I guess I’m easing my way back to writing blog posts. Of course, I could bore you to death with the list of things I was actually doing instead of writing here, but that will really have to wait for another day.
Today, I will just give you some information on some of the recent spam in my e-mail folder that comes from Open Journals (which I have discussed about in the past) and random conferences around the world. I just have the impression that my e-mail is in a “general list of scientists”, or “general list of scholars”, or “general list of people who have written something” that the companies buy and then bombard with queries asking me to select them for publishing in. The rest is a (sufficiently edited) list of such that I have gotten invited to contribute recently in:
- Journals of Statistics.
- Journals of Geometry.
- Journals of quantum information.
- Journals of applied mathematics.
- Journals of law. (US law in particular).
I’m not really an expert on any one of these, although I could probably do something with my research that might be considered for journals 1, 2, 3, 4 with a long stretch. But in item 5 I declare myself a complete amateur even though I do follow some court rulings and such because I find them interesting.
My inbox would also suggest that I am expert on informatics, engineering, cybernetics, communications, computing, molecular and cell biology, as I seem to keep getting invited to attend conferences on these subjects and maybe even chair one session or two on them. It makes me wonder how the hell I got into their e-mail databases.
In the meantime, I’ll go back to my cave where I will be back doing the things that I usually do that force me away from writing posts like this one on a regular basis.
Same here. Minus the US law and plus semiconductors and crystals. I’ve also been “invited” to write papers about lots of things that I know next to nothing about (in particular statistical mechanics and condensed matter stuff). That might explain why I increasingly often, when I read a paper, have the impression the author has no clue what they’re talking about
It could get worse though:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html?pagewanted=all
Dear Mr Bernstein, we would like to invite you and Mr Leonard Susskind to record a new anthem for our banana multi-republic, the so-called European Union. It’s also composed by Beethoven and we have already checked that we are satisfied with your expertise:
HI Lubos:
Thank you for your invitation. I’ll gladly accept if you can show me where those bananas are grown and if I am satisfied that they are proper bananas with nothing funny in them. Then again, I might require payment in gold for my services.
Dear David,
I thought that bananas are being imported from Colombia and you should know them more than “we” do, unless it was drugs, of course. In Europe, ordinary bananas are not allowed. The closest thing that is allowed on our continent are eurobananas which differ from bananas (e.g. from Latin America) by a smaller extrinsic curvature, as described in EU directive No 2257/94.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_No_2257/94
That’s also why bananas can’t be imported from Latin America which is why my comment is inconsistent.
Good luck
Luboš
I think complaining about this is a well established milestone in a physicist’s career. Other career milestones advertised to the world through tongue-in-cheek complaints are
- no time to do real work because of requests for peer review that I am receiving
- my inbox is filled with crackpot emails asking me to confirm their faster than light theories
- my PhD students consume so much of my time that I can’t find time for real research
- traveling around the world for my book tour, I am so exhausted
- I have to attend so many ceremonies giving me honorary degrees and those lectures I need to give at graduation events…
- then luckily one day you will be complaining how fame is leaving no time for real research after that call from Stockholm
I’m working my way up the ladder.
I hate to bring up politics, I don’t think that the use of pepper spray was warranted at UC Davis, but when I try to think of songs of solidarity with college students, all I can come up with is this…is that wrong?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WccfbPQNMbg&w=420&h=315%5D