I have been remiss about updating on The Beast lately. But he has been active – perhaps too active.
It all started when Spring arrived, so I could open the balcony for him. He could sit outside and watch the word go past.

He was happy with this, until The Visits started

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The Beast claims he is innocent, but a little bird told me differently.
If you insist on finding out what this is all about, Matt Brown has the reasons.

From the BBC:

Rarest rhinoceros wrecks camera

Helsinki Hub sounds nice, doesn’t it? Much better than Vancouver hub or Toronto Hub. The alliteration is alluring. So, good folks of Helsinki (and Henry⁷), join the Helsinki hub. Matt tells you how.
Oh, and if you’re not in Helsinki, either move here or join your local hub. If you don’t, the wagtail will remain grumpy

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I’ve been asked to write something for the BES newsletter on double-blinding for journals. So I thought I would try out this Web2.0 thingy, so here’s a draft for you to pick over and comment on. It’s a bit too long, so most suggestions for where to cut will be welcome. Oh, and I couldn’t work out how to have multiple footnotes on the same word, but I hope you can work it out.

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A couple of quick links showing how the review process should work.
Your Review is Hereby Summarily Rejected
How to deal with a Rejection Letter
You have probably already read this one from Henry, but it’s still worth revisiting the rejection letter all editors would like to have the balls to send.
(HT for the first two, well the first from which I found the second: Chad Orzel)

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I’ve just received an email about a conference on the evolution of sex and recombination. For reason that should be obvious, the title of the email was

Conference: S#X & R#COMBINATION…Registration still open!

I guess this is also an appropriate time to point out that I’ve started a collaboration with a project on social pharmacy. I’m only doing it because I want to be invited to one of their parties.

Over the past couple of months at Nature Network, there have been a variety of discussions about good writing (these discussions seems to have started shortly after I arrived. Are they trying to tell me something?). One of the early well written papers was commended for the quality of the language, which was simple and clear, and so enjoyable to read. Unfortunately, many papers have sentences that seem to be written with a different aim: to loose the reader in a whirl of syntactic complexities before finally beating them over the head with a dangling modifier, painfully.

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A couple of years ago I read an interview with a scientist from the US. One of the things he explained was that his strategy for continuing to do research was to avoid administration. Just like we’d all like to do. What’s even more impressive was that he had worked out a strategy that worked.

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… and when you eventually publish an old posts, it keeps the date it was first saved.