rejection

Paper got rejected. Amusing since the reviewers gave it two thumbs up out of three. The third guy didn't leave his thumb in an up or down position at all, which means that whatever we wrote just happened to rub the editor the wrong way. To boot, the boat has kind of sailed on the relevance of the paper. It looks like my primary authorship is going to be shelved for now, and probably buried in some sort of collaboration as an afterthought. Maybe it won't even make it into the text, it will just be supplementary info. Goody goody.

The astute reader will notice that I have added a new label for this post, "research defeat". Hopefully this label won't get much use.

Research is stalled until the NMR facility gets their act together and drops a probe into a magnet that can look at something other than 13C and 1H. These are the times I regret not booking my Christmas flight way earlier.

mixed bag

New paper has been first drafted. Heller recently tore it apart (from abroad even!) and sent it back, notifying me that he prefers separated Results and Discussion sections. I personally enjoy discussing my results as they come up, it leads to less confusion for the reader who might not want to read the whole paper (most readers are of this type.) Doesn't matter much, what does is that several of the claims in the paper were found to be untrue while Heller was in Europe. This will result in frantic synthesis of materials and copious amounts of low temperature high field heteronuclear NMR. On the upside is better to have something you thought didn't work turn out to work. Much better than having someone else contradict you in the literature. A good catch, and perhaps another try at a new crystal structure. It seems as though this new product is temperature sensitive, although not terribly so (stable in an ice/water bath.) This could lead to some interesting antics with the crystallographer.

Harry Potter

Towards the end of the semester is notebook check time for those lucky TA's who happen to be teaching organic chemistry. Labmate Mark is one such lucky duck. I held the door open for him as he walked in with a stack of about 30 notebooks of various sizes and shapes. One notebook in particular caught my eye, as it had gold edging on it. After Mark set the notebooks down on his desk, I picked up the gold-edged notebook to have a better look. It was a Hogwarts School notebook replete with all the appropriate Harry Potter insignia and crazy little fake medieval pictrograms. This particular notebook was from the Gryffindor house. At this point I was impressed with this students dedication to her fantasy niche, but the icing on the cake came when I flipped to the front of the book to see the name. I'm omitting the actual name to spare further embarrassment if this person ever grows up.

Jane Doe, aspiring wizard
Gryffindor House, 2nd Year
Potions Class, section AC

After all this snickering I do have to admit that this girls notebook was immaculate, probably the best kept notebook in the section. If you need to pretend that you're a student wizard to maintain your interest in organic chemistry, then I guess that's just fine with me.

Period Reports

It seems as though I've come to a point in my education when there is an extreme emphasis on writing and not so much on mixing chemical A with B. We've been recently notified that our funding agency is willing to grant us some more money. This is good news. The bad news is that they are holding this money ransom until we turn in our delinquent period report which was due a month ago. Prof. Heller has not told me how much money there is at stake here, but its clear that there is just enough that he's willing to have someone else write the report for him and turn it in, no questions asked. I've written 4 such reports since I've been here (more on the topic of scientific writing later) and it really is a joke. The amount of progress which is actually made on the chemistry is painfully small. The first time I was to write the report I just assumed it was OK to delete the old news and fill in the new results. Not so, I learned, as the funding weinies apparently can notice that the background and strategy sections are the same, so they just assume that you've done no work. Its much more effective to rewrite the entire document even if you provide absolutely no new results with a slightly different word order. The bean counters glance at the document, realize the paragraph sizes have changed, then send off the check. This certainly says something about the capabilities of those who hold the purse strings.

Since I'm not the only one on the budget, these excersices involve compiling the reports of my coworkers. The quality of writing is poor to say the least, partially out of apathy, but mosly out of not being able to effectively communicate. The common public perception of science writing is that it is dry and boring. I categorically agree with this, however, good science writing clearly conveys a message, and boring tediuousness like grammar is essential. It becomes much more tedious when correcting the grammar of others.

I've been request to teach a lab course which carries a writing credit on the undergraduates transcripts for next semester. I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the topic of writing in science after I start to read some of their reports.