At the risk of being guilty of a non-sequitur, they froze my salary for 2009. I will therefore write more on this blog than last year. Besides, it's been a while since we heard about "Biophysical Semeiotics" and "Inherited Real Risk", don't you think?

To get things started, a little something that came in the mail the other day, after I rejected a submission:

-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 7:26 AM
To: Medicine
Subject: Re: Decision

Dear Dr. Lopez,
thank you for the fast decision. I agree, we will find another journal for publishing our results.
After all, neither Temin´s reverse transcriptase nor the first PCR description of Mullis found acceptance by a nature journal.
I wish you more luck for your future decisions.
Kind regards

I don't know if the author is right that those papers were rejectd by the Nature journals, but is it too much to ask for some modesty when talking about one's own research? Or does the author really think that his/her submission will have the same impact as those studies? Only time will tell, but I'm sure you can bet where I'm putting my money.