Is it possible to write a scientific paper manuscript...in a weekend???

Is it? 

Hi! I'm gonna go ahead and say that for us, it probably isn't. Not yet. But I got the idea for this post when I saw a video on YouTube which is literally entitled "How to Write a Paper in a Weekend (By Prof. Pete Carr)". Professor Carr is a relatively old man and I do not doubt for a second that he can write a paper in a weekend (he actually stated that he was involved in writing around 400 papers). So this post is going to be mainly a synthesis of what he said and my own reactions to his advice, based on my own experiences.

First he laid down some preliminary requirements for this type of activity. Of course, you can't actually write a paper from scratch, without anything to build on. However, I still think that even if you are in the early stages of your research project, you can start following his algorithm.

Organizing your digital files as a geoscientist

Hi everyone! If you're stuck in quarantine like we are now in April 2020 because of the COVID19 disease, or for some other reason, now might be the perfect time to re-organize your digital file system. 

About a week after I graduated, I applied for my first job, and about two weeks after that, I reported to work. During that month of inactivity, I didn't switch to a new file system, so throughout my first year of work, I was mostly creating new folders on-the-fly. This, of course, lead to a very messy file system! At some point in the middle of my second year, I just had to do something about it.

This begs the question, "what is a file system for?" Well, in its simplest form, it's to allow you to find something easily. If you have a small number of files, you don't really need one. That's why I survived for a while without one. But, as a working geoscience grad student, you'll know that we eventually end up with a ton of files, involved in many different aspects of our lives.