Mailund on the Internet

Sciencewomen describes a problem I know very well:

On a day when I am feeling increasingly dismal about the publication prospects of my current project, my mood was not lightened with the arrival of the table of contents for the current issue of a very high impact journal (say, cell/nature/science). One of the papers was right up my research alley and the lead author is someone junior to me. Why is it that the other guy is getting a very high profile paper and I'm struggling to get results that will merit publication at all?

I did my PhD in theoretical computer science, where high impact papers (high impact outside your own field, that is) are few and far between, and I didn't really expect to write high impact papers then.

Now I'm doing bioinformatics, and that is a hot field, so now I do want to, but I am not particularly successful.  There's a few that have received some interest, in particularly this one about the speciation of humans,  but I wasn't the first author on that.

Lately, I do not seem to manage to be first author on any paper...

I'm in the weird situation where I am not senior enough to be last author on any paper, but I am spending too much time on too many different projects that I can focus enough on a single project to expect to be first author on a paper.

I feel like I've substituted quantity of publications for quality.  Of course, I have no one to blame but myself, so I just need to change my working habits, I guess.  Spending too much time blogging probably doesn't help either.

Great, now I'm depressed.  What a way to start the day...  Oh well, I'll head to the office to get some work done, that should cheer me up!

I don't want to turn this into a religion blog -- I would be ranting about cartoons all the time (I am Danish, after all) -- but just after I posted the atheism talk by Dawkins, I saw this post at the skeptical alchemist: Is moderate Islam a lie? (part I)

Now, before you start threatening my life for insulting the religion of peace (and by the way, Islam does not mean "peace" but "submission", just thought I'd clear that up for you) let me make it clear that  Islam is not being picked on in particular here.  It is just the religion discussed in the post I spotted.

I would like all religions to get out of my face.  Islam annoys me a lot these days, because a lot of muslims refuse to make religion a private matter.  I don't care what you believe.  Go ahead and worship Jehova, Allah, Santa or Zeus, but stop trying to force your beliefs on me!  Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion, damn it!

I'll stop my ranting now.  I've already spent more time on religion than it really deserves...

Ok, it is only a single talk, but I've had to defend my atheism recently, so I feel like sharing Dawkins' talk with you. After seeing it, go buy his God Delusion!