Many moons ago, the much-missed Max Perutz would prowl the corridors of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology on Christmas Day, rounding up visiting and foreign post-docs, and drag them back to his house where Gisela would serve them Christmas dinner.

This concern for scientists under his charge as humans, for their welfare, was just one of the many things that made Max special. After a semi-drunken conversation with another of the Occam’s Typists the other night, I remembered that when we first set it up, one of the things we wanted to do here at OT was concentrate on the humans behind the science, rather than just on the science. I hope we’ve succeeded in that desire. It makes OT, and especially the people behind the keyboards, a little bit special in the science blogosphere.

It’s been a good year for us. We’ve expanded to what seems to be a manageable number, we’ve had a hell of a lot of traffic (yup, we had to increase our hosting plan again), and we even managed to land a slot over at the Guardian science blogs. So we must be doing something right. Let’s hope next year will be even better.

Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Occam’s Typewriter, have a very blessed Christmas and a prosperous new year.

Richard