Friday 17 February 2012

Music.

Finally. Finally, I have beaten my collaborators into submission and convinved them to publish the (frankly sweet) result we've been sitting on for months. Which means I need good music to listen to while I type. Furiously. So that my fucking competitors don't beat me to it. (I happen to have... found out... what they're working on.)

This is what I'm listening to just now. Why should you care? You shouldn't. But you might like it.

Ultrasound Check out "Black Hole" here, and make sure your speakers are turned up.

Automatic Writing, listen to "Continuous" here. If the 80's had been this good we wouldn't regret them so much.

The frankly awesome Breton,
check out "Edward the Confessor", and you can get download some tracks from the facebook page. By sharing your personal infromation, of course.

Last but not least, Ulterior, listen at the same page.

Monday 6 February 2012

Siggggghhhh.

Suppose that there were a handfull of papers every year bleating on about the same "problem" and how to fix it. Suppose that the "problem" was really no more than a curiosity to do with the method of calculation, and which didn't impact physics in any way.

As such, any attempt to "fix" the non-existent problem by making changes to the relevant theory would be (very rightly) viewed as crackpot nonsense.

Suppose, then, that someone came along and showed in a simple way how to do away with this issue without making any changes to the theory. A short paper, drawing a line under a silly argument once and for all.

Do you think anyone would publish that paper? Well we'll see. Three journals didn't even send it out for review. Now that it's finally been sent to a reviewer, the report has come back after 5 days. Do we imagine the report is positive? No. No we do not. Hey ho.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Journals. Again. Yes, again.

Journal gripe one.

I had to withdraw a paper from a journal this morning because they have had it for over two months and despite requests don't seem to be prompting the referee to get off his sloth ass and read my extremely short paper.

Journal gripe two.

Springer. Yes, it's fashionable to hate them so I'm jumping on that bandwagon. I have conference proceedings `in transit' with them, but after that I'm not submitting anything else to springer. Their corrections team has done nothing to change my mind. First they send me proofs without a list of corrections and queries, then they ignore my corrections and ask why I haven't responded to theirs. Grrr. They finally send me their list of queries, but don't give me access to the proofs any more so I can't make changes. Idiots. Utter idiots.