chesneycat

The referee for PKS2250-41: a case study for triggering only wanted minor corrections.  They're done, it's gone back to MNRAS, and I'm now a Happy Kath because this was the one thing I was determined to get done before flying out to Germany.

Hopefully it'll be on astro-ph within the next couple of weeks...

Now I just have an hour to finish packing up my office!  Shit, I've not backed up this week's work onto DVD... sod it, it's on the main backup, I can tarball it up and ftp from Heidelberg.

I've just been invited to consider submitting an article to a newly established astronomy journal, which shall remain nameless.  My first thought is 'SCAM!', naturally, so I check the links out and it appears kosher. 

*snort*

It takes a lot of effort to intentionally grab the top-spot on the pre-print server...

Comment from Thijs (one of the lads in my office): "Oh crap, it's another Dutchman..."

I'm refereeing a paper today - and oh, dear God, it's painful!  The science is (mostly) fine; it's good enough to be published, but weak enough in places to give me something to comment on, which is always nice.  However, the prose itself is criminally awful.

Here're a few reminders to the grammatically challenged.

* Don't add apostrophes when you're pluralising. It makes my eye's bleed.
* Don't capitalise the first letter of the word immediately after a semi-colon; Every time you do this I want to hit you!
* Don't add a comma, in a random place like this - especially when you're talking about correlations between something, and something else.  Every time you do that a comma-fairy dies!
* Don't write in incomplete.


Would it be wrong of me to insist the authors read Strunk and White from cover to cover before they re-write the whole thing? 

WAHEY!!!

It's accepted, and (with great pain and much strenuous squishing of images) uploaded to the ArXiv pre-print server!Link to PDF which will become active sometime in the next 24 hours

I don't suggest that anyone actually reads it, but some of the pictures are pretty nice for a paper of this sort.

The evil-chicken galaxy paper is FINALLY submitted to Monthly Notices!  Hooray!

Now I need never look at it again.  At least not until the referee replies, anyway.

There's something about writing papers that I simultaneously love and dread - and that's the "Introduction", which usually gets written pretty much last. It doesn't matter how well you plan it; you'll always end up with your co-authors wanting it written in a totally different way.  And once you've got all their ideas written into it as well, you realise that you've lost the whole structure.  [Which ideally should be something like "here's a topic, it's important because, lots of unanswered questions, and we've solved some of them like this".] On the plus side, it does force yourself to become immersed in the recent literature, and to discover new papers about high-redshift halos that you'd forgotten to read when they first appeared on the pre-print archive.  Your reference list suddenly startes growing from the dozen or so entries you had from the rest of the paper, and you start to feel like you're doing some decent science.

So, that's what I'm doing this week.  I weighed my galaxy yesterday (a marginally lower than average 240 billion solar masses, if you're interested in knowing), and that was the last result that I needed to get tidied up before finishing the whole paper off.  It'll be nice getting this one out the door.