Advance warning – there is not much science or entomology in this one, although it could be a welcome respite from Covid-19 😊
I am assured that they are gazing at their navels
A couple of days ago I was scrolling through my ‘Blogs to write’ file, clicking on titles that caught my fancy, when I came across this one that I thought looked interesting – Meaningful numbers, with a file date of almost exactly 4 years ago.
What surprises lurk inside this file?
I wondered what I was thinking about at the time so opened the file. Imagine my disappointment when this was revealed 😊
Nothing but the title, not even a picture to help jog my memory!
So, I was none the wiser. I knew it wasn’t about one of my pet bugbears; journals that use numbered references, because that has its own file, in fact two files, because I seem to have started writing it twice 😊 I guess an indication of how much the practice irritates me. As a referee it makes it so much more difficult to check if the authors have cited the relevant literature. 😦
I hate this so much! It goes against my sense of order, literally speaking of course 😊
It wasn’t about how many times the word insect featured as a worldwide search term in Google Trends, although looking at the graph it is striking that the peak is in June/July, the Northern Hemisphere summer.
Worldwide Google Trends for the search term ‘insect’
Staying with insects, (OK there is some tangential entomology in this piece), could I have been meaning to write something about how many insects species there are, given that the estimates range from Terry Erwin’s gloriously possibly over the top estimate of 30 000 000 (Erwin, 1983) to Ian Hodkinson’s 2-3 000 000, that I consider to be very conservative indeed, with Camilo Mora and colleagues oddly calculated 9 000 000 in between. Or, could it refer to my ten-year data aphid data sets from Scotland, still waiting to be transferred transfer from these battered notebooks to an Excel spreadsheet?
Aphid data, not meaningful until it makes it to a spreadsheet?
Certainly, they contain a lot of numbers but are they meaningful? They haven’t even made it into my Data I am never going to publish series 😊
In desperation I Googled the phrase ‘meaningful numbers’ and ended up, via this piece by Donald Byrd,
http://homes.sice.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math/MeaningfulNumbers+SignificantFigures.pdf
on the Wikipedia page about significant figures, which, although the habit that many undergraduates have of reporting their statistical output to the millionth decimal place, is one of my other pet bugbears, was probably not what I had intended to write about, or was it?
I guess we’ll never know what the original title was all about, but on the plus side, I now have a few more ideas to turn into blogs 😊
References
Erwin, T.L. (1983) Tropical forest canopies: the last biotic frontier. Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America, 29, 14-19.
Hodkinson, I.D. & Casson, D. (1991) A lesser predilection for bugs: Hemiptera (Insecta) diversity in tropical rain forests. Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 43, 101-109.
Mora, C., Tittensor, D.P., Adl, S., Simpson, A.G.B., & Worm, B. (2011) How many species are there on earth and in the ocean? PloS Biology, 9(8):, e1001127.doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127.
Surely this is the perfect time to get those data out of the notebooks and into a spreadsheet? You could try digitising the pages and crowd-sourcing folks to give you a hand, as they are doing for the British Census returns.
You may know this already but the numbered referencing system is called “Vancouver” – see: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/library/public/vancouver.pdf
LikeLiked by 1 person
Indeed, unfortunately I left them in my office 😦 Does it count as essential, travel to work to go and retrieve them? I guess if I go early enough and don’t see anyone it will be OK, but ….
LikeLike
Ahhh, that’s a shame. I wouldn’t describe it as essential but I guess it’s a personal decision.
LikeLike
Yes, like the fact that my wife and I are trapped in two different locations because I travelled back to Shropshire at the weekend 😦
LikeLike
Oh, that’s a tricky one 😦
LikeLike
Haha, I have been suffering from writer’s block for a while, and I have several files only slightly more explicit than yours. Very clever way of blogging, I must say!
LikeLiked by 1 person
good to know I’m not the only one with ‘Blogs to write’ folder full of mostly empty word docs
LikeLiked by 1 person
And me. My best title with no text at the moment is ‘Deadly Deer and Killer Roos’. I do know what that is going to be about though.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sounds exciting though 🙂
LikeLike
Road accidents. We could probably do with it being less exciting.
LikeLiked by 1 person