Good news today:  a paper I co-authored was accepted to a conference in China.  The “acceptance” part of that sentence was the good news, but I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to go east, young man.  If I go.  Finances will, as always be a problem.  Even when the entire trip is paid, I’m always nervous about finances and I always sponsor my university with a part of my salary, it seems.  I think that I have always lost money on conferences.  Other people seem to make money, but I don’t know how.

I have also completed a journal article review today and, as my reward, I have 30 days access to the publisher’s database of papers.  I’m not sure what’s inside the database, perhaps nothing, but I really wish that it was possible to access all scientific papers in a central location.  A while back I was discussing a research idea along these lines with a colleague and we might still work on it, but there are several such databases and they all seem to falter for one reason or another.  I can understand that publishers do not like to give their publications away for nothing, but it seems as if scientific papers are heading that way.  It is probably a good idea that all science should be “open source”, especially if the reproduction costs are small.  In practive one can find 75% of all papers online anyways in one form or another (it may be a even-more-complete technical report as opposed to a journal article, for instance), and as a last resort one could always just ask the author.

One last thing to mention:  it has been raining heavily over the last couple of days.  Winter has really arrived, but it is not yet cold enough I think.  I have only used hot water bottles twice in bed.  I’ll know when it is truly winter when my toes feel as if they want to fall off.  And now the weather bureau is predicting temperatures above 20 degrees for at least Friday, perhaps Saturday as well.  Outrageous!  At least we have had spectacular lightning storms and the wind has really been insanely strong.