It has been a while since I wrote a blog post to my website. I have several excuses on why I’ve not written lately, 1) I have not had a really good idea to write about, 2) I’ve been really busy teaching. (Most of my students don’t take as many classes as I teach) 3)…

Why I art? A year ago, I was going through some of my old papers, and came across a series of sketches and paintings that I made back when I was in my 20s. I remembered the joy that I felt when I made them, and started to think about picking up my pencil and…

Tyrannosaurus rex is the quintessential dinosaur. However, its discovery and initial description have been clouded by legends and fanciful stories. Letters, field notebooks, reports, published descriptions, field photographs and even receipts, have been consulted to reveal to a true as possible story about the discovery and subsequent description of the first Tyrannosaurus rex. In 1897,…

A recent story appeared in the Los Angeles Times, which depicts my current home city of Vernal Utah with some distaste. It is a story pitting a local mid-wife Donna Young with the local crazy pro-oil guy who holds up a sign at the eastern part of town that reads “Honk, if you love drilling.”…

I’ve always adore the writings of E.O. Wilson, whose love affair with nature and biology envelope his poetic non-fiction work with an adoration and passion for science, and I was excited to read his wonderful recent book “Letters to a Young Scientist.” Even though, I am no longer able to call myself a young scientist,…

There has been a lot of disparaging remarks on the internet on the value of a PhD and the poor job market in academia for recent graduates. With the slight nudging of Edmund Hart (@DistribEcology) and Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill), I thought would share my own experiences, in the hopes that it will give others support…

With the start of classes this last week, I’ve been meeting with lots of students at various levels about how to write a scientific paper.  Even after writing a number of scientific papers myself, I tremble at the thought of giving advice, but since I learned through trial and error, I thought I would put…

Across the loneliest stretch of U.S. highway 40, which runs across the north strip of Colorado and Utah you see in the mid-heat of the summer months those bedraggled men and women who get it in their nutty brains to transect the continental United States from coast to coast. They festoon their bikes and packs…

My sister and I would often spend hours around my granny’s kitchen table playing the game of Yahtzee. If you never played the game, it involves rolling 5 dice to score various points. The greatest amount you could score on a sheet was a Yahtzee in which all five dice showed the same number. The…

Search any topic on the Internet and you are bound to find a billion or maybe a trillion websites, movies, and videos on the deeply entrenched debate on creationism. I refuse to write upon the subject beyond this essay. It is not because I think that it is unimportant, or how it erodes the educational…