Thursday, July 17, 2014

Too consise?

I'm preparing a manuscript to submit to Nature. In addition to a low acceptance rate (8%), they have severe word limits. The 'main text' should be "about 1500 words" excluding introductory paragraph, references, methods, figure legends, etc. It is the intro, summary of results, and the discussion all in one. My main text, of which I now have a complete but not final draft, is 1138. It was not hard to make it this short. This is just how long I wrote it. This of course makes me think that there are all sorts of vital things that I should have said but left out. I will think about what these might be after my wife and daughter are asleep.

Monday, July 07, 2014

Nightly visitor

Hedgehog! We have a hedgehog picking up the seed under our feeder every night at 11. The feeder is just outside our bathroom window so when we hear it cracking seeds we creep over, open the window and watch. One night there were two of them, mating, being pretty loud about it. Europeans are mostly pretty blasé about hedgehogs, but to us they are cool and exotic (there are none, except pets, in the Americas).