the public can comment on the Office of Management and Budget’s new Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, and you should do it. The goal is ten thousand independent comments from separate individuals before the period ends on July 13. The new regulations, if passed, would require funded research to adhere to the current administration’s political agenda and would profoundly limit American scientists’ ability to Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

We’ve done this before. Generative AI doesn’t have to be unethical

When victrolas and other music players were first introduced, they weren’t very good. As the technology improved, they slowly replaced live performances in many but not all situations. We still have live orchestras and live bands even though most of the music we listen to on a daily basis is recorded. Players also made it possible to listen to music in situations in that were never practical with live performers, such as while commuting or Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

Those pesky microbes…

I’m in the 19-range of my beginning-to-end read of the AMA Manual of Style, and I find my throughhiking metaphor still holds up. Not only am I walking through places that a section hiker might not find worth the time (charts, vocabulary lists), but my pace and milage are heavily affected by outside factors. Because the point of the exercise is to earn points for my certification maintenance, I’ve been using a stopwatch to track Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

Shelter journal entry: Section 14.9 Isotopes

I like my metaphor of through-hiking the AMA Manual of Style. The point of reading Big Blue beginning to end isn’t to memorize everything I see along the way. It’s that the act of doing it is inherently different from reading one section as needed or looking up individual issues as they arise. The AT does not always hit the best hiking in the states through which it passes (Bill Bryson commented in A Walk Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

Section-Hiking the AMA Manual of Style

This year, I decided to earn some of my BELS maintenance points by brute force: An epic reread of the AMA Manual of Style. For my hiking readers, this is like doing an AT Northbound but with copyright law and specialized punctuation rules instead of Springer, Washington, and Katahdin. Like with an Appalachian backpacking trip, I’ve set reasonable daily goals, staying hydrated, and probably eating more Cliff bars than is good for me. But if Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

Finding the gold test stone

Live editors can find the gold test stone. Right now, LLM AI can’t. Much of my time as a scientific editor and proofreader has focused on authors who speak English as a subsequent language.* Given that the people who hire proofreaders are usually the ones who need them, I often find myself looking at a strange or colorful turn of phrase that needs something closer to translation. I was working for GenScript as a W2 Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

Don’t mess with ketchup! Heinz’s label of truth and why it matters

It’s not exactly science news, but this is a fascinating case of biology-meets-art-meets-business. The human eye has millions of years of selection for subtle differences in color—animators can tell you how hard it is to get green vegetables to look right—specifically to identify food and non-food plants. These people are using our prehistoric skill to fight fraud. Restaurants and other food vendors would finish (and hopefully wash) bottles of Heinz ketchup and then refill the Read more…

By D Flynn, ago

Duolingo: double or don’t

One part of my professional story that tends to surprise people is that I give due credit to those villains of late-century brain rot: videogames. Usually, I talk about the number of SAT words I picked up in RPG and adventure titles: unparallelled, tumultuous, iridescent, opalescent, saffron, malefactor, implements, peruse… (comment if you can ID my favorite series from this). More generally, there is just something so proofready about running through the same scenario over Read more…

By D Flynn, ago