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. 

As seen on The Register...

*sigh*

Apparently there's an open meeting in London tomorrow, but it's too far (and too pricey) for me to get there on short notice.

Can you resign on principle if you've already had your last paycheck?

Or rather, it ought to be.  But we've just had our fan taken away.



That, my friends, is the tolling bell for the employment of postdocs, and the funding of lecturers' research.  I never thought I'd be so relieved to be leaving the country.



Aha!  I know what this is!  This is the solution to the current dearth of physics teachers, isn't it?  Because there's nothing like turning a huge swathe of your workforce into embittered, unemployed wretches (with a grudge) to inspire the next generation of scientists, is there?



Welcome to the FailBoat.
Expect to see a lot of people jumping ship over the next few years.

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 trouble with going away on holiday is the accumulation of e-mails while your back is turned. The best was the referee's report for the recent paper - couldn't ask for better, to be honest. One sentence added here, a few "x marks the spot" scattered across figures 4-6, and a brief expansion to one paragraph in the introduction (and possibly a quick mention of the same stuff in the discussion), and it'll be ready for re-submission. And hey, sentences like "The paper is certainly to the standard expected for the Monthly Notices..." do give me a rather warm and gooey feeling inside. I may not be highly employable based on the disaster of the last two years, but at least I can write a damn good paper.

Anyway, thanks to kernowgirl for her e-mail - it was much appreciated, and I'll send a proper reply as soon as I can. Thanks.

As for the holiday... more posts later.

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.